Online recruiters on the rocks?

With the collapse of online recruiter Stepstone last week, the future of online job hunting has been thrown into question, writes Paul Rubens.

"Site currently down, more information soon." It was an ignominious end for online recruitment company Stepstone and one which plunged the entire sector into uncertainty.

The Norwegian-owned company became widely known for sponsoring Channel 4 sport. But mounting losses forced it to shut down, even though the site hosted about 14,000 vacancies on the day of its closure.

Will we all surf for jobs soon?

So is online recruitment just another dot.com idea that appeared on the radar screen for a few months, burning its way through millions of unfortunate investors' pounds before crashing to earth?

The answer is almost certainly not, according to Martin Yate, author of Online Job Hunting, a guide to finding jobs on the Internet.

"Online job hunting is a wonderful application for the internet, and about one million jobs are advertised online every year in the UK alone. But the UK has over 1,000 recruitment sites and this is far too many," he says.

"Stepstone won't be the last to go out of business - eventually we will see just a handful of large sites and a few very small specialists."

Just the job

The main advantage of job hunting online is that job sites' search engines can find relevant vacancies in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of buying newspapers and magazines and trawling through the small ads, Mr Yate says.

Other services include automatic notification by e-mail of suitable new vacancies and CV databases into which anyone can register their details for the perusal of potential employers.

Over 300,000 CVs are held in the database of Monster, Britain's largest recruitment site.

Will online recruiters wash up at the job centre?

The effect of all this technology on the recruitment business has been dramatic, according to Peter Croasdale, Monster's European product and content director.

"In the past people talked about a job market, but now all this technology really is turning it into a market place," he says.

"The environment has been totally and utterly transformed. In the past you may have posted out two or five or even 50 CVs, but now your CV can be seen by literally thousands of companies within a few minutes."

Dole doldrums

Since there are no printing and distribution costs involved in online recruitment advertising, Mr Croasdale points out that it is intrinsically cheaper than traditional printed recruitment advertising.

Mr Croasdale expects almost all job vacancies will be advertised exclusively online within five years.

"I think we are still in the long trial phase at the moment. Recruiters are used to using a number of channels, and online is becoming accepted," he says.

Are the small ads a dead loss?

In the United States, where Mr Croasdale says online recruitment is more advanced, it is not unusual to see chief executive and chief financial officer positions advertised online.

"About the only people unlikely to look online for jobs are senior managers in their early sixties," he says.

The result of this, Martin Yate believes, is that job hunters will have to alter the way they present themselves if they are to find a job successfully in the electronic job market.

"The computer programs which recruiters use when they search through CV repositories use keywords to find suitable candidates. What's happening in America, and what will become more commonplace in Britain, is that job seekers will put in a 'key strengths' section on their CV containing 20 or so keywords for the software to pick up to ensure that their CV is identified."

Never on the net

But it's not all doom and gloom for traditional recruitment consultants. Many bricks and mortar operations have gone online and there will always be certain types of jobs which will never be advertised on the net, Mr Yate says.

That a certain company might be seeking to replace a senior staff member might be highly sensitive information kept under wraps as much as possible.

"It is difficult to protect confidentiality online, and anonymous advertisements rarely attract the right people, so sensitive hires need head hunters."

"Great! It says they want rocket scientists!"

He also warns job hunters against relying on the internet too much.

"Browsing web sites alone won't get you a job. Use online sites, but use them as just one part of your search for a job along with more traditional approaches like letter writing and making telephone calls."

However, how many jobs will there be up for grabs? Online recruiters not only have to weather the dot.com decline, but the general slowing in the rest of the economy.

The Information Technology Contract Recruitment Association estimates the sites which have survived Stepstone will have to brave perhaps another year of hard times.