Oct. 23--It's not news that the Internet has changed how people look for work and how companies find employees. But the changes go much deeper than you might think.
The World Wide Web is truly tangled. It links the personal and the professional, connects folks with shared interests and serves as a giant holding tank of data for and about the people who built it.
To think about mining that data to find a particular person with a particular skill is to understand the potential it holds for someone with technical jobs to fill. A recruiter skilled at using advanced Internet searching techniques to find that needle-in-a-haystack person has an edge in this talent-starved tech environment.
Meet the e-cruiters.
Listening as Jeanie Mabie and Tracey Claybrooke talk about their trade is sometimes like eavesdropping on a conversation in a foreign language.
Mabie and Claybrooke, both executives with Raleigh-based PeopleClick.com, were working with Claybrooke & Associates, a boutique Internet recruiting consultancy acquired by PeopleClick earlier this month.
They throw around terms like "harvesting," "peer search," "peeling" and "sourcing" in rapid-fire exchanges that seem to reflect the frenzied hiring pace still pervading much of the technology industry.
First of all, they say, understand one thing. The importance of hiring the right person for the job has never been greater. The new economy has also been called the knowledge economy. Brainy software developers are responsible for a technology company's entire product line. Hire the best, churn out quality. Hire a dud and essentially take a chunk out of the company's valuation.
Thus the evolution of what used to a be a paper-pushing "personnel" department. It evolved into a more sophisticated "human resources" function. Now, say Mabie and Claybrooke, it's "human capital."
As part of PeopleClick's push to become the first comprehensive online software package to help companies with all aspects of the hiring, managing, training and retaining process, the Raleigh-based applications service provider has taken to buying companies with specialized expertise.
With Claybrooke, they got experts in the Internet recruiting game.
Once they get past the "human capital" distinction, Mabie and Claybrooke make something else clear: Forget Monster.com.
The giant job sites just aren't effective ways to find top-quality talent. Why? Because top-quality talent usually isn't looking.
"It just doesn't work in this market," says Mabie. She tells a joke about a recruiter posting a job on one of those sites and then just waiting for the resumes to come in as if it's the latest zinger about Gore or Bush. "For one thing, every other company can see it."
That's where sourcing comes in. "Sourcing" is a term for finding so-called passive candidates who might be willing to jump ship if the opportunity was right.
To find the passive candidate, Mabie and Claybrooke turn to the Internet where, using advanced search technology to move from Web site to Web site, they are able to locate individuals with particular skills.
Here's one example: CyberAtlas, a Web marketing site, predicts that there will be more than 32 million personal home pages by 2002. Who will be the first to build them? The techies, Mabie says. And they often link to their employers' Web pages. By searching backward from the corporate site, recruiters are often able to contact individuals directly.
Once found, the passive candidates are courted for the long term.
"You're treating it like a marketing program. You send them e-mail newsletters and just keep them informed of things going on," Mabie says. "You treat them differently. If you come knocking on their door, you're selling to that individual."
Other Triangle recruiters rely on the Internet to find employees, but often don't have time to use the sourcing tricks embraced by PeopleClick's Internet consulting division.
David Tucker, who is handling recruiting for Redback Systems' new Triangle office, admits he's no Internet guru. But he says he counts on colleagues who are e-cruiter specialists.
"They're a very integral part of recruiting today," Tucker says. "They're helping me build the pipeline."
But on the other end, there's still plenty of work to be done to put a passive candidate into a vacant job. "You're basically pursuing them."
And, as Jackie Larson and Cheri Comstock of Durham-based FocusTech points out, there's no time to waste -- the Internet has stepped up the pace of recruiting.
FocusTech, which recruits for tech company clients nationwide, also has employees combing the Internet full time for candidate leads. They also use job board Web sites and have noticed some other Web effects.
"We're finding very strong trends that when we're placing people from the Internet -- they are constantly shopping their resume," says Larson. "All of a sudden, they're unlikely to stay longer than a year. We're having to go back and replace a lot of people -- they're not sticking."
Victoria Richardson has helped Network Appliance increase its RTP presence in an office that has gone from zero to 90 people in less than a year.
"The fundamental tool is the job board. It's pedestrian and very routine. But it's the underpinning. It saves a lot of phone work," she says.
Richardson took a seminar to learn advanced Internet recruiting techniques and was thrilled with what she learned. She was dazzled to find a searching technique that could extract a staff list from a company Web site.
But the pace of her job has been such that Richardson hasn't had time to apply her new searching skills.
She got a kick out of a recent Wall Street Journal article that depicted recruiters who stay up all night online to find job candidates. "Anyone who has a job just looks at that and laughs."
Richardson adds: "In the end, it's all hard work. You have to organize yourself to follow through on it."
Jennifer Richardson (no relation to Victoria), a senior technical recruiter at Raleigh-based Edgesource, does her share of getting creative with the Internet but feels strongly that it's the nonvirtual people network that is most important to her job.
"Everybody knows somebody," Richardson says. "Nothing is more effective than picking up the phone and talking to somebody I know."
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(c) 2000, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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