When US WEST wanted to recruit computer-skilled employees to staff a call center, online resume banks took the company right to the people it was looking for.
"When people put a resume online, it's a good indicator the computer skills we needed were already in place," said Jimmy LaValley, US WEST's executive director of human resources.LaValley said the company assumed fewer candidates for hourly wage jobs would post resumes online but was pleasantly surprised to find that wasn't the case. "Online job hunting has really caught on."
Altogether, US WEST and about one-third of its new hires found each other on the Internet this year. LaValley said he expects the Web to be the employee-finding medium for half of the company's new hires next year.
LaValley sends his headhunters onto the Web to find recruits and has resume -building tools at US WEST's Web site, where potential employees who don't already have a resume can fill in the blanks and know the information they are providing is what the company wants.
Not only are new online job resources helping companies find active job seekers, but the Web also gives exposure to people who are gainfully employed while waiting for a greener pasture to come into view. "Online resources allow the passive job seeker to throw feelers out with some confidentiality and allow companies looking for people to look at a broader pool of potential candidates," LaValley said.
Resumes built online take advantage of what computers do best -- sort and retrieve data. "All of the information goes into a database that can be searched by job skills, education level or whatever," LaValley said.
Resources on the Web take many forms. Monster.com is billed as the largest Web site to post both job openings and resumes. Other sites specialize by career field: librarians, physicists and the like.
Salt Lake-based online career resource directory Myjobsearch.com says more than 145,000 career resources are currently available online. Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., estimates there are more than 2.5 million resumes online.
Myjobsearch.com President Heather Stone said the online job hunting/job recruiting forum so far is weighted in the employers' favor, with resumes outnumbering available jobs 5-1.
In a survey Myjobsearch.com fielded among 405 job seekers in November, 82 percent of the respondents said nine out of 10 employers never responded to their online resume submissions, and 63 percent said they will focus their attention on specialty job sites. "Specialty sites are communities of professionals in a given job or industry," Stone said. "For professionals in any industry, specialty job boards provide for a more efficient online job search."
The online job market is also showing signs of a new "don't call us, we'll call you" protocol on the part of employers. Still, Myjobsearch.com's survey says 90 percent of the job seekers it interviewed feel online resumes are more effective than paper resumes, despite the low response rate.
State government is in the middle of a major revamp to bring its hiring system online, said Dick McDonald, deputy director for the Department of Human Resource
Management. The state currently has a database of 15,000 to 20,000 resumes sorted using proprietary software that has been in place for three to four years.
The revamp is being planned with the involvement of a number of state agencies "to make sure we do it right," McDonald said.
"The thrust will be 'self-service,' where applicants can apply directly to positions in state government," he said.
One object is to make the data convertible into a personnel record once a person is hired. A new Internet-based system should be ready for testing in the spring.
More traditional employment agencies aren't ignoring the online job phenomenon. The Murdock Group in Salt Lake City owns 48 percent of Myjobsearch.com, a privately held company launched six months ago. "The site draws on 17 years of Murdock's training," Stone said.
Typical of online businesses, revenue at Myjobsearch.com is generated by advertising, though none of the revenue comes from employers posting positions that can be found through the site.
"You can't buy your way into our directory," Stone said. "Proctor and Gamble could advertise mouthwash, but nobody reviewed in the directory can advertise here."