In recruiting, don’t forget the Web

So you’re stuck looking under every conceivable rock for good employees, just as the information explosion — in the form of the Internet — takes off as never before. It’s at precisely that intersection that some opportunists spy a unique opportunity.

Denise Geisler, director of marketing and Internet services for Staffing Solutions Enterprises, is also the creator of Careerboard.com, a regionally focused job-matching Web site launched almost two years ago. After a promotional push, which began in earnest last January, it’s now logging well over one million hits a month from 54,000 distinct users.

Still, for all that success, Geisler says no company should put all its recruiting eggs in one basket. She counsels companies to continue to trod traditional recruiting paths such as job fairs and industry networking in tandem with mining the Internet for candidates. “You get a very limited response from any one method. You need to do them all,” she says, and then carefully track which are working best.

But one of the most easily overlooked places to cast about for quality people is also one of the best: a corporation’s own Web site. That’s an especially good place to post job openings, she argues, for at least two reasons. Anyone who has found their way to your Web site, for whatever reason, is almost by definition a captive audience, someone who probably has some knowledge of your business or another connection to your company.

Perhaps even more important, this posting method is more likely to nab the attention of passive job seekers, not those actively searching because they’re out of a job. While the Internet is loaded with hundreds of thousands of resumes — there are 4,000 on Careerboard.com alone — those currently employed are considerably less likely to post their resume, for obvious reasons.

But site design counts. The job-posting space on your site “can’t be a little, hidden button on your Web site. It should be an integral part of the site, and it should send the signal that we’re always looking for good, qualified people,” she says.

While many companies are hesitant to post detailed information about the openings and salary ranges of the positions they’re seeking to fill, Geisler recommends erring on the side of putting more information on the Web rather than less. That will only ensure that candidates “will come into an interview better-prepared, more knowledgeable about your company.”

Finally, she notes, companies that post what amount to job-recruitment ads on the Internet “need to toss out everything they ever learned about writing for print.” In traditional print classified employment ads, clients pay by the word, and thus the focus is on being brief and punchy. On the Web, though, where length is no limitation — where in fact most browsers enjoy the information-rich environment — the emphasis is more on crafting well-targeted key words.

“When you’re dealing with the Internet, people are doing searches based on key words,” she says. So you’d better make sure you talk their language when constructing the ad. Toss out buzzwords understood only by internal audiences in favor of words, which will induce a greater number of surfers to stumble upon your site.

With qualified employees in such tight supply in a booming economy, says Geisler, “the whole job-search process has turned around. Companies have got to sell themselves. And that’s a big departure from how you used to write print ads.”