Recruiting experts say one thing is certain—almost every company is using the Internet to find new employees and almost every job seeker is using the Internet to find jobs. Time was when most resume submissions were mainly on a local scale but with the Internet's arrival, candidates can now reply to job postings from the other side of the globe.

Generally, small businesses have been slow to embrace the Internet as a means of helping them find qualified employees but some entrepreneurs are warming up to the idea.

When Fiducial franchisee Steve Feinberg needs to expand his office staff in Londonderry, NH, he usually advertises in the local newspaper. But he's found that when specialized skills are involved, it's often a more effective route for job seekers to post credentials online.

As it turns out, his daughter, Jamie, will be graduating from college and is seeking a position as a musical director for professional stage productions. Knowing that she wasn't going to get the desired visibility in the local newspaper, Jamie posted her resume online and has already received a job offer from a production company in Maine.

Recruiting is always a problem for small businesses under $1 million, according to Henry Branch who owns a small consulting management firm, Henry Branch Associates, in Secaucus, NJ.

 "They really don't have any criteria for qualifications of employees," said Branch who's been a consultant since 1978. "Their ideal situation is to hire someone who is bright, alert and they will train them."

Targeting your message

Whether recruiting is done via the telephone, personal interview, newspapers or on the Web, the common thread for each avenue is the message that companies display during the process.

For instance, Branch says if you own a restaurant and are looking for a chef, your ad should say that qualified candidates need to have at least five years experience. Next, you need to specify the type of cuisine (French, Italian, etc.) that the chef needs to have familiarity with. That way everyone is clear on the specifications of the position. But most employment ads are not written clearly because people are very general.

If an accounting firm is recruiting for an accountant and they don't specify whether they want tax or auditing experience it makes a difference because the accountants who respond to the ad might not necessarily fit into their business.

"If they need a controller it may require someone who has management experience with an accounting background," Branch said.

Companies that don't spell things out clearly in their ads, they are just spinning their wheels. That's why they need to pinpoint their target audience.

Whether you're selling/buying employment or selling/buying a service, people just sometimes open the doors and nobody comes," he said. "Without knowing who your target audience is nothing is going to happen. I run into this all the time."

While the Internet offers high visibility Branch stressed that companies "have to be certain that someone is going to find you" when they post an employment ad in a specific spot.

"You have to put it somewhere it will be seen," he said. "It's location, location, location. You've got to be in a position where people are going to see it."

Branch says monster.com is a known site that may help small companies with their visibility but Google, the largest search engine on the Web, is the only one he's found that can help small businesses do that.

"In business as well as recruiting the formula is be sure that you're targeting the right audience," he said. "If you target the right audience it works. And if you don't it doesn't."

Making it easier

One thing that has changed the way the whole recruiting process works from the very beginning is how candidates find advertised opportunities.

 "Candidates could be in India and they find you in the U.S. on the Internet," said Todd Raphael, online editor for Workforce Management magazine in Irvine, CA. "As you go deeper in the process, companies are becoming more automated, scheduling interviews online and doing pre-employment tests online."

Due to overwhelming number of applications from job seekers, companies still need to narrow the field of prospective candidates and they do this by asking simple questions designed to quickly ascertain if the prospect has what they're looking for such as can you lift 50 pounds or type 60 words per minute? Companies are also using technology to store all the resumes they've received from job candidates.

Raphael says one of the hottest trends in the job recruiting industry is the interviewing process where tons of candidates are able to schedule interviews for themselves online without having to call up recruiters or a company's human resource department.

Companies are also investing a lot more money on their own Web sites..

"In the 1990s they were spending more money on job boards," Raphael said. "Now even if you find a job on monster.com you go to the company's Web site and check them out. Then you go back to monster.com and apply for the job online. Companies are trying to make it easier."

Industries like security, trucking, nursing and accounting have taken the lead in being proactive on the Web as far as recruiting efforts go. Due to major changes to laws and regulations in the accounting industry, more firms are looking for candidates who understand how to comply with those laws including rules and stock option changes and Sarbanes-Oxley.

"Between those two areas it's made a lot of companies pretty hungry to understand what they have to do," he said.

Look and feel of a big company

Peter Weddle, publisher of Weddle's, a firm that specializes in books and guides for recruiters and job seekers, says current recruiting trends have been dramatically changed by the Internet, running the gamut from posting jobs on the Web to more sophisticated uses for employee development.

"I think the first issue is the use of technology which is not simply bolting on this machine or that machine—really it almost creates a change in the process and in the organization," said Weddle from his office in Stamford, CT. "It can even impact the corporate culture. They should understand that in the beginning."

With activity having become so hectic on the Internet between job postings and resume submissions, Weddle indicated that job seekers are "wearing ruts" by going to monster.com, hotjobs.com and careerbuilder.com.

"The problem is there are 40,000 guides on the Internet for employment," said Weddle. "We publish updates to our books every two weeks in this constantly changing medium. The key to using job postings on the Internet is knowing how and where to do it."

Even the best written employment ad will suffer if it's posted on the wrong Web site.

"Most people simply repost classified ads in cyber space," he said. That's where the playing field gets leveled much to the benefit of smaller companies. "On the Internet a small company can look and feel just like a big company," he said. "Their ads can run as many as 1,400 words which is the equivalent of two pages [in print]."

Weddle likens Internet employment listings to a company's electronic sales brochures so it pays to post it on the right site.

"Doing that transforms your office manager or person in human resources from someone processing forms to someone who acts as a sales agent representing a coordinated brand of the best and brightest," he said.

But these are skills that companies have to sharpen through experience.

"It's not the machine but what you do with the machine that's important," he said.

The "happy" problem, Wedding says, is that companies posting employment ads are going to get a ton of resumes in response. As a result, there are a growing number of companies using assessment instruments to help screen candidates. On the flip side, a University of Michigan study indicates that hiring managers are only 4% better than picking a coin since they choose the right candidate for the job only 54% of the time.

"We all hire the people that we like or that interviews best but neither one is relevant," Weddle said.

No matter the size of the business, experts insist that every company should have a corporate Web site. Only the corporate Web site should not look like a store. The employment section or career area should be more like a farm yet should maintain a store-like similar to sites offered by Coca Cola, Pepsi and IBM because only 16% of those coming to company sites are actually looking for jobs. The other 84% want a different kind of environment. Visitors at these sites often want a company to woo them by building relationships to sell them on the job opportunity.

"The farm is where you start building those relationships," he said.

Illustrating his point, Weddle says companies are always hiring sales people so they set up a corporate career area on their sites to provide information and resources helpful to those wanting to advance their careers in sales so sales people might start hanging out there. He asserted that the best career sites look and feel like a newspaper because when the employment section is surrounded by quality content, Web visitors will start exploring job opportunities.

"That's when the magic happens," he said.

STEPHEN PAREZO is the Media Manager for Fiducial.