Diary of An Online Job Seeker

The Internet is all the rage for technical recruiting, but you can quickly find yourself abused by headhunters. Learn how to make the experience more rewarding.

By Deborah Radcliff

August 7, 2000 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Meet Brad Martin (not his real name), an insomniac whose sleep deprivation recently cost him his job at a large telecommunications company near his Pleasanton, Calif., apartment.
Not that he minded. Martin was itching to move from his senior help desk analyst position to desktop troubleshooting. But his company had pigeonholed him (and his 250 peers) into telephone support for life.
So in early May, Martin signed up for $240 per week in unemployment wages and started hanging out at online job boards during those quiet hours when most of the world sleeps.

			No Job Seeker's Paradise Ask recruiter Susan Stewart, a senior vice president at Tacoma, Wash.-based IDmicro Inc., and she'll tell you that online job postings get her 150% more responses than traditional print and radio ads do. Rose McGinnis, vice president of worldwide recruiting at Unisys Corp. in Blue Bell, Pa., says the cost per hire for Internet recruiting runs 50% to 80% lower than that for traditional media. But both say they won't hire exclusively using the Internet anytime soon. In fact, they stress that the Internet is an adjunct to traditional hiring outlets, not a replacement. Take employee referrals, for instance, which Forrester Research Inc. reports account for 40% of new information technology hires. According to Forrester, newspaper and magazine advertising still account for 23% of job hires, while the Internet catches only 4% of new hires. "If you know someone inside the company you want to go to work for, you'll get hired faster than anyone. The Internet isn't going to change that," notes Mark Mehler, co-author of a guide to online job hunting and resources, titled CareerXroads. "If you can't refer in, you still have to get in front of hiring managers, so you still need to send your resume direct to get their attention," he says.

Martin had been pegged into help desk work for three years - far too long, he says. He needed a new start, in a job that would offer him the opportunity to move to the next level: hands-on desktop support/analysis. It couldn't be a sweatshop like the service provider he'd just left. And while he wasn't tied to working close to home, he did hope to find a job that would be forgiving of his nocturnal body clock.
So he started a passive search for entry-level desktop support jobs, which didn't pan out, he says.
"I'm capable and qualified for desktop work, but I've been answering phones for three years," he says. "When dealing with

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