Trying to Hire? Hit the Web

Emily Kumler, Medill News Service

WASHINGTON-- Monster Government Solution came to the Capitol this week in an effort to help federal recruiters find qualified job candidates online.

The government often limits job searches to those with varying levels of security clearance or specific certifications. That makes finding potential employees more complicated than for private-sector companies that only need to match skill sets.

Monster, a Web-based employment resource company, invited its partner, AIRS, to demonstrate to government officials its Web-based recruiting methods. AIRS is a 45-employee Vermont-based company that offers Internet search training and products to recruiters and hiring managers.

Finding people actively seeking work is much easier than identifying those who are qualified and might accept a job, but are not actively pursuing one, says Chris Forman, AIRS chief executive officer.

"The best thing about passive people is they are everywhere," Forman said. "If statistics are right, about 10 percent of this room is actively looking for a new job and about 90 percent are passive," he said to his audience of 100.

Information Available

Using free sites like Google.com and Alexa.com, Forman showed the audience how to assemble a workforce without having to hire expensive head-hunting firms.

"I think it's funny that the people with the highest security clearance in our government have all their personal information on the Web," Forman said. Even those employers with the most stringent hiring restrictions can use the Internet to find potential employees, he said.

Forman used Google to search for a specific certification given to a fictitious highly trained manufacturing employee. After selecting one of the search results, he went back to Google and refined the search to include parameters: "cissp (directory OR bios OR people OR speakers)."

The new search limits the results to keywords associated with individuals' names and personal information. One such result included a list of speakers at a recent conference, all with the specific qualification he was seeking.

Making Tracks

Alexa.com monitors Web traffic. The site calculates how many unique visitors any given site sees, and where they go after leaving.

Forman showed the audience that after identifying a site where people with similar interests congregate, Alexa enables a searcher to track where the visitors go next.

For example, if an employer were seeking to hire journalists, she might follow one reporter who leaves a newsroom after work to meet colleagues at a local watering hole. There, the employer would find a larger group with the requisite skills: thus, a greater pool of potential workers has been identified. Alexa works much the same way--it allows the user to follow the traffic to a larger pool.

Forman said that in 1997 when his company began training human resources departments to identify potential employees via the Internet, some were reluctant, worried it might be illegal. He said people knew such information was on the Web, but did not know how to find it--and that in the past seven years, AIRS has showed more than 50,000 people how to use these resources.