August 1998 Column

INTERNET SEARCH RESULTS ANALYSIS 

Although we belong to numerous internet resume / job order services and feel it is money well spent, we had never analyzed the results from one service against another. Internet expenses were justified by looking at the total collected placement/contractor dollars in the door versus the total service costs out the door. Realizing that way wouldn’t work for everyone, a comparative study of resume search results might make for good reading this month.  

Initial objective was to go to the resume search engines for each service, enter in the same search parameters for each service and record the total number of responses returned.  

It was difficult to compare ‘apples’ and ‘apples’ due to the fact that all the services present the results to you in slightly different manner. It was also impossible to weed out candidates that were double submitted (it happens), candidates that would not relocate, and candidates that require sponsorship and/or live out of the country (it happens a lot). Most search results consist of a page with 30-50 entries shown in ‘thumbnail’ format. You see the candidates name, skill set and maybe date of submission and/or email address but most services limit the thumbnails to 3 or 4 bits of information for each candidate. You then click on the candidate’s entry to view the resume for review. 

Chosen search: PROGRAMMER and COBOL and MVS 

COBOL and MVS are two key skills used to screen MIS/IT professionals. By using ‘and’ rather than ‘or’ all respondents will have all three keywords somewhere on their resume. The results of the initial search are below.  

OnLine Career Center (OCC)       979

Headhunter.Net                            304

Net-Temps                                   107

Talent Bank                                   154

Career Mosaic                              198

Passport Access                            1268

Recruiters OnLine (RON)              100+

DICE                                            57 

Explanation. 

OnLine Career Center (OCC), is a large, well-known pay service costing $3900.00 per year for unlimited access for one location. OCC lets you select resume aging as well but I searched the entire archive. 

HeadHunter.Net is probably one of the best known and is free for both resume searching and job posting. The do have a ‘Friends’ service for an $800.00 annual fee that places your job postings in front of the free postings. They allow more search criteria than most. In addition to the search parameters, I screened for candidates with no minimum education. 

Net-Temps, is a large, pay service and offers a free trial. Although their search results were not among the highest, they provide an excellent job order distribution service. Most of my internet ad responses come via Net-Temps.  

Career Mosaic, is a free site that requires pre-registration. Searching is based on keywords only but they do note the candidates date of submission on the search results form.

 Passport Access, is an inexpensive, pay service costing $800.00 annually for resume searching. You can pay extra to have your orders posted. This site returned the largest number of matches, although some dated to 1996. They offer a wide variety of search parameters but I searched on keywords only. Although the Passport service returned the largest number of matches, I have been a satisfied member of Passport for a couple of years but many times they show new postings for candidates that we contact then find the candidate has not posted to Passport is quite some time.  

Recruiters OnLine (RON), offers an annual membership at $495.00. They also offer two other types of membership, one being free but they do not offer resume searching. It was impossible to record the search results for this service as the maximum allowed number of matches is 100 per search. Furthermore, I have been unable to actually view any resumes from this service with my browser and have yet to solve this odd problem with the RON technical support group.

 DICE, a well-known pay service runs anywhere from $385.00 to $850.00 per month depending on service levels. DICE had  the lowest total score but for a good reason. They do not allow their resumes to age at all. All resumes returned on a search are all recently submitted. They do allow queries by geography, willingness to travel, and by citizen / visa. Ran the search for all resumes in all states, including ones needing visas and ones represented by agencies. Of the 57 responses, 27 were actually U.S. citizens that were not represented by resumes.

 Easy part over, the fun begins now. I have noted above the ‘hits’ from a number of different services, both pay and free but that is just the beginning of the search. I visited one of the services, OnLine Career Center (OCC), and personally viewed over 200 individual resumes just to see what you really get for your money. OCC returned a respectable 979 matches, the second highest in the group. Choosing the archive option probably offered matches first entered last summer. The results of the second search are as follows: 

Qualified                             69

Qualified but dated              33

Not/Over/Under Qualified   57

Sponsorship Required        47 

More explanation. 

69 of the resumes viewed appeared worthy of placement in the ‘qualified’ category. Keep in mind that many of these matches will not relocate and/or may be over a targeted salary range. The expectation is that the number of actual candidates gleaned from this search to be far less than 69. 

The ‘qualified but dated’ category contains people that at one point in time in their career might have been qualified but have moved on to management positions or newer technology positions. Most people in this group are solid candidates, but not for my target position. Also, these candidates would probably not be interested in the position anyway. 

The ‘not/over/under qualified’ category contains individuals who flat-out do not match (maybe a computer operator or trainer), have moved into positions far up the ladder, might have college experience only and others who were not good for my initial searches and unlikely to be a match for any searches in the future. 

The ‘sponsorship required’ category contains individuals that do not have permission to work in the US and need visa sponsorship.

In closing the number of matches returned from the various resume service varied wildly from less than 100 to over 900. The costs also varied wildly from zero to over $800.00 per month. The information presented here should be helpful in determining where your internet dollars should go.