Recruiters
Online Network
Many
a time I have thought about writing about this service. Although just one of
several excellent recruiter networks available to us, Bill Vick, of Recruiters
Online Network has always held a special place. He is such an advocate for our
industry, and us, sometimes when we need one the most. His services are also
very Internet related, of special interest to readers of this column. So, for
anyone interested in finding out more about RON, read on for some highlights.
Resume
Banks. Three available. The ‘Best of the Net’ database has about 50,000
candidates that RON has drawn into the database. These candidates may or may not
have their resumes listed in other data banks but have specifically chosen to
list their resume with RON. The ‘Rest of the Net’ is comprised of about
600,000 resumes that come from a number of sources including resume distribution
services, free resume banks, etc. The third resume bank consists of a couple of
thousand resumes submitted by member agencies. These resumes are available for
any other member on a split fee basis. Bottom line…lots of resumes to search.
FastCash.
Kind
of like a billing out-sourcer. They do the billing and advance most of the
payment to you on start date. Once you make a placement you send them the
invoice. They send you 75% of the fee within two business days then pay the
balance when the check comes in, less their fee, which is normally in the 3-4%
range if the fee is paid within 60 days but can be much higher for slow payers.
The service is handled through Aquent Financial Services.
Job
Order Distribution. Another part of the RON service distributes all your job
orders to over 3000 sites. Excite, eFront, AltaVista and Classifind Network are
among the Engines and Portals they post to. Hundreds of media sites are included
as well. A couple of the high-traffic job sites include JobsOnline and
America’s Job Bank and also hundreds of News Groups. This service gets your
jobs orders in front of the millions of passive candidates you are looking for.
Recruiter-to-Recruiter
Splits. All your job orders are also posted to a database the other 8000 third
party recruiters can search and respond to. Candidates are offered on a split
fee basis as well. There is no additional fees or commissions for this service
outside of the annual membership fee.
Also,
every RON member gets a free, professional looking recruiter Web site including
all jobs posted to the network.
The
service costs $995.00 per year. Anyone interested in more information can
contact Rebecca Khoury at rkhoury@zoominternet.net
or via voicemail at (888) 827-2983.
XPRESS
by AIRS
AIRS
has introduced a new resume distribution system that allows job seekers to
target their resumes to recruiters who precisely match their industries,
disciplines and geographical preferences. Job seekers pay a modest fee for
distribution - but the service is FREE to recruiters.
To
sign up for this service and to receive your free resumes visit: http://www.airsinfo.com/.
Once the page loads, click on “Become a member” in the upper right hand
corner. Then simply complete the Passport registration and select XPRESS Resumes
to get started.
The
AIRS Membership also entitles you to FREE information and tools, including
recruitment news, the largest recruitment library anywhere, a searchable
directory of over 3,500 niche job boards, recruitment job opportunities, etc.
Michael Gray is the AIRS – XPRESS Product Manager and can be reached via email at mgray@airsinfo.com.
IRG
vs. Sendouts.com
I am sure many, if not all of you have heard of a restraining order filed against Sendouts.com last month by IRG. These are two St. Louis companies that once had a solid working relationship that fell apart. There were bad feelings. Accusations flew. IRG sent out a ‘press release’ type of notice to hundreds of recruiters across the country. This information is printed in its entirety below. I spoke with Don Breckenridge of Sendouts.com about the situation and he has offered a response to the Fordyce readership, many of which are his customers. This response is also printed in its entirety below, followed by a few comments from myself.
The
IRG email:
St.
Louis, Missouri, March 22, 2002 - After filing a lawsuit on March 21st against
Sendouts, LLC, the Internet Recruiting Group requested and was granted a
temporary restraining order that prevents Sendouts and National Recruiters
Network from illegally competing.
The order, issued by Division 10 of the Circuit Court for St. Louis County,
Missouri, restrains "Sendouts and National Recruiters Network from engaging
in a recruiting business that tracks and places job candidates for multiple
companies."
As the plaintiff, Internet Recruiting Group, alleges that Sendouts violated the
non-compete and confidentiality terms of their agreement by copying IRG's
business model and launching duplicate business opportunities. Internet
Recruiting Group was a client of Sendouts, a staffing software developer, when
Sendouts, headed by CEO and President, Don Breckenridge, launched Sendouts
University and later National Recruiters Network. Both of which are enterprises
that IRG claims are "illegal rip offs."
Brian Marchant-Calsyn is the president and CEO of the Internet Recruiting Group,
"when you have success at anything you expect competition. But you don't
expect a vendor that you pay money to, a company you have an agreement with, to
copy-cat your business and steal from you. That's what we feel they've done. The
worse thing is that Sendouts management openly contacted our clients and tried
to lure them away."
The Circuit Court for St. Louis County, Missouri has set a preliminary and
permanent injunction hearing for April 1st at 9:00am. The Internet Recruiting
Group will request that the court prevent National Recruiters Network from
continuing operations and restrict Sendouts from launching any other ventures
based on IRG's business model, while IRG's lawsuit is pending.
Contact: Carl Schlanger, Internet Recruiting Group, Inc. 314-439-5186, carl@intellectmarch.com
The
Sendouts Response:
St.
Louis, Missouri, April 12, 2002 - On March 21st, the Internet Recruiting
Group (IRG) filed a lawsuit against Sendouts.com in an attempt to stop the
marketing and sales of our National Recruiters Network (NRN) training program.
Among other things, IRG alleged that Sendouts.com breached its contract with IRG
by violating the confidentiality and non-compete provisions of their agreement.
IRG
argued that because Sendouts.com collects a small transaction fee upon a
successful split fee placement between two recruiters within the network, that
it is a staffing firm and thus violated their user agreement.
Further, IRG argued that because Sendouts.com gave the IRG users notice
of termination due to non-payment of past due invoices and provided options for
continuing service, that it breached confidentiality and tried to lure clients
away from IRG.
On
April 4th, 2002 Division 10 of the Circuit Court of St. Louis County, Missouri
ruled in favor of Sendouts.com by denying IRG’s motion for an injunction
stating "the court finds that on the record before the court, the court
cannot find that there is a factual basis that the [agreement] has been
violated."
Unfortunately,
we live in a litigious society where anyone can sue anyone. In this case, IRG
filed a lawsuit and disseminated their allegations to the recruiting community
through multiple press releases and mass e-mails. While IRG claims this was to educate the public, we believe
it was meant to disrupt sales of the NRN training programs and sway prospective
customers to IRG's own training program.
We, at Sendouts.com and NRN, have never before been involved in litigation and are pleased with the outcome. We look forward to moving on and focusing on the continued development of our products and services.
My comments:
Although I do use
Sendouts as my ATS provider and know their gang fairly well I do not feel
unfairly biased towards them in the matter. Any good journalist probably should
have personally talked with the people at IRG as well but since I am a recruiter
and not a good journalist I did not feel compelled to do so as their position
was well stated in the email they sent out after securing the restraining order.
I did find out that a judge in a preliminary hearing issued
an order prohibiting Sendouts from engaging in the recruiting business.
This was not an issue for Sendouts as they had never been, nor are likely
to be, a staffing firm. By virtue of the fact that Sendouts does collect a
transaction fee on all split placements, IRG had tried to imply that they are,
indeed, a staffing firm. This would be like stating that Top Echelon or
Recruiters Online Network are staffing firms, which they are not. When the case
went to actual trial, the judge subsequently exonerated Sendouts from any
wrongdoing whatsoever and lifted the earlier restraining order. Case closed. I
would be more that happy to allow IRG any rebuttal of these facts in a future
column.
FYI
- Free Recruiter Resumes
Anyone
interested in free resumes for corporate recruiters and human resource
professionals can visit the resume page at Staffing World by going to: http://www.staffingworld.com/resumes.htm.
This site also allows resumes to be posted for free as well.
SWAT
Armory Open
It
is with real pleasure that I announce that the newest section of our web site,
called 'The Armory' is finally open at www.swatrecruiting.com.
The content is free at this time and is designed for the working Internet
Recruiter. I'd like to give you a quick overview of what you can find on the
site and why it may become one of the most useful tools in your arsenal for
finding passive candidates.
The
Armory has 19 sections including Acronym Lookups, Agents, Area Code Lookups,
Bots 'n Spiders, Career Sites (still under construction), Chat Rooms,
Compensation, Deep Web, Domain Lookup Tools, Employee Screening Services,
Government Search Engines, Industry Research Aids, Mailing List Resources, Map
Resources, Meta Search Engines, Offline Search Engines, Reverse Lookup tools,
Search Engines, and Subject Directories. There
is too much content to write about in detail.
Visit
www.swatrecruiting.com and check
out 'The Armory'. Drop me an email
at wade76205@hotmail.com to let me
know your thoughts, suggestions for additional sites, and how I can make 'The
Armory' more useful for you.
Barbara
Ling Tip
Thanks
to Barbara for providing this month’s excellent tip. From her newsletter with
permission.
“Whenever
you find your business highlighted in the media or on websites, you should take
the next step of telling other media members to check you out as well. I decided
to submit email to some major newspapers and magazines regarding Contractor
Hell....heck, who knows? Something might turn up.
So!
I went to USA Today to find the email addresses of all those reporters
who are simply dying to talk with me (but aren’t aware of it yet).
Between taking care of my three kids and working, I didn’t have the
time necessary to do a deep search. And alas, I couldn’t find any specific
hyperlinked email address that I could use.
Now, of course, I could simply guess at the email addresses...but
wouldn’t it be great to verify something is valid first?
Further
poking around revealed the following. There’s
a direct link on its site entitled “Contact Us” at http://www.usatoday.com/marketing/feedback.htm.
Unfortunately, all the pages seem to go to a mail form (ie, fill out the boxes
and click send). I chose “Life” and was brought to
http://contact.usatoday.com/feedback/online/feedback.asp?type=life.
Hmmm,
said I, to whom do these emails go anywhos? I used the View | Source feature on
my Internet browser, and then searched for form (‘form’ is the beginning of
the text that specifies web-based entry forms). And there I found:
name=”emailto”
value=”acourt@usatoday.com”
Ah
hah! acourt@usatoday.com!
But is that a real person? I went to Google and searched for:
and
came up with
http://www.usatoday.com/life/travel/column/col014.htm.
Further
reading finally revealed that email addresses to USA Today.com could be of the
format
FirstInitialLastName@companyName.com
Are
you trying to find the email addresses of the decision makers of your potential
clients? Taking advantage of the
web form source code to find an initial starting point, and then searching to
see if you can uncover web pages that have both the address and the name, can
help you make educated guesses on the correct email address format of your
target. And that can assist you in
your recruiter Internet marketing efforts.
Who knows, you might be able to uncover the direct line you’ve been
needing.”
For
those of you who haven’t yet purchased Barbara’s three-volume set
“Internet Recruiting Edge” should at least check out her Web site at http://www.barbaraling.com/.
This training resource received a superb review in the January issue of Fordyce
Letter. The set was offered at $149 but she was offering a discount to $99 for
Fordyce readers.