Have you got your own personal web site

Forget the Saturday papers and the phone. Employers will be searching for future employees in cyberspace, write Samantha Walker.

Forget the Saturday papers and the phone. Employers will be searching for future employees in cyberspace, write Samantha Walker.

Something big is happening in the recruitment market, according to Jacqueline Thompson. For those interested in finding another job, trawling through the Satur-day papers will not suffice in the future. Neither will contacting an employment agency and waiting for them to contact you with a suitable placing. Instead, Thompson says, pro-active employees will have their own web site. She is also willing to stake her money on most people having their own web site within the next two years.

This is why Thompson, who is director at recruitment group aCE Resources, has launched a new service for both job seekers and employers wishing to fill a staff vacancy. The service, Resumes OnLine, is operational and already the interest shown by both employers (clients) and employees (members) is high, Thompson says.

Resumes OnLine allows employers to search through a database of possible candi-dates on the Internet. The employers, who pay a yearly fee to access this database, are able to contact a candidate directly, without having to go through a recruitment firm.

Members wanting to put their personal details into the database for employers to search pay a set up fee, currently ranging from $199 to $1000, as well as a monthly fee. This includes the design of their own personal web site with no additional maintenance costs.

Thompson is currently in the latter stages of the meet and greet process of launch-ing Resumes OnLine. In its initial phases, it will concentrate on consultants and IT professionals, however, Thompson says she has her eye on the financial services market.

Resumes OnLine will be available either as an internal or external employment service. This means larger corporations wanting to fill a position from within their own ranks can do so by subscribing to Resumes OnLine and having each member of staff’s details in the database. Thompson says this is a less expensive alternative to the external service as there are no marketing costs involved.

However, the service will not only benefit those wanting to fill a position within their organisation. Thompson says employers may just want to search the database to see the level of skills in the market.

“Sometimes employers don’t want to hire someone. They actually want to know if you as a potential employee exist or not. They like to play around a little. You can’t ask an agency to do this sort of thing,” she says.

When searching for an employee, an employer doesn’t necessarily only want to look at those who are available. The passive segment of the market, those who are already employed and are not actively seeking new work, is often the segment em-ployers most want to target.

“Seventy per cent of the market is made up of passive job seekers. How do you as a client reach these? We allow the client to get to the passive market,” Thompson says.

Thompson says Resumes OnLine is innovative in the way it cuts out the high cost of hiring new employees.

“Executive search firms can be really expensive. Some corporations budget $500,000 a year to hire new employees.”

The other key feature of Resumes OnLine that separates it from the rest of the re-cruitment market, according to Thompson, is in its subscription based fee structure. Paying for recruitment services per transaction is “a bit greedy”, she says.

“It’s totally smashed the recruitment paradigm that exists now of transaction fees. Transaction fees are disgusting. We don’t believe in them.”