Internet Recruiting

From Want Ads to Web – Today’s Newspaper as Internet Recruiting Tool

Whether you’re a professional recruiter, a hiring manager for a large or small firm, or an entrepreneur seeking one employee, you’re going to consider Internet recruiting. The only exception might be if you are trying to fill unskilled or semi-skilled positions from the local neighborhood – nursing homes looking for CNAs, fast food restaurants seeking crew workers, and so forth. Even then, if your nursing home or fast food restaurant is a multiple location franchise, Internet recruiting might still be a good fit.

What, however, are the online recruitment choices and how do you determine which is best? The first thought of those considering Web recruitment are generally the national job boards - Monster, Yahoo! HotJobs and Careerbuilder, the Big Three. These career behemoths attract millions of daily job-seeking visitors and resumes.

One of the best Internet recruiting alternatives to the Big Three might surprise you. It’s your local newspaper. Newspapers offer some of the most robust Internet recruiting options you’ll find anywhere, and they often discount them heavily when you advertise in their print publication.

With an “if you can’t link ‘em join ‘em” approach to Internet recruitment advertising, savvy newspaper executives have designed robust Web sites that provide employers not only with job postings, but also resume databases, candidate tracking systems, Employment TV, broadcast collaborations, mall and workforce center kiosk options, virtual and on-location career fairs, and tons of interactive bells and whistles.

With the help of The Boston Globe and its BostonWorks job site, for example, not only can you advertise in the paper and on the Web but you can also design your own list of pre-qualifying interview questions, peruse a resume database of over half a million job candidates, and send out a direct bulk e-mail to those candidates. You can even enlist the help of the recruitment experts at the Globe to help you compose the message. You can target just the job or industry-specific demographics you’re interested in as well. You can purchase keyword-relevant tile ads, display your openings on the BostonWorks home page as a featured employer, and keep your eye on the progress of your applicant search with the robust BostonWorks Web-based applicant tracking system.

What makes many newspapers an even smarter choice is that you don’t necessarily have to forego advertising in the Big Three we mentioned earlier – Monster, HotJobs and Careerbuilder. That’s because each of these recruitment sites has partnered with newspapers to share each other’s online job postings.

If, for example, you place an ad in the Wilkes Barre (Pa.) Times Leader, the Honolulu Star- Bulletin or California’s Orange County Register, you’ve also placed it on Monster’s site. If you post a job with The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post or The Salt Lake Tribune it will appear on HotJobs. If you advertise your openings in the pages and on the site of The Sacramento Bee, Chicago Tribune or The Detroit News, you’ve scheduled it on Careerbuilder.

The best place, then, for your Internet recruitment dollars may well by your local newspaper. It’s not just the print want ads anymore.