How to work the Web to find work

In recent years, some tough new bouncers have begun to stand watch outside the door to corporate personnel offices. If you want to get your résumé into the hands of a recruiter, you have to get it by them first.

These guardians are sophisticated computer programs that use "conceptual matching" and other artificial intelligence to weed out candidates who don't fit the job profile. While they usually leave the final hiring decision to a human, these programs can whittle down hundreds of applications to just a handful that will be seen by human eyes.

These tireless assistants are needed as the Internet revs up the other side of the equation: Internet job banks and company websites that make submitting résumés faster and easier than ever.

Millions of résumés are now floating around on the Net, experts say. "Résumés today are basically a commodity on the Internet. There are so many of them," says Brad Fredericks, cofounder of RésuméDoctor.com, a South Burlington, Vt., company that helps job seekers prepare effective résumés.

Online job hunting passed a milestone recently when Booz Allen Hamilton, a technology consultancy, concluded in a study that more than half of new hires (51 per cent) were found through the Internet. Job seekers applied directly to companies at their websites or were discovered on job websites such as Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com. They also used social-networking sites, some of which specifically focus on making business connections. Newspaper classified ads, a traditional resource, now account for only 5 percent of new hires, the study said.

"Today, everything is done online. The days of faxing your résumé or mailing it in and getting a mailed response back, those days are gone," Mr. Fredericks says.

Recruiting software can help firms handle huge hiring situations, says Bertrand Dussert, managing director of research for Vurv Technology in Jacksonville, Fla., a supplier of such technology. He estimates that roughly three-quarters of American employers do some kind of computerized screening of applicants.

One of them is Steve Wynn, a Las Vegas resort developer who recently needed to hire 10,000 people within three months. His company used Vurv software to screen 125,000 applicants, including 27,000 on the first day that applications were accepted.

These systems can use answers to questions, such as "Are you willing to travel or relocate?" as "knockouts" - a wrong answer knocks the résumé into the discard pile. Answers also can be "weighted" in favor of or against a candidate.

While a computerized system might cut off some job hunters from talking to a real person, it's still likely to keep them much better informed than back when most résumés were faxed or mailed, Mr. Dussert says. Companies can design automated replies that let applicants know where they stand. "With this kind of technology, there's no excuse for [a company] not to give you a reply," he says.

Corporations have also turned their websites into recruiting tools, attracting job seekers by making sites friendly and easy to use. For example, at T-Mobile, a cartoon dog named "Fetch" searches for jobs of interest to you and will even e-mail you if a position matching your résumé opens up. Coca-Cola's website feels like an online retailer. Job hunters can "Add this job to my cart," "E-mail this job to a friend," or "Submit my profile" with a single click. If you don't have a résumé, some company sites will help you build one. And if there's no opening that matches your skills or interests, the site will send an e-mail if it finds a match later.

Large corporations can have hundreds or even thousands of jobs listed, and sometimes job titles can be obscure. "You can have 10 jobs that are called 'analyst 2' as a title," Dussert says, and they could be anywhere within an organization. At a well-run website, "You can paste your résumé in, and [the software] will find those jobs, even if they're hidden in a different department," he says.

Vurv's system, used by about 300 companies, will let applicants enter a description of their "dream job" into a search box on a company's website. The software will then look for the closest match within that company.

For those about to begin an online job hunt, experts offer some other recommendations to make the process easier and more successful:

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