Online recruiting industry beginning to serve niches
by MICHAEL WATT

The old saw about good help being hard to find is particularly true when it comes to finding good sales people. Most business owners will tell you their biggest frustration is getting - and keeping - good account executives.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is that sales is hard. A fellow I know who has made a nice living in sales over the past 30 years described the secret to a successful sales career thusly: "You have to learn how to eat (bad word) and like it." Not everybody is cut out to make that adjustment, of course, so as a result you have a chronic shortage of the kind of account executives you can count on to help you grow your business.

Compounding matters is the need to get quality people capable of selling and willing to make the sacrifice of time and energy necessary to learn your business. A friend who owns a printing operation recently shared with me that he is willing to pay a six-figure salary to the right person to be an account executive. He added that he had yet to meet anybody who could convince him that he or she was going to stick around long enough to learn the business and justify that investment.

Well, the Internet has shown us that where there's a need, especially a specialized need, someone will try to solve this problem via the World Wide Web. Whereas sites such as monster.com and hotjobs.com have proven that the Internet works as a tool for finding workers and employment opportunities, all indications are that the trend will be toward more of these job sites specializing in specific fields.

Invision.com Inc., for instance, which owns the site I work for (LongIsland.com) also has a vested interest in two others that focus on specific niches.

One, LIJobs.com, concentrates on a specific region, Long Island, as well as on available jobs in the information technology and new media industries. Another, salesrecruits.com, takes the specialization a step further and focuses exclusively on software and technology sales professionals. Salesrecruits.com President and CEO Steven C. Morgan said in an interview that "specialization like this is the future of online recruiting," adding that the recruiting industry is just over $1 billion now but is expected grow to more than $7 billion by 2004.

"The market is evolving in response to market demand. The next evolution is a niche recruitment portal that mirrors what you have offline. Specialization is nothing new, but specialization online is new," he said

The advantage of the specialized site over the general site, according to Morgan, is the specialized site's ability to qualify candidates. When a candidate posts a resume to salesrecruits.com, for instance, he or she is warned that "this is a place for serious executives only." Morgan said their records indicate that nearly 50 percent of the visitors to the site bail out at this point.

"People opt out when they realize they are being scrutinized or press forward because they consider themselves to be legitimate candidates. This makes for a better environment for the companies looking for qualified candidates."

Ironically, the recent (and still ongoing) dot-com fallout has had an interesting impact on the market for sales executives. "We have seen some of the better sales people come full circle," Morgan said. "A lot of them left stable companies for dot-coms because of the attraction of trying to build something. (Since the fallout), a lot of sales executives have come back with a better appreciation of the stability of an established company. They are wiser people for having left and therefore might be more gun shy the next time there is such a rush."

Changing market conditions aside, Morgan believes the pendulum is still in favor of the better sales people. "Even with the dot-com shakeout those companies that are still standing still have the best sales people working with them. They will always be scarce. Good sales people have always been hard to find."

While the sales position is one of the few niches currently being served on the Internet, there are a couple of others. ElfNetwork.com, for instance, offers not-for-profit career opportunities, while funeraljobs.com claims to be the only "dedicated funeral and cemetery career network provider in the country."

A visit to the latter site, unfortunately, turned up entirely too many dead links for the site to be taken seriously (sorry, couldn't resist the opportunity for a cheap joke. It's true, though).

Finally, I came across a search engine recently called megaspider.com. I put it through the same tried-and-true test I give all major search engines (that being "Let's see what happens when I type 'Todd Rundgren' into the search box) and I must report that it passed with flying colors. I found lots of pages and sites I did not know existed, which is what a good search engine should do.