Job-Hunting Online: The Employer's Experience

Mark Anderson of DoubleClick, Inc., answers questions about the company's experience with online job seekers.

DoubleClick is a company involved in building the sales and technology infrastructure for Internet advertising. The company employs over 1,800 employees in 31 offices around the world. Mark Anderson, DoubleClick Inc.'s director of strategic recruiting, answered a few questions recently about the company's experience with online job seekers.

RD.COM: How many individuals have you hired using online resources?

ANDERSON: We do roughly thirty percent of our hirings from online resources

RD.COM: Can you describe how those hirings came about? For example, did your company post an opening on a job site?

ANDERSON: We post our openings on major websites like HotJobs and Monster. We also use niche boards that target specific skills or geographic locations. For instance, we recently used JapaneseJobs.com to source individuals for some positions that required Japanese language skills. There are also many sites that target specific technical skill sets, like Java and Oracle.

RD.COM: What are you looking for in an online applicant? How can that individual get noticed?

ANDERSON: Individuals who can describe specific projects that they've done or specific achievements, and who can at the same time highlight how they used their skills "toolbox," will catch a recruiter's eye. Recruiters do not spend a lot of time dissecting every resume they get. The best recruiters, like the ones we've hired at DoubleClick, have the ability to read a resume and pull out the pertinent information quickly. It's important for an individual to tell his or her story in as concise a manner as possible.

RD.COM: What is the best way for an online applicant to contact you?

ANDERSON: We encourage all our candidates to go to the career section on our website at http://careers.doubleclick.net and apply online. We have a very sophisticated online recruiting system, which is powered by a product called Softshoe. It was developed by the people at HotJobs, and allows candidates to search all our job opportunities by location, job type, and by keywords in all our job descriptions. When they apply online, a DoubleClick Recruiter is immediately notified of their submission.

RD.COM: What are the pros and cons of using the Internet to search for job candidates?

ANDERSON: The pros are that it's a very cost-efficient way of tapping a large pool of potential candidates. It's important for companies to realize that agencies are tapping this same pool in many cases, and may be delivering the same candidate to your company, and charging you high fees for individuals that you could have found yourself if a disciplined approach to Internet recruiting had been built.

The cons are that if an Internet sourcing strategy is not well thought out, it can cause a flood of unqualified candidates to apply. Recruiters then have to wade through large numbers of unqualified candidates.

RD.COM: What advice would you have for the online candidate?

ANDERSON: The basics of job searching still apply in the online world. Candidates should be doing some preliminary checking on the companies they are potentially interested in. The Web makes doing research incredibly easy, and candidates can gather a great deal of information on potential companies before they apply.

Once a candidate identifies the companies that he is interested in, going to a company's online employment section will allow him to search and review all the potential openings. You can usually apply to more than one job if qualified, and also have an opportunity to write a little bit about yourself in addition to submitting your resume.

Many of the job boards have "search agents," which alert individuals to jobs that match their specific criteria. This technology allows candidates to have potential job opportunities delivered to them whenever one comes up.

There really has never been a time like this when candidates have been so empowered by the career search tools available to them. The Internet has become the great equalizer both for companies and for candidates.