What's Next: The Monster Dilemma

Posting jobs on the Web is easy. It's sifting through hundreds of resumés that's a pain.

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For business owners plagued by a dearth of candidates for key job openings, the Web was supposed to provide an ideal solution. Job-search sites like Monster.com (NASDAQ:MNST) can put postings in front of millions of applicants instantly. And newer business-oriented social networking sites like LinkedIn provide similarly fertile recruiting territory, supplying access to the contacts of thousands of people. On the other hand, anyone who's actually tried to hire someone through the Web knows the truth: You post an ad and are immediately flooded with hundreds of resumés, many from people whose backgrounds are wildly inappropriate. So much for the Web making things easier. It's enough to make you long for the days of print newspaper ads and snail mail.

But just as technology created the problem, newer technology aims to solve it. A new generation of hiring tools promises to screen out inappropriate applicants, allow the suitable ones to put their best foot forward, and even hunt down good candidates who haven't applied. As these new services get better at these tasks, they may well change the balance of power in the job-recruiting industry and could even redefine the way we think about jobs.

A shot at diverting a river of weak applicants is the chief advantage offered to employers by Protuo, a Woodstock, Georgia-based start-up that launched its service in January. Protuo isn't only a job-listing site; it also forwards its clients' listings to some 270 established job-listing sites, including Monster. But applicants can't respond to a Protuo posting unless they spend seven minutes or so filling out a survey that asks about experience, skills, workstyles, and job preferences. Employers can customize the survey by choosing from a wide field of prepared questions or by adding their own, and they specify which responses get a candidate's resumé past the screen. Has the candidate managed a technical project? Is he or she willing to move? The approach is modeled, to some extent, on the sort of compatibility gauging one encounters on a matchmaking site like eHarmony, notes Jennifer Gerlach, Protuo's co-founder and vice president of marketing. Gerlach went through the dating process on eHarmony just to research the technique. "I learned a lot," she says. "And I met some very, very nice people."

With online job postings sometimes pulling in more than a thousand applicants, the ability to winnow the flood could mean the difference between being able to retain control of the hiring process and having to bring in a professional recruiter--at a typical cost of $30,000 for a midlevel hire. The time and expense of dealing with a huge influx of resumés is all the more frustrating because much of the flow comes from online applicants who indiscriminately bombard hirers with resumés. You can try a keyword search on the resumés to narrow things down, but applicants have learned to load their resumés with them, often by pasting in phrases from the job posting. Even LinkedIn has suffered from inflation, as many users aggressively build networks of people they don't really know in order to make themselves appear better connected. "There's no value in a lot of these contacts," says LinkedIn user Chris Knudsen, who heads business development for podcasting company Podango in Salt Lake City. "It can just be someone whose card you got at a trade show." (A LinkedIn spokesperson commented via e-mail: "Anyone can join the LinkedIn network; however, the quality of your own personal LinkedIn network is the responsibility of each individual.") But a well-designed survey, contends Gerlach, allows users to skim the cream.

Fred Donovan, who runs Donovan Networks, a seven-employee computer network security firm, has been flooded with applicants responding to previous postings to Monster.com and other online job boards. He is currently conducting a Protuo search and likes what he's seen so far. "I can specify that I want to see only resumés from people who say they have 10 years' experience in negotiating sales and are familiar with the software development process," he says. "I'm seeing a small, better-qualified subset of the applicants." There must be something to the idea. Other hiring sites, including Market10, Jobster, and Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO), are introducing their own approaches to automated candidate screening. And Monster is doing the same, making available--for a fee that adds about 20 percent to the cost of posting a job--the ability to direct applicants to a questionnaire designed to rank the suitability of candidates.

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