Finding the right person for the job today means relying on traditional methods, such as employee referrals and, increasingly, using online recruiting and searches with tools such as those from AIRS.

FYI There are more than 10.4 million people working in IT jobs at for-profit U.S. companies with more than 50 employees; that's 4% higher than the 10 million total IT employees of a year ago. -- ITAA

Corning gets about 40 percent of its new IT hires through its own Web site. The Corning, N.Y.-based manufacturing giant, which last year reported $7.1 billion in revenues, is on the lookout these days mainly for optical and electrical engineers and IT programmers. And it hopes the careers section of its site will attract that talent. "We brought in outside consulting help and took a close look at our online demographics, then we convinced upper management the people we want to recruit are on the Web," says Valerie Kennerson, recruitment marketing manager for Corning.

Now Corning regularly analyzes its Web site traffic, keeping tabs on where IT surfers go, how long they stay and where they jump off. In the fall, Corning will co-brand the Web site with six colleges--including Pennsylvania State University -- that serve as heavy recruiting sources for Corning. "We're setting up a co-branding situation, addressing job-seeking students who come to our site from the psu.edu server," for instance, Kennerson says. Penn State students will get job-related information, such as when Corning recruiters will be on campus.

Kennerson hopes to expand this customized program to target engineers who work for its competitors and engineers with its supplier companies who visit Corning's site. The site will be able to identify these professionals and then greet them when they hit the Corning site with information about career opportunities or job benefits at Corning. This is key to getting the specialized talent the company needs. "We still need experienced, highly skilled technical talent," Kennerson says. "In some cases, as in optical engineering, we may struggle to fill jobs that only about 20 people in the world can do."

The Hot Ones Click here to enlarge

Online Recruiting Catches Fire

Meantime, online recruiting in all its forms is getting hotter: It is now the most widely used method for finding IT workers: The Web contains 110 million different job listings and 20 million résumés, according to Interbiznet's 2001 Trends Report. And it's growing fast. The $2.5 billion online recruiting industry is projected to grow to $7 billion by the end of 2004, according to Wayne Cooper, president of Kennedy Information, a human-resources consulting and market-research firm based in Fitzwilliam, N.H.

It takes special training to perform searches because at least 2,500 sites cater to recruiting, and that's not counting internal corporate sites, such as Corning's.

Online recruiting sites these days are starting to offer job candidates more help via résumé tips, job leads and research links and helping their clients -- the employers -- better manage talent and the entire hiring process. Sites that offer career-assessing capabilities are considered better than traditional online job boards.

AIRS, for instance, recently unveiled PeoplePortals, an online application for recruiting to help companies find targeted IT candidates. PeoplePortals includes resources, tools and links for recruiters and corporate HR executives to create a recruiting desktop to search for specific IT skill sets online.

AIRS even offers in-depth training in the latest Web crawler technology and advanced search algorithms to find unique candidates who can't be found with the everyday search engines.

"We teach recruiters to use very complex Boolean search strings, and have embedded in our SearchStation product a number of complex strings that enhance the likelihood a person searching will find what he or she wants," says Bill Craib, director of training for AIRS.

What a Difference a Year Makes Click here to enlarge

Since taking the AIRS class, Sandra MacFarland, a recruiter for TAC Engineering Resources, has placed more than 50 IT staffers, including Microsoft Windows developers, programmers and software quality-assurance testers, in new jobs. MacFarland, who has been conducting searches on the Web for a year in addition to using job banks, says without this type of training "you are only skimming the surface."

Recruiting sites -- such as AIRS' site, CareerBuilder.com, HeadHunter.net, JobsOnline.com and Monster.com -- that combine training, assessment and placement services are catching on fast, too. Forrester Research predicts that within five years these sites will grab 55 percent of the online recruiting market. Many of these sites are consolidating, too: Witness the merger of Monster. com and HotJobs.com, for instance.

Nimble Technology's Godwin uses a combination of AIRS tools on the Web as well as other online recruiting networks. She also solicits referrals from Nimble's own engineers and attends chamber-of-commerce events to promote Nimble in the local business community. Corporate HR recruiters in Seattle are rather close-knit, she says, which can be helpful for searches. "While we sometimes compete, we've also learned to pass along referrals of candidates," Godwin adds.

Godwin's company sells middleware that translates data from relational, flat-file or traditional hierarchical databases to XML (Extensible Markup Language) for dissemination over the Web. With its product set to ship in September, Nimble's challenge until recently had been to hire skilled XML programmers. Instead of competing for top-dollar "XML gurus," Nimble last year was forced to hire "potential XML gurus." Still, officials say the company has been successful in its recruiting.

FYI Employers will attempt to fill more than 900,000 new IT jobs in 2001; that's down 44% from the 1.6 million new jobs that had been projected for 2000; still, total IT employment is expected to increase year to year. -- ITAA

For its XML hiring push, Nimble Technology's human-resources staff created a profile for selecting software engineers who would be able to learn the intricacies of XML and hit the ground running. The key traits included engineering experience on enterprise software-development projects, top-level C++/Java development work and the ability to ask for help in learning XML. Many of Nimble's own senior software engineers fit the profile and were trained to work in XML.

Good old-fashioned referrals, meanwhile, are still alive and well: Capital One Financial Corp., Falls Church, Va., gets about 40 percent of its new hires from employee referrals, according to Mark Andrews, IT recruiting specialist for Capital One. Andrews says Capital One also uses other channels in hiring, such as the Web, recruitment fairs, college tours and some recruitment consultants, too.

Free Lunch and Warm Fuzzies

Even as the economic downturn and emerging online recruiting tools make hiring easier than it was last year, companies also are trying to do more to keep their current IT employees happy. Relativity's Wadhwa says his company's primary focus these days is mostly on cultivating perks for existing employees -- free lunches a few times each week, a no-suits-in-the-office policy, a fully stocked kitchen and even a $1,000 bonus for employees who quit smoking. (For more information on retention strategies, see "Keep Talent From Taking Flight.")

And with the IT special-projects faucet turned down to a trickle, companies are challenged to make their IT departments stimulating for prospective employees who don't want a job that could go stale, Klees says.

In many instances, a sense of job security and providing for basic needs will make most IT job candidates comfortable in accepting an offer, says FlipDog.com's Walker. And since top performers will likely have other attractive opportunities, making an initial offer with a competitive salary and benefits is crucial. One way to make sure your job offers remain competitive is through comparative work-force intelligence and benchmarking. Web sites such as Salary.com and AIRS offer tools to help measure and compare IT job talent and the price companies should pay for that talent. That type of information is free on the site, though Salary.com also sells in-depth reports.

Salary.com publishes findings on compensation data and trends for HR professionals, business managers and individual employees. Salary.com's Coleman says salaries are still growing, though perhaps not as quickly as in previous years. Overall, he says, salaries for IT professionals are up about 5 percent from a year ago and about 10 percent above 1999 figures. (For figures from our recent salary survey, click here.)

Online Special Relativity Technologies has tapped into a gold mine of IT talent: technologists from the former Soviet Union and other parts of Europe. See "From Russia, With Talent."

Salary.com calculates job salaries based on nationwide averages and geographic adjustments. Here's an example of the kind of information Salary.com provides: A network administrator working in San Diego typically earns a median base salary of $60,221, but a network administrator working in a smaller city -- Sioux City, Iowa, for example -- generally makes a median base salary that's lower, at about $52,463.

So there's no reason to hire blindly these days. Businesses hiring IT workers are finding they can take more time to assess their needs rather than frantically grab bodies to fill open job slots. The increasing number of online tools for finding and filling those openings are making the process more efficient. FlipDog.com, for example, lets employers search résumés, bios and personal profiles of more than 1 million people listed on the Web. Other recruiting sites have partnered with advanced Web database providers, too, to widen and simplify the search process online.

Companies should enjoy the recent shift in power in the hiring process, but plan for the future and be ready for potential changes in recruiting needs, experts say. And remember that the cost of replacing an IT worker -- which includes recruiting, salary, benefits and training fees -- can be twice his or her salary, so it pays to keep your on-board IT talent happy as well.