By Meg Brazill, AIRS Director of News and Content

Teaser: Joanne has a great job with an excellent company. She's the perfect candidate, but she's not looking for a job. How do you find her?

Virtual communities are a mecca for finding people on the Web. It doesn't take much searching to find resumes when virtual communities like Angelfire, Tripod or GeoCities offer members resume templates when building their Web pages. But what if candidates choose NOT to post their "curriculum vitae?" How will you find them in their virtual community if they have created a homepage without a resume? The answer is that homepages are resumes.

This is Your Life

Take Joanne Smith^*, for example. Joanne is a senior consultant with a Big Six firm in Chicago. For the past four years, she's been working on SAP integration and Y2K projects. Barbara received her MBA from Stanford and her BS in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.

She's great at her job, leads a team of 27 people, and is very happy (except with the amount of time she spends on the road and that Chicago is way too cold). The last thing on her mind is sending a resume to a job board. She likes her job and is justifiably proud of the contribution she makes to her employer. Wouldn't you just love to hire her?

Last year, Joanne found GeoCities, a site that offered her free email and a free homepage to homestead there. Intrigued, Joanne created a homepage in Hollywood, a neighborhood designed for film buffs (she loves the movies). On her homepage Joanne talks about where she's been, where she is now and what she does. She has links to the alumni servers at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford - links that take you to lists of other highly qualified professionals.

Not Too Proud to Brag

She also has links to her workplace because she's very proud of the work she does. And, because she loves her co-workers, she has a link that takes you inside a server at her company that contains bios of her whole project team! Because she's proud of her achievements, she's also cut and pasted her resume into her homepage. Finally, she has links to four of her best friends, all professionals in similar positions.

At first glance, Joanne's homepage looks like a collection of personal trinkets - snippets of information, family pictures and links that aren't really worth much to a recruiter. But those snippets invariably contain descriptions of Joanne's educational background, her work history, employer and co-workers. This is a picture of a passive candidate.

Those passive candidates are easily accessible by searching Virtual Communities. Our focus has been on GeoCities, so let's continue with that arena. Searching through GeoCities clubs and neighborhoods is a better option than searching all of GeoCities using the advanced search field. A targeted search will narrow your results down to a manageable number. Since we are looking for homepages, you won't need to use the keyword "resume" in your search string, but a good Boolean search string coupled with the advanced search field available in neighborhood or club searching is a necessary step to take to avoid result overload. You'll still see a lot of resumes, but your results won't be limited to those.

Homepages Are Resumes

Joanne isn't looking for a job. She's sharing her world with her three brothers, one of who is in school in Florida, another now lives in California and the third in the Air Force is stationed in Germany. She's sharing her world with her mom, and with colleagues far and wide. Consider this, however. Passive candidates who build homepages may not be thinking about applying for new jobs, but once you see her resume, you know that Joanne is the perfect candidate for a new position, and she just might be convinced of this too.

So expect a homepage to tell you all about a person's professional life and more - often they'll link you to similar people (passive candidates) who they've gone to school with, met professionally or work with now. And a homepage really will give you a window into their character and interests - something of profound importance when considering a candidate's cultural fit in the hiring process.

^*Joanne is a fictional homesteader. However, there are many out there like Joanne just waiting to be found!

AIRS Glossary of Terms

Homepages - Personal pages that individual users create to describe themselves, their interests and skills. Such pages serve as invaluable resources for finding candidates on the Web since they often provide as much information as a resume. Sometimes the term is used to describe the starting page of a Web site.

Neighborhoods - Themed communities in which you can design and build a homepage in Yahoo! GeoCities. There are no regulations as to which Neighborhood you can belong.

SAP - Acronym: Systems, Application and Products in Data Processing.

Virtual Communities - Web sites that offer free homepages to the public and provide ways for people to share information, interact online and communicate with one another.

-- Meg Brazill is AIRS director of News and Content. She is also the managing editor for AIRS Source Book and AIRS Search Guide publications. This article is reprinted by permission from AIRS, a global leader in Internet recruitment, tools, news and information. For more information on AIRS, please go to: http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com/pages/airs.php. Copyright © Hanover Capital Management Corporation 1997-2001. All Rights Reserved

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