The Internet produces lots of data. E-commerce sites, in particular, have become adept at using their servers to acquire information about visitors. They know who has visited their site, how long they stayed, and what they looked at and what are their use habits.

Commercial recruitment sites do even better than that. They may not be the most visible e-commerce enterprises, but they are among the best at collecting data. They make money selling access to talent. In addition to what they learn as their visitors move into and around their site, they also archive that most complete and telling of all documents: the resume. As a result, their knowledge of the Joes and Janes who visit them rivals that of Uncle Sam.

This information is precisely what recruiters need to target their job posting and resume sourcing efforts effectively. It would enable them to select the best site or sites for each of their recruiting requirements by matching site traffic and demographic profiles to candidate specifications. Such analysis would replace guesswork with precision, and that precision would beneficially influence the return recruiters achieve on their investment in online recruiting.

Despite this obvious advantage, however, most recruitment web sites do not share the candidate information they collect with recruiters. Instead, they prefer to keep them in the dark. They claim that the information is proprietary or not collected, or can’t be provided because other sites will exaggerate their numbers (which may be true) and make their accurate data look bad. Whatever the reason, recruiters aren’t getting the information they deserve. This week's column will explore what they’re missing in terms of the candidate traffic into these sites, while next week’s column will address the absence of demographic information on those visitors.

Increasingly, recruitment sites are spending money to build visibility among candidates. It’s a smart investment because it's driving traffic to the sites. The generally accepted measure for this candidate flow is unique visitors per month. This figure identifies the number of people who "step into" a site in a given month, with each person counted just once, no matter how many times they entered. In the vernacular of the web, it’s a measure of "footprints."

While that information is helpful (and a growing number of sites now provide it to their customers), recruiters need more. To make smart buying decisions, they must know how long those visitors stayed on the site and what they looked at. Currently, most sites use the very crude measure of page views per month to indicate how long visitors hang around. Page views count how many discrete segments of information -- the site’s home page, an article on resume writing or a job posting -- all visitors viewed during the month. In theory, the more page views that are opened, the longer visitors stayed on the site.

That’s not necessarily true, however. The figure tells you what visitors did in aggregate, but not the experience of each individual. And, it’s the individual experience that determines the ability of a site to translate its visitors into potential candidates. In other words, a high page view count may indicate that visitors are reading a lot of information on the site -- including job postings -- or it may simply mean that the site has attracted a lot of visitors, each of whom read hardly anything at all. The recruiter can’t tell.

To correct this situation, I devised a measure called attention span. It’s a simple ratio of page views to unique visitors and yields the average number of information pages each visitor opened while on the site. While also relatively crude, it at least tells the recruiter how long each visitor stayed on the site as measured by the average number of page views they opened during the month. For example, based on data provided in my "1999 Guide to Employment Web Sites", the attention span at Joblynx is 4.6 -- that is, each visitor to the site looked at 4.6 pages of information, on average, while they were there -- while the attention span at CareerMagazine is 13.3. To put it another way, each visitor to CareerMagazine stays on that site three times longer than does each visitor to Joblynx.

But what do these visitors look at while they are there? No site that I’m aware of provides such information to recruiters, yet it’s available and extraordinarily important. Historically, recruiters have had to rely on audited circulation numbers to guide their buying decisions. Print publications have long provided these figures, but they’re less than helpful. Like page views, they do not reveal what each reader did -- whether they looked at the sports section, the front page or the classified ads -- while engaged with the publication.

At a web site, however, the computer tracks exactly what each person saw during their visit. The site’s log files identify the precise pages of information each visitor opened and in what order. Hence, recruitment sites have the capability to tell recruiters what percentage of their visitors looked at job postings and what percentage of those who looked at job postings looked at positions in each industry, location and employer. They can also tell recruiters how effective their job postings are by reporting what percentage of candidates who looked at them applied for the positions.

This information would indicate very clearly how effective a site is in delivering candidates for a specific kind of job posting. And that may be the reason why it's not offered. Nevertheless, recruiters are being held accountable for spending their organizations’ recruitment dollars wisely, and they need this information to do their job.

So, how can they get it? The only way is to ask. In fact, make it a precondition for doing business with a site. But provide a quid pro quo, as well. If a site agrees to provide this information and it demonstrates that the site can, in fact, deliver candidates to the kind of job a recruiter will be posting, then recruiters should be willing to commit to long term contracts with the site. And why not? At that point, they’ll have all the evidence they need to justify the investment and to maximize their return. Sounds like a win-win proposition to me.