I often hang around online discussion areas frequented by recruiters. It's a good way to find out what's working and what's not in the employment space on the Web, and I learn a lot from the information and opinions that flash back and forth through the ether.

However, lately some of this commentary has been off the mark. The topic has been Monster.com and alternatives to using this site. A number of recruiters seem to feel that Monster.com has been precipitous in raising its prices and careless about quality. Whether that's true or not, the search for a replacement for Monster.com is fundamentally misdirected. Indeed, the whole discussion reflects a common misconception about the Internet as a recruiting medium.

This misconception has great roots. Its heritage can be traced to that paragon of traditional recruiting, the local newspaper. For decades, recruiters have relied almost exclusively on major newspapers in their metropolitan areas. Unless the vacancy was at the senior level (then, only a headhunter would do) or in a very rare occupational field, most recruiters were content to use a single venue -- the daily or Sunday newspaper -- for all of their recruitment advertising.

This search for an alternative to Monster.com is of the same genre. It's an implicit acknowledgement that many recruiters view that single site as their virtual local newspaper. They have come to rely on it for just about all of their staffing requirements. Whether they needed candidates for a sales and marketing job in San Francisco or an electronic engineering position in Atlanta, Monster.com was their one-stop recruiting resource.

There's a problem with this notion. No one site -- not even a site as big and well known as Monster.com -- can meet all of an organization's requirements. The math is simple enough. Take the number of resumes on the Monster.com site (when last I checked, the total was 1.2 million) and divide it by the 250 major occupations in the U.S. Government's Occupational Handbook. Then, divide the result by the 50 states in the Union, and you come up with a grand total of just 96 candidates per occupation per state.

Now, obviously Monster.com has more than 96 candidates in a number of important fields. When I last surveyed the site for my 1999 Guide to Employment Web-Sites, it reported that the largest occupational fields in its resume database were engineering, finance and accounting, information technology/systems, management and sales and marketing. In these fields, it clearly has plenty of candidates. But, if you're looking for human resource practitioners, retail sales clerks, paralegals, physical therapists, restaurant managers, advertising executives, manufacturing systems analysts or candidates in any of hundreds of other occupations, it's probably best to look elsewhere.

So, the question we should be asking is not "What can take the place of Monster.com?" but rather, "What site can best meet my specific requirement, at this point in time?" It may be Monster.com or it may be HotJobs, NationJob, CareerCast, WebHire, ComputerJobs.com, CareerPath.com, CareerMosaic, Dice.com, Net-Temps, CareerBuilder, the American Marketing Association Job Bank or any of the other almost 100,000 employment-related sites on the Web. To put it another way, the days of using the local newspaper (or the one-stop recruiting site) are gone forever.

Why? Because even in the face of adverse demographic trends and fierce competition in the job market, employers have adopted a new recruiting paradigm. The old model -- stripped of its conceptual finery -- was basically an exercise in getting the round peg into the round hole. All round pegs were viewed as being essentially the same, so the challenge was simply to avoid hiring a square peg for a round hole (or vice versa). The approach didn't do much for individual fulfillment, but it kept organizations staffed and humming.

However, times have changed, and treating candidates as interchangeable parts simply isn't tenable in today's high tech workplace. We live in an era of specialization brought on by a proliferation of different hardware and software products. In effect, each and every job has its own special set of skill and knowledge requirements derived from the systems involved in performing it. For example, to be competitive for a specific accounting position now requires more than a facility in math or even a CPA designation. In addition, the successful candidate must also be competent in the particular accounting software package that's integral to the job.

Employers have learned the hard way that they cannot ignore this exactitude. As a result, instead of putting generally the right shape into sort of the right hole, their recruiting now must have the precision involved in opening a lock. Each position has a special and detailed set of requirements, and only those candidates whose qualifications accurately and completely match that profile will be successful on-the-job. Other candidates may be close, but unless they are an exact fit, they will not be able to deliver the outcome expected by the organization. Trying to force the wrong candidate into that job will only produce the same frustration as trying to open a lock with the wrong key.

The only way to unlock the potential inherent in any position is to find its unique human key. And there is no one site that has all of the keys or a master, not even Monster.com. Successful online recruiting is a little harder than that. It requires a detailed knowledge of tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of different recruitment sites, so that the optimum venue can be identified for each opening's key requirements. Acquiring that information is a topic worth discussing at any recruiter's forum. It won't yield a replacement for Monster.com, but it will definitely improve your return on investment in online recruitment advertising.