Recently, I was talking to a senior recruiter for a large corporation who told me, "Sure, we recruit on the Internet. We post jobs on Monster.com." Oh, if online recruiting were only that simple.

Unfortunately, implementing an online recruitment campaign that consists entirely of posting jobs on a single web site -- even one as big and well known as Monster.com -- is the functional equivalent of thinking you are cooking a gourmet meal when you boil water. There are many other steps and a great deal of skill-based creativity involved in achieving superior performance and results.

In a recent poll conducted by my newsletter, better than 50% of recruiters told us that they routinely use six different strategies in their online recruiting. They were:

• posting jobs on free commercial recruitment web sites,
• posting jobs on for-fee commercial recruitment web sites,
• searching the resume databases at free commercial recruitment web sites,
• posting a job on their corporate web site,
• searching the resume databases on for-fee commercial recruitment web sites and
• posting jobs on search engine sites.

These recruiters knew what they were doing. Almost nine out of 10 (89%) reported that the Internet was moderately or very helpful in their staffing efforts.

Their experience underscores an important key to effective online recruiting. No single site or strategy is sufficient to meet all of your recruiting needs. Indeed, in most cases, one site or strategy will also be insufficient to address even a single recruiting requirement. The best campaign is multifaceted and custom-tailored to the particular details of each job opening.

For example, if your employer is in the insurance industry, and you are recruiting for a sales manager position in San Francisco and a C++ programmer in Washington, D.C., your strategy should involve posting these positions and searching the resume databases at an array of free and for-fee sites. But, which sites should you use?

The Sales Manager position might generate a good flow of candidates if it were posted at MarketingJobs.com and Career Mosaic, which has a special area for insurance professionals; or at jobsjobsjobs.com, a site specializing in the San Francisco Bay area.

The C++ programmer position, on the other hand, would be better served at a site such as America's Job Bank (which now has an information technology recruiting database) Dice.com, HotJobs.com (the site does not accept postings from headhunters) or ComputerJobs.com which has a "regional store" specializing in Washington, D.C..

But how would you find out about these (and other possible) sites, and how would you determine which among them would be best for your particular requirements? Until recently, such questions were typically avoided or answered by trial and error.

In the first instance, you simply didn't worry about which site was better than another but sought the relative security of a recognized brand. In other words, you used Monster.com or, maybe, CareerMosaic and HeadHunter.Net because everyone had heard of and seemed to be using these sites. In the second instance, you were more selective but had few resources with which to make an informed choice. Basically, your methodology consisted of asking colleagues about their experience online and experimenting with the sites they suggested. In both instances, the results were often disappointing.

Today, however, there are ways to be more discriminating in your selection of a recruitment strategy and web site. You can take advantage of the research done by others and use one or more published guides. The information they provide varies in depth and quality, but all can be helpful in identifying which sites have the potential to be helpful to you for a given requirement. These resources include:

• "CareerXroads" by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler (IEEE, 1998),
• "The Employer's Guide to Recruiting on the Internet" by Ray Schreyer and John McCarter (Impact Publications, 1998),
• "The Internet Recruiting Edge" by Barbara Ling (Lingstar, publication date not available) and
• "The Green Book," also know as "WEDDLE's 1999 Guide to Employment Web Sites; The Recruiter's Edition" (WEDDLE's Publishing, 1999).

Equally as important, recruiters are now developing data collection and analytical methodologies for evaluating the actual performance of different sites and strategies. These techniques involve tagging responses received by each site and using that data to calculate traditional recruiting measures of merit (e.g., cost-per-hire, time-to-hire, return on investment). Those metrics, in turn, can be used to compare the effectiveness of sites and strategies and to improve your return on investment you achieve with each.

For example, cost-per-hire (CPH) can be used to compare the performance of a job posting for an Oracle database administrator on Techies.com to a similar strategy for the same position on CareerParth.com. In addition, the CPH analysis can help you determine the impact of alternative titles and content in successive postings for Oracle DBA positions at CareerPath.com, so that your cost declines over time.

At the bottom line, recruiting online requires more than guesswork or a follow-the-herd approach. There are more than 100,000 employment-related sites on the Internet and a growing array of strategies for tapping their reach into the candidate population. Picking the best site(s) and the right strategies can mean the difference between success and failure, and the key to making smart choices is careful research and detailed analysis.