Online recruiting has evolved through two distinct phases which mark its development as a useful staffing resource. These changes also laid the groundwork for its future.

The first period, which I sometimes call the bronze age because it focused on tools, ran from the early 1990s to the end of 1995. The second phase covered the years between 1996 and 1999. This was a period of practice and of getting familiar and comfortable with the tools we had devised.

Today, we are in the early stages of a third and potentially revolutionary era: a time when we have the capability to move from craftsmanship to creative development. We can now advance beyond using our tools to perform day-to-day tasks and apply them to the expression and enhancement of the human condition. If we press on and continue our progress, I believe we will create a new concept of recruiting that will dramatically improve the way we find, communicate with, assess and recruit employees.

In the bronze age of online recruiting, those who experimented with the Internet were fascinated with its emerging technological capabilities. The focus was on perfecting programming languages and upgrading the speed and efficiency of boxes and pipes, our computers and the wires that connected them into a global network. The goal was to create a web-based recruitment tool where the constituent search engines, databases, links, banners and supporting server all worked.

By the early months of 1996, we had broken through most of the technological barriers, and our attention turned to implementation. We had entered online recruiting's second phase of development. Work continued on advances, but our interest turned to enhancing our use of the technology, to applying it effectively to various recruiting functions. We focused on perfecting the use of job postings and resume searching in this new medium in order to expand our candidate pool, reduce our acquisition costs and improve our cost and time to recruit. In other words, online recruiting moved from a technological novelty to a business system.

Although there is still much to learn about job postings and resume sourcing online, Internet recruiting has -- just three years later -- entered a new period. We have begun to look beyond our current use of the medium as an electronic delivery vehicle for traditional recruitment activities -- classified advertising and candidate search -- to visualize its role in a profoundly different and better kind of recruitment.

This new form will evolve as we extend our knowledge and use of the Internet's power to support mass one-to-one communication on an all day-everyday basis and to foster convenient companionship among people located everywhere around the globe. These previously unattainable capabilities are the building blocks of virtual communities, and those groups, in turn, are the building blocks of higher-level online recruiting.

Virtual communities are reservoirs of human capital. As with other, traditional forms of capital, however, they must be nurtured and husbanded. They will not happen by magic or serendipity; instead, they require all of the planning, investment and management attention an organization typically musters for its most important strategic initiatives. This represents an extraordinary commitment for organizations which are already stretched to the breaking point by fierce competition and unfavorable demographic trends. The return on investment, however, can be enormous.

Virtual communities can move recruiting from a reactive exercise that is consumed by the press of day-to-day requirements to a proactive employee succession strategy that builds long-term relationships with large numbers of working men and women. The support and loyalty engendered by those relationships are the dam which fills a human capital reservoir. They keep competitors out and the inventory in, so that a recruiter always has the right candidate with the right skills for the right job at the right time. The resulting improvement in person-job fit will help to avoid individual performance shortfalls, while the decrease in downtime and lost productivity will make a genuine contribution to the organization's bottom line.

In this new era of online staffing, recruiters won't fill vacancies; they will manage human capital. They won't jump through hoops to meet this or that hiring manager's needs, they will nurture and deploy the organization's most important asset: its past, present and future employees. Human-resources practitioners have been urging such a vision shift for years. Before the Internet, however, there was no way to pull it off. Now, there is.