During a telephone call the other day, my two long-haired dachshunds -- Mikey and Joey -- heard the letter carrier come to the door. As they always do, they barked as if the Trojans were outside the walls. "I'm sorry," I said to my caller. "It's just my staff -- my Vice Presidents of Security."

After we hung up, I started thinking about that remark. Without the tell-tale woofing, the exaggerated title I used might have misled the caller. With no evidence other than my creative description, they could have concluded that I was a large enterprise with a huge staff.

Most of us are accustomed to hyperbole in traditional media, and we've learned to combat it. We know how to spot exaggerated claims in sales pitches, marketing presentations, print ads and television commercials. We've learned how to evaluate vendor claims, and we can separate fact from fiction to make good purchasing decisions.

It's a different matter on the Internet, however. This new medium enables vendors to erect virtual storefronts with much less investment than that required for a traditional enterprise. Take a look at the web site for a Fortune 500 company and compare it to one by someone working out of a back bedroom; it can be hard to tell the difference. These impressive but imaginary edifices can be the doorway to genuine capability and durability or they may be, like a Potemkin village, nothing more than a facade. With two million sites online, it's very difficult to know.

That's particularly true for recruitment web sites. There are thousands of these sites, and most of them have very impressive home pages. The colors are vibrant, the links work, the graphics are slick and there may even be a little animation. On the surface, at least, you can't tell whether the services they offer are supported by a single person or a large staff, or whether they will give you access to millions of prospective candidates or to 12 (including the site's operator). From the outside looking in, it's hard to know whether they are stable or are struggling.

To help you find worthy sites, there are some questions you should ask any recruitment web site before you pay to post a job or purchase access to its database. The answers will give you a better sense of the organization behind the site so that you can gauge the credibility of its claims. The questions aren't foolproof, but they come with the full endorsement of my Vice Presidents of Security. And ultimately, they will help you to be a better consumer of recruiting services on the Internet.

First, check the date the site was launched. It's a crude criterion, but sites which have managed to stay in business for several years (that's the equivalent of a decade or more in Internet time) must be doing something right.

Second, find out who owns the site. If it's owned and operated by an established organization (either in the real world or among Internet companies), the site is more likely to have the financial resources and commitment to customer service to deliver on its promises.

Third, determine how many people visit the site. If the site refuses to divulge that figure, tells you its traffic numbers are proprietary or uses "hits" to count site visitors, move on to another vendor.

Fourth, ask for references. There are two kinds of references on the Internet: trade ratings and customer testimonials.

Trade ratings are provided by organizations that evaluate and rate web sites. Some rate sites in all categories of business, while others concentrate on a specific industry. Currently, ratings of recruitment web sites are available in "Job Hunting on the Internet," (Ten Speed Press, 1999) by Richard Nelson Bolles (author of "What Color is Your Parachute?"), "CareerXroads," (IEEE, 1998) by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, and Internbiznet, a web publication.

Customer testimonials, on the other hand, are like postcards from peers. Although some sites post testimonials to save you the trouble of asking around, they are obviously going to list only the most positive messages they have received. To get a more fulsome perspective on the site's performance, visit bulletin boards operated for recruiters (e.g. Electronic Recruiting Exchange or Recruiter's Network) and ask the participants to share their experiences with you.

There are many fine recruitment web sites in operation today. Others, however, use the suggestive power of the medium to create a false sense of their durability and to promise far more than they can deliver. The key to separating the former from the latter and making smart online buying decisions is to look behind the virtual images of cyberspace to the real-world organization which backs them up.