Company	Action
Intel	Opened satellite offices in San Francisco and San Ramon, and plans to open San Jose and Fremont satellite offices in 2001. the four satellites will accommodate a total of 300 employees each day.
Cisco Systems	Will open a $10 million child care center housing 440 children in September. The center will be equipped with Web cams so parents can check in on their children. Also, it provides free annual passes for public transportation in Silicon Valley.
Adobe Systems	Will formalize a telecommuting policy over the next few months.
3Com	Has a longstanding telecommuting policy. Recently beefed up concierge services.
Hewlett-Packard	Longstanding telecommuting policy, pays for set-up of home offices.
Respond.com	Pays for laptops and subsidizes second desktop PC so employees can work from home. Subsidizes public transportation.

What will it take for online recruiting to mature beyond its esoteric beginnings? What will transform it into an everyday strategy that is used by the staffing industry and recruiters in corporate America?

While a number of factors will play a role in that transition, building an organizational foundation may be one of the most important. A girding of process and procedures, systems and structure, budgets and staff is all but essential if online recruiting will have a permanent and influential role in the way the employment community does business.

So what does such an infrastructure look like? U.S. West Inc., a former Bell System telecommunications company that sprawls across 14 Western states, may have the prototype. With 50,000 employees, organized into 27 different operating units serving 25 million customers, the company has always been a voracious recruiter.

Until the mid-1990's, though, it was the only telecommunications company in the Denver area, and its recruiting process reflected the lack of competition. Cumbersome, inefficient and costly, U.S. West's recruiting administration was paper-based. Everything -- newspaper print ads, resumes, candidate lists, policy guides, forms -- was done with paper. As Wayne Redovian, an account manager in the staffing organization, put it, "We were just killing a lot of trees."

Mr. Redovian and his colleagues decided to save the trees and themselves a lot of aggravation. They hopped on a big corporate push to use the company's intranet and two years later had the entire in-house employment process online. The new system, called Diamond, operates as a self-service platform for everything from requisition writing to final offer formulation and delivery. It also provides online access to (and easy updating of) policies, procedural guidelines and forms for the entire recruitment process.

Not surprisingly, there was some resistance to using the system, at least early on. It came primarily from hiring managers who were used to having many of the system's functions done for them and from those in the HR department who were uncomfortable with computer technology. To get past it, the HR department enlisted the assistance of the corporate communications department. It also built-in a six month transition period to give everyone a chance to acclimate to the new technology.

The key factor in getting buy-in, however, was the bottom line: the system vastly improved the efficiency of the staffing process. Diamond easily accommodates the 65,000 resumes the company receives each year, stores them as electronic information in the company's automated resume management system, generates and transmits electronic candidate lists, provides applicant selection forms which can be forwarded electronically to the HR department, and will shortly support online interviewing of qualified candidates. At the same time it enables employees to view positions that have been posted around the company to build their own online resume, and both archive and forward it in response to a relevant open position.

For external candidates, the online system is just as sleek, but it begins on the Internet. U.S. West uses a number of Internet- and web-based strategies to tell job seekers about its employment opportunities. The company holds online career fairs and advertises on a wide range of commercial recruitment web sites. When candidates click on one of the company's banner ads or express an interest in a job posting, they are electronically linked to the U.S. West home page.

Not surprisingly, this system represents a serious investment, in technology and culture modification. It weans the staffing organization off paper, enables a relatively small group of recruiters to support the staffing needs of a large and growing company, and brings hiring managers closer to the process that provides the people who will work for them. In essence, it focuses technology on what technology does best, and liberates people to do what only people can do well.

The U.S. West system enables recruiting professionals and hiring managers to find, attract and acquire needed talent efficiently, and that's the best indication of what can happen when online recruiting is reinforced with a sturdy foundation.