According to Ziff Davis Marketing Data, one out of every two American households will own a personal computer by the end of this year. Less than five years from now, they estimate, there will be 116 million people online, the vast majority of which will be Americans. Those are pretty impressive numbers, and some believe that they add up to Easy Street for recruiters.

It's a wonderful notion, but unfortunately, life is seldom so simple. Indeed, at the moment at least, there is little correlation between Internet use and individual involvement with online employment resources.

For example, current estimates put the number of resumes archived in one or more databases online at about 5 million, out of an Internet population of 73 million. In other words, if Internet use does in fact increase to 116 million by 2002, the number of resumes available to recruiters will likely grow to around 8 million. While that's a decent pool of candidates, it's hardly a tsunami of talent.

Of course, some online recruiters go well beyond searching resume databases. They expand the pool of prospective candidates by networking with people who participate in newsgroups and other virtual communities or by ferreting out employee e-mail addresses and telephone numbers at corporate web sites. These techniques take time, however, and the yield is low. At best, they might increase the pool of candidates by 25%, to 10 million.

At the bottom line, there just aren't enough resumes (and candidates) online, on a steady-state basis, for the Internet to live up to its full potential (let alone the hype) as a recruiting medium. And the only way to change that reality is to stimulate both a fundamental and permanent shift in usage patterns among current Internet users and the active participation of millions of men and women who are not yet users.

For that to happen, however, the general population in this country must be convinced that the Internet is a medium for employment as well as for news, information, catalog shopping and entertainment. More specifically, passive as well as active job seekers must be persuaded to do two things:

• check the online job postings at one or more recruitment web sites on a frequent and regular basis, and
• archive their resumes continuously in one or more confidential online resume databases.

In short, using the Internet as a "career aid" must become a habit. It must be as easy and important as checking your e-mail. Many people had never even heard of e-mail just five years ago, and now, they can't go for two consecutive hours without seeing who has sent them a message.

How does online recruiting get to that level of almost obsessive participation? Commercial recruitment web sites must spend their own advertising dollars in new places. Many of these sites currently direct their promotional spending at two populations: corporate and third party recruiters, because the fees they pay make the sites' economic model work, and people who are already online, because the cost of advertising to them is much lower. The former, of course, does little to increase the candidate pool, while the latter fails to reach those who are not yet using the Internet.

More importantly, this latter category of spending does not position online job search and career management as an integral component of American worklife. Indeed, ask most people today how they look for a new or better job and they will answer -- notwithstanding decades of alternative advice by career counselors and others -- with the classified ads.

Despite wishful thinking by a host of recruitment web sites, print classifieds are still both ubiquitous and deeply embedded in the American worker's psyche. Until online recruitment advertising challenges that position, its ability to deliver unbridled access to million and millions of potential candidates and, in the process, create Easy Street for recruiters will remain a pipe dream.

Felicitously, a small handful of commercial recruitment web sites are now starting that assault. For example, two sites -- HotJobs.com and The Monster Board -- have bought commercial time during the Super Bowl telecast. They'll plug their advantages to one of the largest television audiences of the year. In doing so, of course, they will build their own brand and drive traffic to their own sites. Equally as important, in positioning their companies as employment resources for the general population, they will advance the process of mainstreaming the online recruitment industry. They will make a gigantic contribution to the greening of the Internet as a vehicle for active and passive job seekers.

Of course, not all sites can afford to make such a large investment in traditional advertising, but they can adopt the strategy. To do so, they must re-direct their advertising budgets and activities to concentrate on the working Joes and Janes of America. They must promote their new media and state-of-the-art services with familiar and old fashioned media -- print, television and radio advertising.

Using that media, they must re-position the online recruitment industry from its compulsive fascination with golly-gee-whiz-bang technology to a laser-like focus on customer service, from drinking its own bath water about interactive content and searchable databases to meeting the employment needs and exceeding the career expectations of average, non-technical American workers. In short, online recruitment web sites have to introduce themselves and become familiar to people who read magazines, listen to the radio and watch football games. They have to transform online recruiting from a computer term to a household word.