As I noted in an

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.

, my newsletter recently surveyed commercial recruitment web sites about their traffic. I asked them for monthly counts of the "unique visitors" to their site and the "page views" they generated while they were there. These measures are important to recruiters because they indicate the total candidate population that is likely to enter a site in a given period and whether or not those visitors will stay on the site long enough to have any chance of seeing your job posting. In short, they are the beef of commercial recruitment advertising.

But how do you know that you're actually getting 100% beef rather than soy-filled meat byproduct? Obviously, many of these sites are operated by honest business people, and they'll deliver on their traffic claims. There are others, however, who are less scrupulous. They fudge or exaggerate their numbers or take their time when reporting a decline. Indeed, some claim that such numbers are proprietary and never even make them public, while others hide them away on their sites where virtually no one can find them. If you're trying to buy a good grade of beef, therefore, you need a way to verify what you're being sold.

Virtually every other medium that sells advertising has such a system of consumer information and protection. It's called auditing and is performed by reputable, independent firms with credible verification systems. Newspapers have audited circulation numbers. Radio has Arbitron. Television has Nielson. And the Internet?

The Internet has RelevantKnowledge, I/PRO, Media Metrix and a number of lesser known services, all of which purport to provide auditing of web site traffic. There's just one, little problem. Of the sites I surveyed -- which included the best known brands in the industry -- only 38.7% indicated that they used such a service. That's right, amazing as it may sound, at more than six out ten of these commercial recruitment advertising web sites, you -- the customer -- have absolutely no assurance that the site is delivering the candidate traffic for which you're paying.

Now, in the sites' defense, it is important to note that the fees charged by many of these auditing services are steep. For new ventures operating on a shoestring -- which is the case for at least some recruitment web sites -- hiring one of these auditing companies would consume a big piece of the budget. Further, there is currently no generally accepted metric in the industry for measuring site usage. Not surprisingly, many operators are loathe to spend their money on a system that they believe undercounts their true performance.

But while new web sites wring their hands over cost (and what more important investment can a new business make than in its credibility?), and other sites whine about imperfect metrics (and what analytical methodology is without flaws?), the on-line recruitment industry is moving ever closer to a potentially fatal crisis.

With each passing day, the claims of unscrupulous web site operators go unchallenged, the money they take from unsuspecting customers mounts up, and the harmful impact of their behavior grows on the community of recruiters willing to try the Internet. The net effect is likely to eviscerate the industry as it loses the confidence of its customers and ultimately, their patronage.

So what's to be done? I propose that the industry establish a trade organization with dues based on revenue (a powerful incentive, in and of itself, to prevent fibbing about traffic and economic performance). There are now somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 employment-related web sites in operation, so there are plenty of potential members. The first order of business for this organization should be to establish a measurement methodology and auditing system which can be consistently applied to all sites (hence, whatever its flaws, they will be equally as bad or good for everyone). All members of the trade association will then be eligible for auditing with this system at no charge (other than their dues). The results -- audited traffic figures for a given period of time -- will be made available to recruiters and the general public at no charge by the trade association. That organization will also simultaneously promote its members and the integrity with which they operate -- as evidenced by their participation in the auditing process.

This proposal is clearly not the optimum solution, but it gets the job done. And that's what is important. As more and more recruiters make their first venture into cyberspace, they must find a recruitment advertising industry that is above reproach. Internet businesses have known for years that it's easy to lure someone to a site the first time; the key to a successful venture is to provide them with an experience that will keep them coming back. An independent, third-party auditing process that ensures that recruiters know what they are buying at a commercial recruitment web site will go a long way toward getting them to pay a return visit.