You'd have to be sensory deprived not to know that the U.S. economy has recently begun to slow. And when business turns down, hiring almost inevitably follows suit. Sure, companies will still recruit, but the panicked pace of just a month ago is history, at least for awhile.

So, where does that leave the Internet recruiting industry? Using the information superhighway to advertise jobs and source candidates is probably the most important development in employment since the creation of the resume. But with companies cutting back on recruiting, this new idea is destined to end up somewhere between the beta-cam and Woolworths. Forget about it, right?

Wrong. No doubt, it would be convenient and easy to go back to recruiting the old fashioned way. In times of trouble, the stimulus to do something new or different -- and, therefore, risky -- diminishes to almost nothing. As HR Departments see their budgets come under attack and feel the push from upstairs to do more with less, they're apt to seek the safe haven of classified advertising.

And that would be a mistake. Not because there's anything wrong with print ads. They work. But with the economy adding new pressure to the recruiting equation, they should be partnered with on-line recruiting. Why? Because the Internet delivers employment candidates in almost unprecedented numbers.

Recently, my newsletter conducted a survey of over 150 on-line recruitment web-sites and found that:

• A third of the sites had monthly traffic of 100,000 or more unique visitors (i.e., each person is counted only once no matter how many times they visit a site). Since, over 90% of all sites post job openings for 30 days or longer, every one of those visitors has a chance to see your ad.
• Even more impressive, 20% of the sites in the survey reported monthly traffic of 500,000 unique visitors and an astonishing 9% actually attracted 1 million or more unique visitors each month! That's putting a lot of eyeballs in front of your ad.

But did all of those people hang around long enough to take a look? According to the survey, the traffic at almost half of the sites (47.5%) stayed long enough to open and look at 250,000 or more pages of information. At 37.5%, they looked at 500,000 or more pages of information. Not a shabby performance, particularly given all of the other demands on people's time these days.

But wait, it gets even better. At 26.3% of the sites, all of those visitors took a look at 1 million or more pages, and at 8.75% of the sites, they read a staggering 10 million pages or more of information each and every month!

Sure, candidates are still looking at the classified ads. But, as these findings suggest, they're also reading the job postings in cyberspace. Big time!

Any recruitment strategy that overlooks the on-line medium, therefore, risks missing out on a huge population of candidates that are technologically savvy, forward looking and proactive. So, as budgets get tight and the pressure goes up, don't forget about the Internet. The real risk is in not using it when you recruit.