It's been a year now since a group of twenty-two powerhouse companies launched DirectEmployers.com, a nonprofit, employer-owned search engine for employment.

By pooling their resources, the companies set out to create an alternative to job boards such as Monster.com and HotJobs. Unlike job boards, which function primarily as online classified ads, DirectEmployers.com links job seekers directly to all job listings on member company Web sites. As a result, it allows member companies to cut recruiting costs, gain complete control over candidate information, and maintain a higher level of privacy and confidentiality.

And it's working. Despite the sluggish economy and lackluster corporate hiring plans, Direct Employers.com is thriving.

In fact, the current business conditions "actually work in our favor," says Bill Warren, executive director of the Direct Employers Association, the non-profit group that operates the search engine. (The group changed its name from the E-recruiting Association in January to align itself with its domain name and eliminate confusion.)

Cutting Recruiting Costs

"Business has been very good for us because we help companies save money on recruiting and that's what everyone is looking to do right now," he adds. In fact, it was the spiraling fees of online job boards that drove Direct Employers' founding companies to develop the search engine in the first place.

Rather than paying a fee for each job listed, as is the case on job boards, Direct Employers Association members pay a standard, yearly membership fee of $12,500 that allows them to index unlimited jobs on the site. Considering that major corporations can spend up to a million dollars or more on job board contracts, the association fees are relatively attractive, says Warren, a former president of Monster.com.

Not surprisingly, a growing number of major companies are jumping on the Direct Employers bandwagon. From its founding group of 22, the association has grown to include about 124 companies "and we are adding about 10 to 15 per month," according to Warren. The list includes many companies that employ chemists such as Abbott Laboratories, AstraZeneca, Colgate-Palmolive, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Merck, Praxair, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

Consequently, the number of jobs listed on the search engine is also climbing. "We currently have about 213,000 jobs [indexed] on the site and we are actually starting to see that number rise. I really think that companies are starting to open up more job opportunities. So I am optimistic. I think things are going to get better."

Still, he adds, "we have the war issue hanging over us. But once that is resolved in some way, I think we are going to see some really good things happen."

Growth Into The College Market

Another bright spot for the association is its growth into the college recruiting market, something that it didn't plan on from the start. Just this past fall, the association teamed up with the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) to launch NACElink, a suite of online college recruiting and hiring tools.

NACElink differs from the DirectEmployers.com in that "it is more like a database than a search engine," explains Warren. "Company recruiters typically favor certain schools and want to target where their job listings go," he observes. "This design allows them to do that."

NACElink includes a job-posting feature, resume database, and interview-scheduling component. Additional tools will be added to accommodate the diverse needs of participating schools and employers.

NACElink is available on NACE's Web site as well as on DirectEmployers.com or through the participating campus career center web sites. "We just opened up membership to all schools," reports Warren. "We have about 60 schools onboard now and we expect to add about 40 per month."

Managing Resumes

Connecting with college students or experienced candidates via the association's electronic tools has advantages other than cost savings. "Because job candidates apply directly to our member companies' Web sites, the companies can manage the resumes better than when they come through a third party such as a job board," says Warren. Recruiting through Direct Employers "puts total control of the process into the company's hands."

That was certainly an attraction for recruiters at AstraZeneca. One of the company's main goals is to "direct candidate traffic to our corporate website career pages," says Tim Wood, the company's director of staffing in the U.K. Toward that end, "we have been increasing our reliance on third party job boards with limited success." Because job boards allow employers to include a corporate website link in their job postings, job seekers can find their way to career pages, but only by an indirect means, he explains. In contrast, he feels that the Direct Employers.com. search engine has been "very effective" in driving traffic to the site.

By connecting with job seekers at their career Web sites, companies can "capture needed information, such as a profile in addition to a resume, which is beyond what most third-party career sites will allow," says Joe Sommers, managing partner of Talent Management Resources (Plano, Texas), a management consulting firm dedicated to assisting companies with the identification and development of their talent. At the same time, companies can build and maintain valuable candidate relationship databases.

Security And Privacy Concerns

Now more than ever, companies value a direct connection with candidates because it eliminates some security and privacy concerns, "which are becoming really big right now," says Warren. When a candidate applies through DirectEmployers, for instance, "we can assure that person that he or she is applying to reputable, well-known company," says Warren. Job seekers don't need to be wary of false job postings aimed at stealing personal identities, for instance.

Earlier this month, concerns over privacy were further heightened by reports of hackers breaking into a database at the University of Texas at Austin. They gained access to names, email addresses, phone numbers and social security numbers of 55,200 current and former students, faculty, staff, job applicants and retirees. A student at the university was charged with the unauthorized access.

Becoming A Household Name

While Direct Employers.com has done much to streamline the recruiting process, the association has yet to perfect the model. For one, the search engine probably does not have the visibility it needs.

"There are still multitudes of job seekers who don't know about DirectEmployers.com," says Sommers, who calls it "one of the most innovative and useful job-related sites to hit the scene in several years."

The association seems to have done a very good job from the employer side, he says, "but most individuals that I help in their career transition process have never heard of it," he says. To resolve this problem, he recommends that the association tap into career networking groups in major cities and work with major outplacement firms on a national basis.

AstraZeneca's Wood, too, feels that the association might need to do more to "ensure that the awareness of the site is as wide as possible within the candidate community." In addition, he would like to see the search engine "become a primary source for job seekers" within the U.S. as well as outside it.

DirectEmployers.com may need to market itself to compete with commercial sites that do this aggressively, says a recruiter at another member company, who asked not to be named. While the association has attracted an impressive array of employers, he adds, "It has not marketed itself with the general public as much as I'd like to see."

But, for now at least, Warren rejects the idea of marketing. DirectEmployers.com has been modeled closely after Google, which "became the number one search engine on the internet without spending anything on advertising," he reasons. "And that does not necessarily mean that we will never advertise. But for now we are following the Google model and—judging from the rise in our traffic—it's working."

Benefits To Job Seekers

Job seekers will eventually figure out "that we have the greatest number of jobs," says Warren, referencing the fact that Direct Employers.com lists all member jobs while job boards list only a percentage of those available. That fact, rather than flashy advertising, he says, will be what drives traffic to Direct Employers.com.

Warren is further encouraged by how well job seekers are adapting to the DirectEmployers.com model. "When we started out, our critics pointed out how job seekers are conditioned by job boards to be able to just shot-gun their resume to many companies at one click of a button." With DirectEmployers.com, on the other hand, job seekers must go to each company and apply individually. "Many questioned whether job seekers would accept that." But, surprisingly, he says that job seekers "even seem to prefer our method, because they like the fact that they are connecting with the employer."

Another concern—lawsuits that had threatened the launch of DirectEmployers.com—has also been eliminated. In those suits, Monster.com parent TMP alleged that Warren and other former Monster.com employees had stolen trade secrets. In the end, however, "TMP had to pay our legal fees and give us a public apology," says Warren. "So that's all behind us now."

Indeed, Warren is sanguine about the future of Direct Employers. The biggest hurdle continues to be educating recruiters and job seekers about how Direct Employers is unique, says Warren. "Once they understand what we are trying to accomplish, they come on board very quickly,"

"People tend to think in traditional ways and this is totally new," he adds. "It is a new way of recruiting on the Internet and it is the future. There's no question about that."

Susan Ainsworth specializes in writing about chemical industry topics and is based in the Dallas, Texas area.