Information Search

Free sites vs. Paid sites

The Internet is fraught with resume sites, and some of them tend to be extremely expensive. If your recruiting company has a limited budget, you should determine if the paid sites could really give you what you are looking for. The best way seems to be selecting a variety of free and pay sites and use them along with your other methods of recruiting. Keep in mind that free sites receive most traffic from other recruiters. Actually, some of the smallest sites are hardly visited by recruiters while large free sites are highly popular and you have to act fast on new resumes. Overall, free sites are both popular and effective. Regarding the pay sites, some of those are very expensive.

You want to consider the type of candidates you are looking for and what the actual resume database can offer. A paid website is expected to provide you with a trial period to view the quality of resumes. If a trial period is not offered, get as much information as possible. Could they offer several weeks of subscription or you have to pay for half a year or full year of service? The resume sites can usually provide the percentage of their resumes for different professions or fields of expertise. For instance, 55% marketing, 37% engineers, etc. It is good to know as much details as possible. What is the percentage of entry-level resumes? The percentage of H-1 Visa resumes? How many resumes are in their database, and is it updated real-time? How many fresh resumes arrive per month? For how long the resumes are kept if there’s no feedback from the applicant?

Finally, the resumes should be in a neat format and could be easily exported to your database, saved on your hard drive, or printed. If a resume site is unable to provide you with the necessary information, think hard before investing in their services. In addition to employment specific sites, you could also try other sources, like appropriate trade magazines, trade organizations, search engines, university and alumni organizations, the career sections of newspapers, and newsgroups.