Method and system for employment placement

This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/733,921 filed Dec. 12, 2000, which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.

The present invention broadly relates to the field of electronic commerce and to global network job placement services. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for gathering and disseminating information about employers, employment openings, and prospective employees, and a system and method for providing incentives to the prospective employees and employers encouraging the use of the employment service.

Fuelled by a robust economy and a decreasing pool of qualified applicants, employers today expend considerable resources on attracting, screening, and hiring employees to fill manpower needs. Faced with staffing shortages, employers must evaluate their needs, advertise such needs to reach as many qualified recruits as possible, and screen potential employees through burdensome hiring interviews, all typically on very short notice. Further compounding this tedious process, employers searching for employees with highly specialized skills suffer from a limited number of qualified personnel, especially when restricted to a specific geographic region.

Since the advent of print media, the traditional method of job placement has been through classified advertisements. Although these newspaper advertisements may be sufficient for one-time searches for recruits in a particular location, advertisements in a single newspaper or series of newspapers fail to meet the needs of today\'s global economy, in which large regional, national, and even international employers are continually looking for employees. What is more, placing classified advertisements in newspapers is an expensive undertaking, often constituting an employer\'s single largest recruiting expense. Not surprisingly, most newspapers derive more than half of their revenue from classified advertisements.

In light of the great expense and limited effect of print advertisements, employers have embraced the global computer network, or “Internet,” for its powerful ability to gather and disseminate information. In the context of employment placement, early uses of the technology involved simply posting job openings on employer\'s individual websites. Although this technique avoids the cost of classified advertisements, it requires job seekers to visit individual websites without really knowing if a position is available. In addition to being time-consuming for the recruit, this employment placement method is unreliable for the employer, because the employer has no way of assuring its advertisement is reaching enough qualified personnel.

Seeing the need for centralized job listings, the next step in the evolution of Internet employment placement was to establish large websites that post open positions for multiple companies. These Internet job sites feature extensive lists of job openings organized by such criteria as company, location, and field of employment. Examples of such Internet job sites known in the prior art are HotJobs.com™, Hire.com™, Jobs.com™, JobOptions™, Monster.com™, CareerBuilder Network™, CareerPath.com™, America\'s Job Bank™, and IdealJobs.com™. Although some sites are free to employers, most typically charge for each listing or, perhaps, charge a monthly or annual fee. Through advertisement, each Internet job site strives to attract as many visits by potential applicants as possible. These advertisements, combined with the steadily increasing Internet usage by job applicants, enable employers to broadcast openings to many qualified applicants with relatively little effort and resources.

In addition to posting openings, some Internet job sites offer additional services that aid an employer\'s search and hiring process. Some sites give employers special access through which to directly create and edit job listings. Some sites provide means for applicants to forward résumés to the employers and, in turn, provide employers with tracking tools that organize incoming résumés into categories. Typically, the sites provide screening and searching tools that help employers target the most qualified recruits. Some sites offer anonymous résumé postings to accommodate a job seeker who does not want her current employer to know about her job search. Finally, some sites provide files in which to keep notes on individual recruits, such as whether a recruit has been contacted, interviewed, or rejected.

Related to Internet job sites, Internet recruiting services further expand an employer\'s reach by providing means to post open positions to several Internet job sites, while only having to enter the information once. Yahoo Recruiter™ is one example of such an Internet recruiting service. Once positions are posted, the recruiting service in turn collects the incoming résumés from the various job sites and organizes them into a single database for the employer. These Internet recruiting services therefore offer the advantage of a central place to manage the process of posting positions and filtering résumés.

Despite the many conveniences Internet job sites and recruiting sites provide, there are still significant drawbacks. First and foremost, employers have no guarantee that the fees they pay will result in the binding and hiring of a recruit. In fact, a considerable number of job listings languish on the job sites, costing the employers money and producing no results. Through advertisements and offers of ancillary job search services (such as résumé writing software), the Internet job sites attempt to attract as many applicants as possible. However, no single Internet job sites offer a unique incentive that would persuade an applicant to use its service instead of another.

Second, typical job listings provide candidates with only a limited amount of information about the position and an even more limited amount of information about the employer. Some job sites do offer hyperlinks to the employer\'s website. However, these hyperlinks require the candidate to exhaustingly browse the employer\'s website looking for recruiting information that is organized differently on each website. Such an inconvenience results in the candidate\'s losing patience and abandoning the search, thereby leaving the employer with no return on its investment.

Also, current Internet job sites typically use the same basic approach for all types of job openings. It is not suprising, therefore, that these “one size fits all” sites are not tailored to fit the specific needs of many professions.

Consider, for example, healthcare professionals such as hospital nurses. Unlike most other professions, hospital nurses have a skill set that is easily transportable. Since hospitals, unlike most service businesses, do not have a steady core of repeat business, it is easy for a nurse to take his or her skill set from one hospital to another or from one region to another. Thus, nursing is especially well-suited to temporary staffing. In contrast, other professions, such as engineering, require a significant investment in time to acclimate a new employee to the nuances of a new job. For this reason, one size fits all job websites are not optimal.

Thus, a third drawback is the inability of current Internet job sites to satisfy the needs of highly specialized fields, such as healthcare. Typically, healthcare job seekers desire a quick, easy to use service that presents information about healthcare facilities (e.g., hospitals and medical clinics) and their position openings in a clear and uniform manner. The information must be concise, addressing the concerns most job seekers express when searching for a job. For example, in the healthcare context, pertinent information would include such facts as the number of beds in a particular unit, the number of operating rooms, whether the facility has a trauma center, and whether the facility is a teaching hospital. In effect, the job seeker desires an employment service that offers not only job listing abilities, but integrates the postings with a data warehouse filled with information on employer facilities. This integration would enable the job seeker to focus on specific employer facility criteria and formulate quick, targeted searches.

From the employer\'s perspective, an employment service that accommodates highly specialized fields saves money. Because the job applicants are more focused and can better understand the needs of the employer\'s facility in reference to their own, such a specialized employment service integrated with a data warehouse appreciably reduces the time and effort employers waste on unqualified and incompatible applicants.

The present invention is a method and system for providing an employment placement service. Broadly stated, the present invention broadcasts job openings, presents detailed information about the employers advertising the openings, provides means for employers and applicants to exchange information (e.g., résumés), and provides incentives for both employers and job applicants to use the employment placement service. The primary components of the present invention are a job listing database, an employer information database, a résumé database, and a series of graphical user interfaces that integrate the databases and give the employers and applicants access to view and manipulate the information.

In the preferred embodiment of the present invention, incentives encourage use of the employment placement service by both employers and job applicants. For employers, the incentive is a billing structure that only charges for results. Specifically, the present invention provides unlimited job listings and charges employers only for successful job listings that result in hirings. Optionally, such charges attach only to job listings for high demand, or “critical hire,” positions, while the fulfillment of other, non-critical positions occurs free of charge. Thus, the employer places advertisements for free and pays an employment placement fee only if their recruiting efforts are successful. As another incentive to use the service, the present invention furnishes the employer with means for advertising its business and facilities to potential employees, by giving job applicants access to the employer information database.

As an incentive for the job applicant, a representative embodiment of the present invention provides a signing bonus if 1) the job applicant uses the service to locate and contact an employer, and 2) if the employer hires the job applicant for a critical hire position. This signing bonus is paid from the fees the employer pays for a successful job listing. In addition to critical hire positions, the present invention also encourages applicants for non-critical positions to use the service by offering weekly prize drawings for all applicants who have started employment during a particular week in a position located on the employment service. The employment service pays for the prizes using, for example, a portion of the monthly subscription fees (if applicable) or revenues from filled critical hire positions. Prizes could include anything from watches and other personal gifts to vacations. The magnitude of the prize necessarily depends on the number of employers subscribing to the employment service.

Thus, the present invention ensures a successful employment placement by offering incentives on both sides of the transaction. Employers pay only if job listings are successful, while applicants are paid to make those job listings successful. The net result, provided by the present invention, is the increased use of the employment service and, consequently, increased advertising fees and profits for the provider of the employment placement service.