A Changing Landscape

The last ten years have seen a wholesale change in the way that a large percentage of workers find jobs. Employers' recruitment processes have also changed as a result of this, and for much of the labor force the hiring landscape is now quite different to how it was in the mid-1990s.

This huge change is of course the internet – specifically recruitment sites like Monster.com. For professional workers, these sites have revolutionized the job-finding process, and given them choices and opportunities they have never had before.

Unfortunately, a significant proportion of the labor force has missed out on this revolution. For non-professional workers, typically on low wages, the process of finding a job has not changed much for nearly 100 years. For these people, the three traditional channels for finding work have remained the only realistic choices:

· Personal contacts and recommendations

· Newspaper classified job ads

· Staffing agencies

With low-paid workers often having restricted or non-existent access to the internet, these traditional channels, especially staffing agencies, have retained their strong hold on the non-professional job market.

The Way Forward

None of the three recruitment channels described above are ideal:

· Relying on personal contacts and recommendations is haphazard and unfairly advantages some workers over others.

· Newspaper classified ads have a wide coverage, but responses are certain to include a high proportion of unsuitable candidates, which have to be filtered out by the employer, taking time and thus money. The level of response is also unpredictable and varies widely.

· Staffing agencies are able to provide appropriately selected staff to a wide range of employers, but this service comes at a premium cost, sometimes as much as double the hourly rate paid to the workers concerned.

In addition, it could be suggested that the high costs for employers of using staffing agencies plays some role in suppressing the wages of non-professional workers – hardly an ideal situation.

The good news is that internet access is slowly becoming more widely available to low-paid workers, through public libraries, internet cafes and the growing availability of budget-priced computers and internet access services.

One company that has observed this trend and found an innovative solution to help match non-professional workers with employers is New York-based Emerging Demographics, Inc. Through combining internet services and multi-lingual telephone services, they have developed a service that serves the needs of both employers and non-professional workers, combining many of the advantages of staffing agencies with the much lower costs of direct advertising.

How It Works

HireWorkers.com is the first website to use this system. Workers can register with the site by one-time internet access (ideal for those who do not have their own computers) or by telephone, in one of several languages. Their details are recorded and automatically matched against incoming job vacancies, posted by prospective employers.

Once an employer has posted a job, a short list of possible candidates is automatically drawn up, and the employer has the chance to speak to interested candidates over the telephone via HireWorkers.com's call centre. A guaranteed minimum number of suitable candidates are found for the employer, taken from a database of over 20,000 profiles. Once a successful candidate is chosen, the employer recruits them directly, with no further ties to HireWorkers.com – unlike a staffing agency, whose costs often continue throughout the worker's contract.

This system is aimed at a wide range of non-professional job areas, such as restaurant help, construction help, hotel staff, customer service agents and factory and warehouse operatives.

The only costs incurred are a modest charge by the employer to list the position, comparable and in some cases lower than placing a newspaper classified ad. There are no costs to the candidates at any stage.

HireWorkers.com and LatinoHire.com all use Emerging Demographics, Inc.'s innovative new web-based technology to provide recruitment services for non-professional workers.