WORKERS, JOBS CONNECT ON NET\On-line listings offer advantages for searchers.

Byline: Sana Siwolop The New York Times

When Jerry Baker sat down at his computer one evening last February, what began as a lark soon signaled the end of a long job hunt.

Baker, a marketing executive for the health care industry, already had put in four months searching the classified ads of a dozen big daily newspapers and medical magazines. He also had worked with at least 10 recruiters.

But sitting at his computer in Nashville, Baker stumbled upon America Online's career center and spotted a listing for a job with Healthworks Alliance in Wayne, Pa. Within minutes he responded on line, and within a day, he heard from the recruiter. By mid-April, Baker had the job.

On-line job listings are not new, of course, and their usefulness is hard to gauge. But by the available measures, the field has mushroomed - in the number of job ads and job seekers going on line, and in the types of positions and job-search services.

For example, six daily newspapers - The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News and The Washington Post - jointly started Careerpath.com in mid-October on the World Wide Web. The service now carries 40,000 to 50,000 help wanted ads that also appear in print (http://www.careerpath.com).

As the new service suggests, the on-line want ads that used to be predominantly technical are becoming much more mixed. For example, at E-Span, an on-line job source that runs on virtually all of the major on-line services, half the postings still have technical orientations. But the rest are spread across other fields.

Even as on-line job notices grow, however, on-line job seekers far outnumber them. On America Online, the Help Wanted-USA service is listing between 12,000 and 15,000 new ads a week. But it receives more than 1 million visitors a month.

E-Span puts up between 1,000 and 1,200 new ads a week, but it generated 1.8 million "hits" from job searchers in October alone.

The kinds of services are multiplying too. There are already dozens of resume database services, hundreds of job-related bulletin boards and World Wide Web news groups, and a growing number of employment-related Web sites sponsored by individual companies.

But within a year, employers and job hunters on some services may be able to meet for on-line interviews. To cut the cost of in-house employment offices, some companies are establishing job databases for their own employees.

Why all the growth? For many job hunters, cyberspace has a clear appeal. It breaks down the geographic limitations of many traditional job searches, and when job seekers put their postings on line, they achieve a visibility they never get by mailing resumes to individual employers. Moreover, many employers see on-line applicants as having good technology skills.

More broadly, many employers say the medium is inexpensive and effective.

When Computer Horizons Inc., an information management firm in Mountain Lakes, N.J., won a big contract last spring, Jeff Kleiman had to hire 230 computer consultants in six months.

To supplement traditional recruiting tools, Kleiman, a recruiter for the company, posted his job needs on E-Span and promptly filled nine positions. By placing job ads on line, "I've discovered I can get responses from highly qualified people within 24 hours," he said.

The embrace of on-line services by some employment recruiters depends on how they get paid. According to Tom Rodenhauser, an editor of Executive Recruiter News, recruiters who work on contingency and who typically handle midlevel managerial jobs paying between $20,000 and $70,000 are on-line enthusiasts.

But recruiters who work on retainer, handling jobs paying $75,000 and up, continue to use networking and other traditional tools.

"It's more important for contingency firms to go on line to cast a wider net," Rodenhauser said.

Despite all the growth, job seekers will not find it easy to gauge the effectiveness of individual services. Solid numbers on job matches are scarce, even at large, respected services like E-Span and the Online Career Center, an Internet service that gets 7 million hits a month (http://www.occ.com/occ). Technology is not yet available to track the millions of on-line job seekers.

And while outright scams appear to be rare, some services have taken steps to watch for them. Help Wanted-USA, for example, uses its 75-member sales team to monitor suspicious-sounding jobs, like those soliciting sexual services or promoting get-rich schemes.

People familiar with the services note that not all are of equal quality. Nor do they offer the same features. Job seekers may want to ask, for example, whether a service provides a large, public database or a smaller, more specific one that may be more popular with recruiters.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

Photo Jerry Baker spent four months looking for a job the traditional way before turning to the Internet. The New York Times