JCMC 7 (4) July 2002
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Vol. 6 No. 1 Vol. 6 No. 2 Vol. 6 No. 3 Vol. 6 No. 4 Vol. 7 No. 1 Vol. 7 No. 2 Vol. 7 No. 3 Vol. 7 No. 4
Ideological Discourses in the Making of Internet Career Sites
Daniel Marschall
Lancaster University, UK
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Historical Development
- Power Dynamics in the Labor Market
- Evolving Methodologies
- Community Indicators in Three Sites
- A Balance of Discourses
- Corporate Human Resource Sites
- Conclusions
- Acknowledgments
- Footnotes
- References
- About the Author
Abstract
This paper examines the ideological discourses evident in related categories of commercial World Wide Web sites during the last year of the dot-com bubble (1995-2001). It analyzes two collections of employment-related Web pages: third-party Internet career sites (such as Monster.com) and the employee recruitment sections of corporate Web sites (such as General Electric). After reviewing the historical development of Internet use for job search purposes and the effect on labor market dynamics, I estimate the extent to which discourses of community permeate these sites by using methodologies that focus on the content of Web sites and the messages conveyed by advertisements. The conclusions highlight the importance of considering ideological constructions in grasping the meaning of “discursive domains” among commercial sites on the Web.Introduction
After making a spectacular entry into the public arena (through million-dollar advertisements) during the 1999 Super Bowl, employment-related Web sites became some of the most popular and high visibility locations on the World Wide Web. More than 13 million persons visited these sites in July 2000 (Carr, 2000). The top 15 of these sites attracted more than 20 million unique visitors in September 2000, with Monster.com achieving a 52 percent share in “Career Eyeballs” (TMP Worldwide, 2000), a measure of the number of unique visits to a site and the time spent by those visitors. An estimated 35,000 employment-related Web sites were available to job seekers and employers in 2001.Although the proliferation of such sites is a relatively young phenomenon, emerging after Internet commercialization in 1995, these sites and related computer software technologies are transforming the human resource (HR) profession and the international recruiting industry by helping to reduce the costs of hiring employees (Lee, 2001). A 1998 survey of 550 human resource professionals found that 70 percent had used the Internet for corporate recruiting, an increase from 21 percent in 1996 (Leonard, 2000). A poll of 400 organizations, conducted in February 2000, reported that 86 percent of companies intended to increase their spending for online advertising (Pro2Net, 2000). By 2004, according to Forrester Research, companies will boost their spending for online recruitment by 52 percent while cutting their print advertising (Carr, 2000). The world’s largest companies are looking to the Web for their recruitment and placement needs. In 2000, out of Fortune magazine’s Global 500 companies located in North America, more than 90 percent were using the Web to recruit employees (iLogos Research, 2000). The worldwide market for “eRecruiting services” is expected to generate nearly $15.7 billion in revenues by 2006 (IDC, 2002).
Despite the proliferation of employment-related services on the Web and the impact on the contemporary labor market, social scientists and cultural analysts have devoted little attention to probing the meaning and messages projected by this genre of commercial Web sites. This paper analyzes the ideological discourses evident in advertisements and promotional materials associated with such “Internet career sites,” which are defined as commercial locations on the World Wide Web that enable job seekers to construct one or more work identities, learn about employment opportunities and non-standard work arrangements, and convey those identities to potential employers.
The touchstone of this critical inquiry is the concept of online communities and the extent to which these commercial Web sites express discourses of community in order to attract users, generate revenues and maintain competitive market position. As Baym (2001) points out, the propensity of scholars to use community as a starting point for analyzing online interactions is driven by popular discourse, by the evocation of the term “community” by the users of electronic communication trying to make sense out of the experience of using Internet-related technologies. Writing in an exchange of messages on “Company vs. Community” in the Association of Internet Researcher (AoIR) mailing list, Baym continues:
| From an academic perspective … ‘community’ and the history of scholarship examining the concept, allows us to explore underlying logics that make all of these concepts *fit together into a system* that enables people to know how to act and perpetuate those systems…. And more importantly, community is an overarching concept not because it’s a nice scholarly trope, but because when real people are in online contexts their understandings of others’ actions and decisions about how to act themselves are shaped in part through this concept. It’s an abstraction with force. (Emphasis in original.) |
In their paradigm-setting report for McKinsey and Company, Armstrong and Hagel (1995) present a framework for defining the prime characteristics of such communities. They identify four types of social needs to which electronic communities respond: (1) communities of relationships in which members are aware of one another and interact on a regular basis; (2) communities of fantasy in which users interact in fictional settings and typically assume virtual identities; (3) electronic communities of transaction in which users focus on content, buying and selling items and services; and (4) communities of interest whose interactions focus on limited areas defined by specific subject matter. A single online community may be oriented to serving one or more of these social needs, say Armstrong and Hagel, and communities may evolve over time to satisfy a greater range of social needs and create value in the commercial marketplace. The implication of their typology is that the quality of online communities vary and that a community which meets all four of these needs is likely to be stronger, more “sticky” in electronic marketing parlance, than a Web site that is limited to only one of these features. Hagel and Armstrong codified their findings in an influential book, Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), helping to establish Hagel as a “fountain of concepts that are being put into practice all over the Web” (Business Week, 1999).
Werry (1999) critiques the evolution of business attitudes toward the Internet and identifies three stages. In 1993-94, as the Internet moved toward commercialization, business texts depicted the network as an environment hostile to free enterprise and dominated by unruly “natives” whose ideologies impeded effective use of the network for profit-oriented ventures. That attitude began to change in 1995, as entrepreneurs experimented with various business models on the Web and community emerged as a “polite way of talking about audience, consumer demographics, and market segmentation while seeming sensitive to Internet users, their culture and community” (Werry, 1999). This trend culminated in 1997 with the publication of Net Gain and widespread acceptance of the metaphor of the Web as an ecosystem in which relationships emerge organically and community architects cultivate an open management style to design online communities that balance the needs of users, advertisers, marketers (who collect demographic information) and “natural owners” (i.e. businesses whose products and services are directly related to the offerings of the community). Werry concludes that the metaphor of community dominates contemporary business discourse regarding effective use of the Web for commercial purposes.
This paper examines the extent to which the discourse of community permeated the employment-related Web during the final year of the dot-com bubble, a period of rapid economic growth and stock speculation (Cassidy, 2002) that stretched from the spring of 1995 (when several prominent Internet Service Providers went public) to the beginning of the recession in March 2001 (NBER, 2001). After tracing the historical development of Internet career sites and discussing the impact on labor market dynamics, I use methodologies developed by Zickmund (1997) and Mitra (1999) to analyze two sets of Web sites: (1) three leading Internet career sites that aggressively promote their services, and (2) three human resource sites used by major corporations to recruit new employees.
My examination of these issues is situated in the tradition of what Silver (2000) calls critical cyberculture studies, an emerging field that seeks to move beyond journalistic description and popular treatment of Internet-related topics to systematic exploration of “the social, cultural and economic interactions that take place online … the stories we tell about such interactions … a range of social, cultural, political and economic considerations [framing] such interactions … [and] the technological decision- and design-processes which, when implemented, form the interface between the network and its users” (pp. 24-25). The conclusion discusses the findings in the context of these dimensions and speculates about how the March 2001 recession has affected these discourses.
Historical Development
The history of Internet career sites is coterminous with the history of the Internet itself, or, more accurately, the history of individual job seekers, human resource professionals and employment providers using computer-based resources and advanced telecommunication networks to communicate about job opportunities. Though the early days of this history remains obscure, sufficient published material exists to differentiate major aspects of the evolution. Online employment-related services, as part of external labor market relations in the United States, have developed in four phases, three of which are evident while the fourth is more speculative.The first phase, stretching from 1969 through approximately 1994, started with the founding of ARPANET. This was before the World Wide Web gained a critical mass of users. Internet use was restricted to a cadre of academics, researchers and government officials in a few centers across the country. Early Net users, especially after the invention of e-mail in 1972, experimented with the new communication technology for job search purposes. In May 1976, for example, Raymond Panko of Menlo Park, California, consulted his ARPANET colleagues about job opportunities by placing “An Electronic Want Ad” on the MsgGroup (Message Services Group), an electronic discussion group that Hafner and Lyon (1996) suggest was the first virtual community. Panko explained:
| As often happens in this business, my part of SRI is suffering some lean times, and I will probably be looking for a job around July 1. If you a potential job opening or could point me in a promising direction, I would be grateful…. My paper on the outlook for computer message services, which many of you have read, indicates my current behavioral and economic interests…. My primary career goal is to understand and if possible improve human communication/collaboration. (Excerpt from Panko, 1976) |
| There are two kinds of message that have been frowned upon on the network. These are advertising of particular products and advertising for or by job applicants…. There are many companies in the U.S. and abroad that would like to have access to the Arpanet. Naturally, all of them cannot have this access. Consequently if the ones that do have access can advertise their products to a very select market and others cannot, this is really an unfair advantage. Likewise, if job applicants can be selected amongst some of the best trained around, or if the applicants themselves can advertise to a very select group of prospective employers, this is an unfair advantage to other prospective employees or employers who are not on the net. (Excerpt from Feinler, 1978) |
| The amount of harm done by any of the cited ‘unfair’ things the net has been used for is clearly very small. And if they have found any people any jobs, clearly they have done good. If I had a job to offer, I would offer it to my friends first. Is this ‘evil?’ Must I advertise in a paper in every city in the US … all in the name of fairness? … So I state unashamedly that I am in favor of seeing jobs offered via whatever. (Excerpt from Stallman, 1978) |
Community-based networks as well began providing job-related services. The 1,584-line Directory of the Cleveland Free-Net, what Jay Hauben (1995) calls the “grandfather of the worldwide community computer networking movement,” contained information on Jobs Wanted (under Community Services), cle.jobs (under Cleveland Area Special Interest Group), Jobs & Rehab. Resources (under The Handicap Center), and The Jobs Area (in The Computer Corner). Founded in 1984, maintained and upgraded by some 250 volunteers, the Cleveland Free-Net had more than 40,000 registered users during its fifteen-year life.
Proprietary computer networks also waded into this burgeoning field, led by the 1991 founding of E-SPAN by CompuServe, a site that focused on professional and managerial positions. Offering a service that would become a standard feature of these sites, CompuServe created a number of separate “forums” for specifics occupational areas (Rosen, 1994). America Online had its “Career Board” with 42 professional topic areas. Prodigy, the smallest of the proprietary services, offered a “Careers Bulletin Board.”
Complementing the growth of these online job matching sites was the emergence of computer software packages to help assemble resumés, prepare for interviews, automatically enter resumés into computerized data bases, and automate a host of HR functions. As recruitment industry analyst Joyce Lain Kennedy (1994) marveled: “Employers have already boarded the e-train. They like electronics because it’s cheaper to use computers than to employ people to sort through mounds of resumés and to keep track of everyone. The number of recruiting organizations that are substituting technology for labor in job-search screening will continue to accelerate…. A job-market revolution is happening before our eyes” (para. 7).
The second phase, beginning in 1994-95 with mass dissemination of the Netscape World Wide Web browser and the commercialization of the Internet, saw the emergence of Web-centric career services, some of which were start-up companies while others emerged from text-based sites. Started in 1990 as a Bulletin Board Service for technology professionals, DICE BBS became Internet Career Site Dice.com. Large companies, led by high technology firms, refined their experimentation with Web-based recruitment. In addition, independent Internet career sites began to merge with one another or be taken over by larger human resource organizations. TMP Worldwide, a global advertising firm, acquired The Monster Board in mid-1995 and merged it with the Online Career Center. As of December 1998, approximately 15 percent of active job seekers and 7 percent of employed persons used the Internet for job search purposes (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2000b). By the end of this period in early 1999, only a few of the leading Internet career sites were independent companies.
The third phase in the evolution of employment-related Web sites was marked by the high visibility advertising campaign launched by Monster.com, which paid $4 million (nearly 20 percent of its annual marketing budget) to run three television ads during the January 1999 Super Bowl (McNamara, 1999). Their Internet traffic increased by 450 percent within 24 hours. To be noticed, sites require significant amounts of investment capital or a carefully designed niche strategy. Mainstream companies committed themselves to recruiting new employees online, and explored partnerships that enable them to use innovative software programs developed by the intermediary sites.
The fourth phase began with the collapse of the dot-com bubble, which started with the crash of the Nasdaq stock index in April 2000 (Cassidy, 2002) and solidified with the beginning of the recession in March 2001. The conclusions discuss the characteristics of this phase and economic factors affecting the discourses contained in employment-related Web sites.
Power Dynamics in the Labor Market
The functionality offered by Internet career sites has become an integral part of the institutional framework of the American labor market, the complex web of interactions (Tilly & Tilly, 1998) that structures the process by which individual job seekers enter into contractual relationships with employment providers. Viewed in these terms, the labor market is a social construction (Fevre, 1992) whose meaning, operation and institutional practices are formed by the interaction of a network of actors and organizations which continuously negotiate their patterns of cooperation and their relative bargaining power. Fevre distinguishes between five interrelated labor market processes (informing employers, informing workers, screening activities by both job seekers and prospective employers, and the offer to purchase or sell labor) each of which is influenced by the rise of digital technologies and Web-based job search practices.Internet career sites enable job seekers to adopt a particular work or occupational identity based upon previous work experience, educational level, skills, geographic location, target company or industry, employment objective and other characteristics; this identity is incorporated into one or more resumés that are posted on the Web site for review by prospective employers. In turn, employment providers release information about specific positions for which they will consider candidates and use electronic search techniques (and technologies) to search resumé data bases (or the entire Internet) for appropriate matches. After both parties conduct mutual screening activities, they may enter into negotiations over pay and working conditions, a process that may lead to an offer for full-time employment or hiring for other nonstandard work arrangements (Hudson, 1999).
In the context of incremental change in the rules and conventions (North, 1990) of this institutional framework, the significance of Internet career sites resides in the third and fourth of these processes: the actions of job seekers and employment providers in “screening” one another to gauge the desirability of an ongoing relationship. Internet career sites influence the dynamics of power involved in the maneuvers between key parties in the labor market. During a job search in the pre-Internet era, a prospective employee would have minimum information readily available, typically a small Help Wanted classified advertisement or word-of-mouth notice from a friend or family member. Using Internet career sites, a job seeker may review thousands of job postings categorized according to location, occupational category, industry sector, keyword, salary requirements, or company name, and do so at convenient times while maintaining a degree of confidentiality.
Moreover, a job seeker has immediate access to a wide range of background information on the company, its corporate culture, recent press reports, and uncensored commentary from commercial sources (such as Vault.com, which sponsors what it calls “infamous” message boards on particular companies, and WetFeet.com, which profiles firms and publishes detailed “Insider Guides” on them) and more than 5,000 anti-corporate “rogue” Web sites (Kassel, 1999-2000). Job seekers have access to a rich body of information, data that is not necessarily controlled by the firm being evaluated. This dynamic tended to increase their bargaining power in the job search and hiring process during the dot-com bubble, allowing them to “comparison shop” among employers (Gardyn, 2000) and “customize an employment deal” (Laabs, 1998) in line with their expectations.
However, this fluctuation in power relations was complex, flowing in several directions. To screen job candidates, employers gained access to a wide array of computer software and Web-enabled packages, including more than 100 resumé management/applicant tracking systems and more than 30 comprehensive employment management systems (Crispin & Mehler, 2000). Resumé management systems enable recruiters to accept resumés in print or electronic formats, store the information in a computerized data base, search and categorize the data according to keywords and other criteria, develop candidate profiles, match skills to job requirements, and prioritize applicants. Employment management systems combine resumé processing with other aspects of the hiring process. These systems integrate job analysis (to determine job requirements), pre-screening for key competencies (Williams, 2000), managing the applicant pool, maintaining data security, communicating with candidates, assessing the time to hire, collecting government reporting data, arranging interviews and handling related administrative tasks. Such automated systems are becoming very sophisticated, allowing HR managers to ask job candidates specially tailored questions on-line, for example, and obtain pre-qualifying information before the initial face-to-face interaction.
Most major global corporations have added job listing sections to their corporate Web sites and are striving to draw prospective employees directly to those sites, without necessarily using the Internet career sites as intermediaries. These sites provide far more limited opportunities for prospective job seekers to construct a customized work identity (hence, they fall outside of the definition of Internet career sites as described here) and protect the confidentiality of that identity. The potential bargaining power of individual job seekers is reduced if they choose to interact primarily with the Web site of a prospective employer.
An assessment of whether the relative power between job seekers and job providers will shift due to Internet technology is premature at this stage in the evolution of a new institutional paradigm (Abraham, 1990) in labor market relations. However, the centrality of this notion of power relations directs attention to a dimension of Internet career sites that has been neglected by scholars interested in the social impact of cyberspace: the ideologies of these sites. The ideological content of these sites represents a discursive formation, a pattern of discourses occurring in the American labor market that expresses the dynamics of power and knowledge during the historical period (the dot-com bubble) in which the Internet emerged as a prominent communication medium.
In an advanced capitalist country such as the United States, with its democratic political traditions and aggressive mass media, the leadership figures of institutions ordinarily will seek to maintain their dominance through formal rules (i.e. laws enacted by representative bodies and officials selected by legitimate means) as well as informal “codes of conduct, norms of behavior, and conventions” (North, 1990, p. 36) that guide interactions with others in organizations, families and external social relations. The desire to maintain power through informal mechanisms makes the situation inherently unstable, open to contest and challenge from forces that wish to gain more control over the organizations that influence their lives.
In this context, an important role arises for ideologies, the “way in which a society is described by its dominant groups,” helping to unify the society around a preferred self-image that “links socio-economic reality to individual consciousness [and] establishes a conceptual framework, which results in specific uses of mental concepts, and gives rise to our ideas of ourselves” (Cormack, 1992, pp. 12-13). Power and ideology are inextricably intertwined. To the extent that Internet career sites destabilize power relations in the labor market, ideological discourse will come into play, activated by diverse individuals and organizations in their quest to maintain the status quo or undermine its legitimacy.
Like other assemblages of symbolic meaning in a culture, constructed by persons and groups in accordance with their preferred ideological perspectives, Web sites and their promotional materials may be considered cultural products, the “specific, identifiable objects and events in which a culture is made manifest” (Cormack, 1992, pp. 26). In this framework, to analyze Web sites and related advertisements, especially as they appear embedded in an institution with shifting power relations, is to study the alternative ideologies of the manufacturers of these representations (regardless of how consciously those makers are conveying their ideological biases). Internet career sites thus provided a glimpse into the expression of ideologies as they jostle for public notice, commercial success, brand loyalty and the elusive Holy Grail of Internet hipness: a sustainable "buzz".
Evolving Methodologies
The fundamental characteristics of the Web, what Mitra and Cohen (1999) call its self-conscious hypertextuality and seamless intertextuality, offer particularly fruitful terrain to investigate contending ideologies. They point out that critical textual analysis of linear texts (e.g. literary works and cinema) presuppose that their intertextual meanings are often hidden, buried in the texts through stylistic and narrative techniques, and need to be unearthed by the expert cultural analyst. In these cases the ideological predispositions of authors are obscured. In contrast, given the centrality of hypertextual links in Web pages, the ideologies of their manufacturers are expressed in a more overt fashion through their conscious choice of which outside pages to link to their productions. The intentionality of the constructors of Web pages thus becomes more transparent in a hypertextual environment. In addition, the multimedia capabilities of the technology enables Web page constructors to integrate sounds, real-time “chats,” visual images and video into their productions, offering a powerful platform to convey mythical concepts and enhance the sense of involvement and community-building among users.Scholars have begun to craft methodologies to examine the rich load of ideological meanings embedded in individual Web sites. Zickmund (1997) studied the cyberculture of right-wing hate groups, focusing on the manner in which their Internet presence has “transformed radical individuals into a subversive community” (p. 189, italics in original). She investigated their Web sites and the dominant discourses they contain, uncovering an “ideological dialectic” (p. 200) in subversive newsgroups in which insiders and outsiders clash over the interpretation of events. Her investigation yielded rich insights on the way this cyberculture is expressed on the Web and in real-life interactions among members of this discursive community.
Zickmund’s methodology has five components. First, she explains the historical development of a group of individuals before the Internet became ubiquitous, an exercise in “historicizing” integral to cultural studies methods (Williams, 1999). Next, to launch her examination of specific Web sites, she identifies a clearing station, a central node that contains links to a representative sample of organizations. She then examines how specific Web sites incorporate a number of distinct features: heroic key figures, a set of cultural icons, a mythic belief structure, and the use of language that distinguishes outsiders from insiders in a manner that builds internal cohesion within the group that set the parameters of the original discourse. To illustrate the important role played by language in the reinforcement of this community, she analyzes the content of specific discussions in subversive newsgroups. Finally, she settles upon an overarching concept – in this case the idea of the Other as the personification of evil – in order to explain the passion and depth of hatred which right-wing subversives direct towards Jews, blacks and homosexuals. Her discussion of this concept reveals an important dynamic: “the question of how cybercultures appropriate antecedent genres in fostering current narrative structures” (p. 192), a point that is relevant to the analysis of any phenomena that existed before and after the emergence of the Internet as mass media.
Using a text-centered and interpretive approach, Mitra (1999) examined the domains of meaning presented by another group that existed before the rise of the Internet, in this case natives of India who reside in other countries as a diaspora. To “discover the different signifying, textual and discursive strategies” produced by this community, Mitra first identifies a “seed text,” a single page with a substantial number of links to other pages and a high ranking in the number of visitors to the site (analogous to Zickmund’s choice of a clearing station). The hypertext links that are featured on this gateway page are evaluated, highlighting links that point to locations with a large number of other links. This process identifies two “discursive domains,” defined as “specific hyperconnected interest areas” that reflect aspects of the diasporic experience: an “India domain” that focuses on the culture of their “place of origin,” and a “host country domain,” acknowledging their dual allegiance and association with host country organizations (such as the university where the author of the seed text works). The ideological implications of his approach are presented in terms of the values conveyed in these pages, namely the significance attached to democratizing the image of Indians (rather than conveying a single centralized image), promoting a sense of interconnectedness and participation in the community, and prioritizing the lasting connection to their place of origin.
An earlier article by Mitra (1997), pointing out that the “texts exchanged on the Internet are the artifacts that hold the Internet communities together as well as indicators of the direction in which the community is headed” (p. 59), highlighted the importance of integrating a comparative component into the analysis by looking at categories of texts and their ideological patterns.
These evolving methodologies provide tools to examine the ideological content of Internet career sites, contrasting their discourses with the meanings being projected by an alternative set of Web pages. The definition of Internet career sites offered here (highlighting their commercial status and multi-service characteristics) situates the investigation in the external labor market (as opposed to the use of Intranets in firm-specific internal labor markets), and excludes public sector job sites (e.g. the U.S. Labor Department’s America’s Job Bank). Internet career sites are part of a hyperlinked network of employment-related Web pages that include more specialized services such as writing electronic resumés, searching for jobs in specific regions of the country, and gathering information on the corporate culture of particular firms. Currently available are a number of “clearing stations” for Internet career sites, such as listings provided by Media Metrix, 100hot Web Rankings and Top9.com.
Upon initial examination, Internet career sites exhibit basic attributes of online communities: they are “groups of people seeking to achieve a common goal” (Jones, 1997, p. 10), collections of “geographically separated individuals … selected more by commonality of interests and goals than accidents of proximity” (Licklider and Taylor, 1999, pp. 108, 110). Individuals may initially visit such sites because of an advertisement they saw on television or in a magazine. If they decide to use the resources of the site, their involvement increases the potential that a community is emerging among its participants.
In the competition between the sites, the stakes are very high: billions of dollars in revenues, the character of online job hunting, and the electronic systems used by major corporations to direct their recruitment systems. The past history of the Internet provides ample evidence of how some entrepreneurs will manipulate the term “community” on their sites, diluting its meaning to signify only “the most tenuous connections, the most minimal interactivity … [not] forming anything worthy of the name community” (Brown, 1999) for crass commercial purposes of selling more advertisements. Claims of community thus merit rigorous scrutiny.
Community Indicators in Three Sites
Once individual job seekers decide to conduct their job search online, they face a large array of sites and alternative search methods from which to choose. To make full use of a site’s resources, a job seeker is required to register, divulging some personal information (i.e. giving up a certain amount of privacy), and develop an electronic resumé (often in the specific format favored by that site) that will be circulated directly to employers. By voluntarily engaging in this process, the job seeker chooses to adopt a particular online identity, and the markers of that identity or identities will have tangible consequences: the sorts of contacts or job offers received from employers. The ideological discourses contained in particular sites, and their evocation of community and other values, contribute to structuring the interaction between the job seeker and the user interface.Competition among commercial sites is extremely active. Each seeks to demonstrate its popularity by citing its rank by measurement services, which compete against one another for legitimacy among prospective users, as well as public credibility in the form of media attention. Extensive research is offered by the former Media Metrix (now comScore), which positions itself as the “most frequently referenced research provider,” one who adheres to “the highest quality research standards and integrity in reporting” (Media Metrix, 2000). The firm collects data monthly on the “reach” of Internet career sites 1, the number of unique visitors, how many pages were viewed by those visitors, and the total number of minutes spent on the site per visitor. These measurements are assembled to produce two lists: a “Power Ranking” (the reach multiplied by the average pages per visitors) and a “Share of Career Eyeballs” ranking reflecting the number of unique visitors and the total time spent by those visitors. Monster.com dominated the Career Eyeballs category with a majority share of the market in September 2000, followed by hotjobs.com, jobsonline, and Headhunter.net. Detailed data from Media Metrix was not publicly available (without paying a client fee) and the firm did not function as a central source for connecting to various Internet career sites. Its rankings need to be considered, however, when selecting an appropriate clearing station for starting an analysis.
Other Web services rank employment-related sites according to online viewing habits of frequent Internet users, such as the daily “Web-surfing patterns of more than 100,000 surfers worldwide” (100hot Web Rankings, 2000) and monthly consumer research intelligence provided by “over 120,000 real-time home users of the Internet” (Top9.com, 2000), whose data on publicly available sites is compiled by PC Data Online. The 100hot Web Rankings site features a “Top-Ranked Job Sites” home page with a list of the leading sites categorized weekly. The name of each Internet career site is hyperlinked to that location, giving the page a vast number of connections outside its domain. Monster.com was the top ranked site on this list as of October 2000. Out of the top 13 sites listed by 100hot Web Rankings, nine also ranked among the top 13 by Media Metrix, a finding that increases the credibility of the 100hot site. I therefore used the 100hot listing to select sites for closer analysis.
Three sites provide a balanced sampling for analysis: (1) Monster.com, the leading Internet career site, with a high public profile, which is a subsidiary of a large international public relations firm, TMP Worldwide; (2) jobs.com, which was ranked #7 by Media Metrix and #15 by 100hot Web Rankings, an independent and privately held company that started as the Resumail Network in 1989; and (3) Guru.com, #18 in the 100hot list, a high profile site founded in April 1999 that focuses on connecting freelancers and independent consultants with contract work. This selection of sites offered a representative mixture: one very large company with global ambitions, and two smaller firms that were independent. Jobs.com linked the Internet site universe with its roots in the past, when the electronic distribution of resumés was a predominant feature. Based in Dallas, Texas, jobs.com had its feet placed solidly in the United States, promoting its network of career hubs in 25 major cities. Guru.com connected this selection with the Internet culture of brash newcomers; it was oriented towards the future and conveys a clear vision of how the Internet may be used as a paradigm-busting tool for the courageous. Guru.com implemented a major nationwide advertising campaign, funded by the $63 million it has raised from venture capitalists.
To analyze the three sites for key indicators of community discourse (heroic figures, cultural icons, mythic belief structures, and distinctive use of language), I ranked their features according to how strongly they corresponded to each of these indicators. In each case I started by reviewing the home page of the site.
Heroic Figures
Guru.com and Monster.com, both of which have colorful and engaging home pages with clear navigation options, were strong in their use of heroic figures, individuals who personify the values and experiences that the sites put forward as ideal for candidates who will benefit from their services. The home page of Guru.com took a people-intensive approach, featuring photos of three persons, a young woman asking “Are you an independent professional” and a management consultant in the “Guru Spotlight,” all with broad smiles. Moreover, the Guru.com home page had three locations where a user could jump directly to secondary pages that profiled a guru, had short statements extolling the virtues of the site, or introduced a guru who had recently joined the “Guru Gallery,” a third-level set of pages that includes 55 gurus from four industry categories. All of the persons in the Guru Gallery had a small icon-like photo, with their name, a job title and a profile in which they responded to a series of questions, allowing them to relate interesting stories about their identities as a freelancer, consultant, “programmer for hire,” strategist, “aspiring independent professional,” and other avocations. Many of the stories related the difficult journey the guru had gone through to be successful, illustrating the heroic dimension while reinforcing the community aspect (i.e., here is a story that may help out our fellow gurus).
The Monster.com home page took a distinctively light-hearted approach, directing the user’s attention to key sections signified by colorful fantasy monster cartoons such as the Trumpasaurus (for Monster Moving to another city) and Swoop (for Job Search functions). At the center of the home page was an icon for the Monster Talent Market, which took the user to a secondary page with a heroic figure link (with photo) and a “Share in the Success” headline that linked to third level pages that profiled workers who had successfully used Monster.com resources. Nineteen success stories were available, each of which provided personal details about the worker’s “most memorable project” or the sort of mistakes that others may learn from. Though these profiles are one level below those for Guru.com, they are readily available from the home page.
Jobs.com made weak use of heroic figures, featuring a bland, no-nonsense home page that spotlighted resume development services (in line with its history) and relationships with specific employers. The top banner of the home page had a Resources button that took the user to a secondary page with a small headline (Testify!) that moved the user to a third level page with company logos, each of which had audio or video files with comments from existing employees of those firms. These comments focused on “what it would be like to work for one of these great companies,” rather than the journey that a job seeker would take in pursuit of their career goals. This secondary Resource Center page also had a link to “Expert Authors: Tips and thoughtful advice from the pros,” but the content was career advice and articles rather than personal stories.
Cultural Icons.
The second community indicator is cultural icons, which I define as objects, paraphernalia or images that represent the ideology of a Web site and enable the user to identify with that site in a meaningful way. By purchasing an object that symbolizes the site, the user associates his or her identity with the values being expressed. Again, Guru.com and Monster.com made strong use of symbols put forward as potential cultural icons, readily available to the masses from Guru Gear, “the place to outfit your independent lifestyle,” and The Monster Store, an online catalog of items to wear, drink from, play with, and plop on your desk. In keeping with its playful presentation, Monster.com items emphasized casual shirts, the ubiquitous logo baseball cap, toys (like the Trump Plush Stuffed Animal) and children’s wear, notably the Open Wide Bib depicting the friendly Trumpasaurus.
While Monster.com was silent about the meaning of these items, Guru.com hammered home the message. The guru is a happy and confident professional, ready to accessorize, and here is “a rich collection of specialty items designed to celebrate and cultivate your independent lifestyle…. Whatever you choose, you’ll be showing the world that you’re independent – and proud of it.” With work, office and personal gear, each with the distinctive Guru.com logo, the proud guru proclaims the “power of the independent professional” to colleagues and employers alike. Even the Guru.com home page contained a prominent banner ad saying “Do you Guru?” with a picture of their Unisex Massage Slipper, great for the stressed-out guru on the go.
Jobs.com, in contrast, was all business. It had a plain-text logo and no opportunity to purchase high-concept items that enabled users to flaunt its brand. Its use of cultural icons was weak, and those it did display conveyed a message very different from the other two sites. When users progressed through its home page, Resources section, and Testify! headline, they came to a page with the logos of 23 companies, each of which provided information on jobs, profile/benefits, and how to apply. These images had more interactivity associated with them (i.e. audio and video files), as if jobs.com was downplaying its own image to direct the spotlight on the job providers themselves. Who were the primary clients here? Jobs.com was oriented toward the employers who advertised their job openings on the site, with resumé preparation depicted in a purely instrumental manner. The jobs.com home page reflected this propensity, reserving a prominent location for the two job providers who were their “Featured Employers.”
Mythic Beliefs and Specialized Language.
The presence or absence of heroic figures and cultural icons, and the messages conveyed by those representations, are closely related to the third indicator, a mythic belief structure, the intricate collection of assumptions, stories, customs and common sense ways of viewing the world that govern the way members of a culture interpret reality. For individuals, myths provide a socially-sanctioned map, a kind of software meta-program, to help guide them down the path of life. Given that all of these Web sites are commercial entities, one would expect their mythic dimensions to coincide with classical mythical elements of American capitalism: the self-made man, the triumphant entrepreneur, the value of rugged individualism, the determination of the brave to risk death and conquer new frontiers, the power of technology to overcome social problems. Considering the anti-theoretical tendencies in American culture, I would expect the markers of such a mythical belief structures to be shrouded in these Web pages.
Once again, Guru.com and Monster.com came through most clearly, though the treatment by jobs.com yields important insights. The emphasis of Guru.com on the “independent professional” evoked classic American mythology of the self-made man or woman: confident, talented, focused on a clear goal, and determined to win out over adverse circumstances. For the proud guru, setting out on your own is the key to commercial success and the pursuit of happiness – the Guru Gallery depicted 70 percent of its figures with smiling faces. By associating with the Guru.com site, users not only received the leads they needed to find projects, but also obtained the necessary inspiration from a community of helpful, happy gurus. As one guru said, in remarks quoted at the top of a second level page: “I ventured into consulting because I missed being creative. Apprehension soon gave over to joy as I was deluged with Guru offers in my chosen technical field” (Guru.com, 2000a). During their first annual guru awards in June 2000, the company honored “the guru who most diligently promoted the guru lifestyle” with its “Furthering the Guru Way Award.”
Monster.com strummed somewhat different mythical chords. The Web is a big place, implied in the name Monster.com, filled with deep reservoirs of information to help the job seeker, but offering a daunting challenge to the isolated individual searching for that one right match with an employer. By using Monster.com, job seekers gained access to the latest “innovative technology,” a global network of career-related resources, and the collective expertise of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. Everything about Monster.com was big: more than 485,000 paid job listings (February 2001) by employers, more than 13.6 million job seeker accounts, 3,000 pages of articles with career advice and thousands of profiles of firms, all buttressed by alliances with America Online and the big players of the Internet (TMP Worldwide, 2001). As their name suggests, Monster.com was oriented toward giving job seekers and employers alike access to powerful, monstrous technological tools to tame the Internet.
Jobs.com offered a more pragmatic, stripped-down approach. We don’t need monster cartoons and chic baseball caps, jobs.com implied, just clear and straightforward information about jobs available and solid connections with familiar employers like American Airlines, Honeywell and Papa John’s Pizza. For jobs.com, resumés were not creative works of identity exploration, but just traditional instruments of communication between unemployed persons and potential employers; part-time work was not a bold lifestyle statement, but just a practical way to make some money if you didin’t have time for a full-time job. Behind all the hoopla and pretensions of these trendy Web pages sits a simple reality: companies have the power because they hold the purse strings to pay for your labor, so we concentrate on cultivating those employers. The mythical content of jobs.com was the great American anti-myth: we Americans are practical, down-to-earth folks who don’t care about myths, theories and foreign-sounding ideologies; just give us the tools to get the job done.
This pattern of discursive formations held true for the fourth indicator of community, with both Monster.com and Guru.com making a modest use of specialized language. Monster.com trademarked its Monster Talent Market name, and used the term “resumé builder” to refer to its resumé template. Guru.com said its Guru Profile is “like an online resumé – on steroids” and allowed users to “find a gig” and save those results in “My gig list.” All of their terminology drew upon familiar phrases and well-accepted job search concepts, offering slight variations that were immediately recognizable. Jobs.com used standard phraseology.
A Balance of Discourses
Two of the Internet career sites described above, Monster.com and Guru.com, actively used a discourse of community to strengthen user association with their sites, framing many of their services as a chance for job seekers to learn from the success stories of their colleagues and gain access to specialized technology to increase the efficiency of their job search activities or contract management responsibilities. This finding was reinforced by their explicit use of community terminology and community-building activities. Monster.com provided access to a group of "11 Community Experts" who answered questions on various topics, along with a series of Message Boards and real-time Chats to facilitate communication. A series of Monster.com Communities allowed users to locate useful information according to industry, profession or career stage categories.At its founding in July 1999, San Francisco-based Guru.com set out its goal of becoming a “leader among a wave of Internet companies building coherent markets around fragmented groups of consumers and services providers,” through the creation of professional community, capturing the spirit of independent pioneers and offering them “the community, tools, and services they need to make the most of their skills and workstyle” (Guru.com, 1999). To pursue that mission, the site supplemented its Internet presence with a series of public events, including trade show appearances, The Guru Awards (putting forward the leading members of the community publicly), the Guru Mixer (to allow users to meet the Guru.com management team), and Guru Speak forums “to give gurus the opportunity to connect with fellow independents, and to glean inspiration from solo professionals who’ve found great success in their fields” (Guru.com, 2000b). To help “create a vibrant community,” Guru.com published its set of community standards. These activities illustrated how the Guru.com marketing strategy sought to move beyond a “community of transactions” (Armstrong & Hagel, 1995) to build personal relationships between members and thereby strengthen its community.
My review of these sites revealed, however, that the community theme was not the only message these sites projected to potential users, many of whom visited because of print or television advertisements. The advertising budgets of both Monster.com and Guru.com indicated serious commitment to project their ideologies into the public consciousness. The other ideology evident in both these sites was power, relating back to the impact of this segment of Web sites on the institutional framework of the American labor market. Ideological themes in both sites indicated that they tried to attract users by conveying that individuals could enhance their power by associating with them, yet the conception of power acquisition was different in each of the sites. This difference was apparent when the predominant messages conveyed by their print and broadcast advertisements were evaluated.
For Guru.com, power meant having greater control over your lifestyle, the ability to achieve a seamless blend of work and personal life. Here power was equated with freedom, as in the “freedom to balance your priorities and work in your pajamas.” This was the message of a 1999 Guru.com ad, printed in Entrepreneur magazine, which featured a modest Guru.com leaflet with the headline “Be Your Own Boss!” pasted to a lamppost at an urban intersection.
The street metaphor carried through to a later advertisement, a two-page spread, this one from Business Week (20 March 2000), headlined simply “the commute” in an informal type style. The ad contained a series of three photos, ascending in size and concluding in a scene of a living room/work area. The viewer followed a young man in casual dress and white socks traveling from a bedroom, down a hallway, and descending a plain wooden staircase and heading for his “office,” which turned out to be sparsely-furnished living room where the center of attention was a laptop computer on a glass coffee table surrounded by file folders, tape dispenser, calculator, notepads, a few books (notably an office supply catalog), an empty coffee mug and other items scattered about. The furniture was vintage IKEA and the makeshift desk sat on a simple sisal carpet. “There’s no such thing as road rage when you commute in your slippers,” said the caption, reminding everyone how the happy, smiling guru gets to avoid the hassles of donning shoes and battling rush hour traffic. Under the Guru.com logo was the slogan: “Power for the independent professional.”
In their characteristicly big, bold style, with a heaping helping of fantasy, Monster.com shot its message through the airwaves in the form of blockbuster television spots. TMP Worldwide spent $161 million on marketing and promotional activities in 2000, more that double the previous year, “due primarily to increased marketing for our Interactive operations, especially Monster.com” (TMP Worldwide, 2001). To show the “power of Monster at work” (Monster.com, 2000a), the company launched a television ad on September 5, 2000, (the day after Labor Day) using the theme of “Tedmania: Put Yourself in Demand!” Their 30-second commercial featured “Ted,” an “ordinary guy” technology worker, and showed how “employers everywhere are fighting” one another to hire him (Monster.com, 2000b).
With energetic music in the background, the commercial began with a TV newscaster reporting: “And in business news, we are drawing closer to Ted’s decision day.” Behind her the viewer saw a graphic with “TED” in bold letters alongside a blacked-out photo (suggesting his status as the “common man.”) The broadcast was seen at a lunch counter where several business executives in suits were reading newspapers, including one paper with a full-page headline: “PAINT THE TOWN TED!” Next a city bus rolled by, and the viewer saw its banner ad: “Where Will Ted Go?” Sitting at a shoe-shine station was another suit-clad executive, this one reading Big Business magazine (designed to resemble Business Week) with the cover page blaring “Ted’s Next Move.” He shook his head in amazement and says: “Man, this Ted must be something.”
The core of the commercial followed. In rapid succession, the viewer saw three corporate executives, each ordering his or her underlings to “Get me this Ted!” Then, as if being viewed from a rapidly moving car, a water tower was shown emblazoned with the message “WE WANT TED.” At this point the music stopped and the viewer was taken into a dark office washroom. A white-haired executive was fixing his tie in the mirror, a young staff member standing next to him, nodding meekly as the executive barked out his orders:
Executive: What do you mean we haven’t heard from Ted yet?
Staff: Well, I’ve heard he’s had quite a few offers.
Executive: Then play hard ball, boy, send him a fruit basket!
Finally, the viewer saw Ted, target of all this attention, a curly-haired fellow in an open-collared blue shirt sitting at his computer in a company-issue cubicle. Muzak droned in the background. In a close-up shot, Ted looked as if he were oblivious to the chaos he had created. Not so. A computer screen flashed. Ted was shown scanning the Monster.com home page, just as a co-workers walked up, resplendent in short-sleeve white shirt, polka-dot tie and plastic pen protector. Holding the ubiquitous coffee mug, the co-worker asks: “Hey Ted, any response from Monster yet?” Low-key Ted nodded affirmatively as the camera pulled back and showed that, in fact, Ted’s cubicle is overflowing with fruit baskets. The energetic music started again as the announcer wound up: “Get your name out there. Put your resumé on Monster.com.” In the final image, one of the company’s signature little monsters ran across the screen, leaving the name and logo of Monster.com in its wake.
This commercial directed the viewer to identify with Ted, working away at his computer while his virtual identity was projected across the country, causing powerful business executives to compete for his services. Ted was dressed casually, stuck in his little cubicle under greenish fluorescent lights, while the executives strode around with subordinates in tow, talked on their cell phones from offices overlooking the city, or issued commands to humiliated staff who have followed them into the bathroom. Ted has leveled the playing field, enhancing his position in the labor market by drawing upon the power of Monster.com. Just as the executives were surrounded by submissive staff persons, so Ted was surrounded by clueless co-workers. By tapping into the power of Monster.com, the commercial implied, the ordinary technologist can transcend his or her immediate work circumstances and aspire to gain the sort of influence represented by the managers of the business world.
For Monster.com, power during the dot-com bubble meant helping the ordinary guy get the best possible employment deal. Get the power of the Monster behind you, their message went, and you can climb the Wagnerian heights of UberGeekdom, where legions of “suits” will tremble at your feet and mere mortals (your colleagues) will wallow in their own cluelessness.
While a community theme was evident in Monster.com and Guru.com, the discourse of cooperation co-existed with an appeal to personal empowerment. It is up to the user, said these sites, to craft an identity best suited to their interests, inclinations and career goals. Either way, greater power and freedom of choice awaited the self-confident worker willing to leverage the resources of cyberspace.
Corporate Human Resource Sites
The Internet brings significant benefits to corporate hiring managers and their firms, along with potential increases in the efficiency of labor market processes. The Web enables hiring managers to post more detailed job descriptions at a lower cost than traditional newspaper advertising and circulate those postings rapidly to an international audience, a process firms are using to eliminate —to disintermediate—the external recruiters who charge 25 or 30 percent of first-year employee wages for those they recruit (Vaas, Chen, & Hicks, 2000). By increasing the efficient operation of what economists call the “job matching function” (Bleakley & Fuhrer, 1997), the growing use of digital technology has the potential to increase the quality of the match between job candidates and job vacancies in the entire economy (Kuhn, 2000). In a 1998 survey of major companies, 70 percent of respondents agreed that the Internet helped the company attract high caliber people (recruitsoft.com/iLogos Research, 1998). “The bottom line is lower job search costs for both employees and employers, and less time required to fill a vacancy or find a job—trends that are expected to continue,” said Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger (2000).The iLogos Research report, Global 500 Web Site Recruiting 2000 Survey, pointed to a clearing station with which to select corporate HR sites for further analysis. Fortune magazine published its Global 500 list online, and the site provided a chart with the rank of each company, its revenues and its name hyperlinked to the company's Web site (Fortune, 2000). The report divided their assessments into three industry categories: high tech, financial services, and retail. Firms in each of these categories display a characteristic pattern of recruitment strategies. Selecting one firm from each of these industry segments, I reviewed the HR sites for General Electric (#9), Citigroup (#18), and Wal-Mart Stores (#2).
The Web home pages for all three of these companies contained one or more “Careers” headlines to allow users to jump directly to a set of pages that provided information on specific job openings, career development matters, descriptions of the work environment, and instructions about how to submit an application. The career opportunities sections of these Web pages presented a mixture of information describing what the company offered to prospective employees.
General Electric and Wal-Mart were most insistent about stressing the centrality of their career domain, providing three links on each of their home pages. The General Electric home page was a complex, multi-layered web of documents designed to appeal to diverse audiences: consumers, small businesses, investors, television viewers, newspaper reporters, and prospective employees; in this rich environment a separate box in a prominent location was headlined “Discover how you can start a great career at GE.” The Wal-Mart home page was more straightforward, exhibiting a friendly, folksy and people-oriented appearance that focused attention on seven smiling, multi-ethnic customers and employees (in their distinctive blue- or red-vest uniforms). The Careers link at Wal-Mart went to a minimalist set of pages that emphasized the management opportunities available with its vast network of retail stores.
The Citigroup home page was high-concept all the way, featuring a simple “we are Citigroup” headline above a middle band of small color photos and diagrams surrounded by a list of topics in menu format and a set of news headlines. The “career opportunities” hyperlink was very simple, but jumped to a “career web sites” page with significant depth because it pointed to seven segments of the Citigroup conglomerate, each of which had its own separate career domain. The most elaborate of these sites highlighted “Global Opportunities for New Graduates.” When users followed this link, they entered a different world, an elaborate Macromedia Flash production hyper-world in which a circular menu (symbolizing Citigroup’s global reach), labeled “Careers Across Borders,” enabled them to learn about the pioneering work of the company, the global diversity of its employees, the opportunities for exciting assignments and steady career progress, and the standing of the firm as a “global powerhouse.” Citigroup presented its appeal as “the power of a pioneer,” a vision of
| opportunities that defy frontiers – from marketing in Malaysia to relationship management in Manhattan. The best training in the industry. A work environment that celebrates your skills and supports your ambition, while giving you the responsibility for your professional development. Interaction with people from diverse backgrounds and cultures, every day … supported by an environment that offers the freedom to demonstrate their potential and make a real contribution from day one. (Citigroup, 2000) |
Moreover, gaining access to such opportunity was not reserved for just MBAs and research scientists. With a C average in college, and the willingness to relocate to the vicinity of one of Wal-Mart’s 2,500 stores across the United States, an ambitious young person could experience a 20-week management training program that would set the foundation for a viable future in retailing. As long as an Associate was willing to follow “Mr. Sam’s lasting legacy … by staying true to our basic values and beliefs” (Wal-Mart, 1999), a rewarding career awaited.
Opportunity also appeared as the chance to interact with a diverse group of fellow workers. According to Citigroup, 55 percent of its U.S. employees were women and 23 percent were members of minority groups. The “exhilarating work environment” of General Electric was fostered by the company’s commitment to “horizontal learning” and the sponsorship of Networking Forums for African Americans, Hispanics, women and persons from Asian-Pacific background (General Electric, 2000).
Framing this entire discourse, however, was the opportunity for exploration and conquest. Join our team, sublimate your individual identity to the needs of the group, proclaimed these corporate sites, and you will gain the key to explore a world of challenging assignments, learning new skills, and solid career progression. Accept the work culture and values of the corporate world, in other words, and share in their power.
Conclusions
During the waning months of the dot-com bubble, both Internet career sites, positioning themselves as high tech intermediaries, and the human resource sections of corporate Web sites asserted discourses of power in an American labor market destabilized by the erosion of old employment relationships (Cappelli, 1999) and the emergence of a model of “boundaryless careers” (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996). In summary, Internet career sites portrayed themselves as flexible collections of tools and repositories of knowledge that gave individual job seekers the power to mold a distinctive work identity, choose among thousands of job openings, and construct a customized career pattern that balanced work and lifestyle. Corporate human resource sites held out the promise of opportunity, the prospect of becoming part of an awesome organization of multiple industry sectors, fascinating co-workers and challenging assignments in exotic locales around the globe.These findings in the realm of e-commerce reinforce Mitra’s (1999) conclusions about the presence of identifiable “discursive domains” among collections of Web sites in the same genre. Internet career sites constituted a “personal empowerment” domain, characterized by an ideology that offered freedom, happiness, and independence to the worker who functions as a capable, well-informed individual. Human resources sites represented a “corporate opportunity” domain, marked by an ideology which argued that the individual would be able to realize his or her full potential only by melding their identities with a larger corporate entity and associating with others who have done likewise. The distinctiveness of these discursive domains is closely related to the ideologies they project.
Furthermore, consistent with the market values suffusing the e-commerce realm, these Web sites competed with one another for allegiance. In an Althusserian (1970) framework, the ideologies of these discursive domains hailed workers in a specific labor market context, arguing that a particular constellation of services would best yield job satisfaction and a desirable lifestyle. As workers (employed, unemployed, and self-employed alike) used the features of these Web sites, modifying their work and occupational identities according to previous experiences and current requirements, the ideological discourses embedded in these domains gathered momentum and assumed a “material existence,” the capacity to guide and regularize the concrete practices of individuals as they participated in labor market rituals. The interaction between workers, employment-related Web sites, and varied ideologies had an impact on the career consciousness of individuals and their attitudes toward working conditions, contributing to the construction of a new labor market paradigm (Abraham, 1990) evidenced by the increasing importance of market-mediated transactions (Cappelli, 1999).
To echo Zickmund’s (1997) findings, Internet career sites sought to transform a disparate and scattered group of individual job seekers into a community that identified more closely with its sites than with any single corporate entity. To construct this cyberculture, the intermediary sites appropriated “antecedent genres” (p. 189) in their narrative structures, notably the classic mythical elements of American capitalism such as the self-made man and the struggle to tame ever-new frontiers (including the inner frontier of squaring one’s desire for exhilarating work with the need for a fulfilling personal life). With the clever deployment of their own resources, their ideological perspectives just as firmly embedded in American traditions (and now offering the entire globe as the work/playground for the highly skilled), global corporations actively engaged in this contest.
The character of the messages in these discursive domains was consistent with particular labor market trends that prevailed during the dot-com bubble, namely a shortage of skilled workers or “tight” labor market (National Resource Council, 2000). One survey found that 10 percent of executives feared turning away project work because of a lack of qualified employees (Palmer, 2000). In the state of Maryland, 91 percent of employers hiring qualified computer engineers or analysts in 1999 reported difficulty in filling these positions, compared to 73 percent in 1997 (Maryland Business Roundtable for Education, 1999). Corporate recruiters in high-tech centers such as Silicon Valley were engaged in frantic competition for talented computer experts, leading to rising salaries, expanding fringe benefits and a “very predatory environment” in which companies did not hesitate to steal employees from one another (Richtel, 1999). During 1999-2000, the nation’s monthly unemployment rate averaged 4.1 percent.
“There is a new worker emerging in America today,” concluded one of the most comprehensive studies, conducted by Spherion (2000) Corporation and Louis Harris in early 1999, of the values and expectations of full-time U.S. workers. They found that the new, “more liberated” breed of employee in the “Emergent Workforce” was determined to gain more control over his or her career, focused on career development rather than job security, preferred task creativity to day-to-day direction, valued a fulfilling work environment, and pledged loyalty to a company based upon the level of contribution he or she could make to the organization rather than the amount of time on the job. Both Internet career sites and corporate HR sites were targeting such “emerging workers,” arguing that their approaches provided the smoothest avenue to satisfying work-related desires for flexibility, mobility, and greater control over their careers (Barber, 2000).
The collapse of the Nasdaq stock index and the onset of the recession heralded a shift in economic conditions that affected employment-related Web sites. The job market remained strong in 1999, especially in computer and data-processing industries where employment was bolstered by the push to resolve problems related to the Y2K transition in computer systems (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2000a). Though the unemployment rate remained at historic low levels during 2000, the economy began to slow down as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2001), the availability of venture capital funds declined, and dot-com firms began a steady stream of layoffs, company reorganizations and closures. In 2001 the recession took hold, fueled by a decline in business investment and a strong U.S. dollar, and intensified by the terrorist attacks of September 11 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2002). Venture capital investment dropped as the valuation of many dot-com firms collapsed (Rivlin & Park, 2001). Webmergers.com reported that more than 537 Internet firms closed or declared bankruptcy in 2001, double the number from the year before. Nearly 2 million jobs were cut across the economy in 2001 (Disabatino, 2002), as the fourth-quarter unemployment rate rose to 5.6 percent, the highest since mid-1996.
In the harsh economic environment, the evolution of employment-related Web sites entered the fourth stage, characterized by consolidation, the emergence of a few Internet career sites that dominate the market, and near-universal adoption of online recruitment by major corporations. As layoffs swept across the domestic economy in 2000-2001, traffic at employment-related Web sites surged and competition between sites intensified. The major sites began to merge and compete with one another for other sites. CareerBuilder acquired Headhunter.net, which earlier had purchased CareerMosaic. After TMP Worldwide (owner of Monster.com) made a bid to purchase HotJobs.com, the Yahoo! Internet portal made a successful counteroffer and restructured its organization to make HotJobs its exclusive provider of available job listings. When Jobs.com declared bankruptcy, Monster.com purchased its trademark and integrated Jobs.com offerings into its overall market strategy. By 2002, with a combination of aggressive marketing, new service offerings and strategic alliances, Monster.com continued to dominate the market among third-party, employment-related Web sites.
Corporate-sponsored sites have moved to shore up their presence in this area. In 2002, among the Fortune Global 500 firms located in North America, 95 percent were recruiting employees using the Web (iLogos Research, 2002). A “cooperative” of 24 major international companies has created a non-profit organization to operate DirectEmployers.com, an online transition and outplacement center which enables job seekers to gain direct access to all of the job listings available at participating companies, helping to “make employer websites their most valuable recruiting tool” and “promote long-term relationships between employers and job seekers” (Direct Employers, 2002). The executive director of DirectEmployers.com is the former president of Monster.com.
An examination of the discourses present in post-bubble Internet career sites reveals some stark changes. At Guru.com, the logo remains the same but the slogan alongside it has changed from “Power for the independent professional” to “the intelligent path to talent.” The “Guru Gallery” and the “Guru Spotlight” features of their Web page, which focused on the heroic stories of model independent workers, have been eliminated. Though the Guru.com home page cycles through photos of technology workers, the user cannot directly access their stories. Their people-intensive approach has been replaced by an orientation toward providing “articles & advice” on specific issues that independent professionals are likely to encounter: getting started, managing money and finances, handling legal questions, marketing services, paying taxes, and managing work and lifestyle. Each of these issue areas is broken down into subtopics, and those subtopics include articles, FAQs and stories by “interesting people dealing with related issues.” Moreover, the cultural icons that enabled the guru to “celebrate and cultivate” an independent lifestyle are no longer available on the Web site. Though Guru.com representatives continue to appear at trade shows, the June 2002 Web site says nothing about sponsorship of Guru Awards or holding Guru Mixers, events that were part of their efforts to “create a vibrant community” and build a supportive network among solo professionals. Promoting the joy and exhilaration of an independent life/workstyle has been replaced by a traditional, instrumental approach to helping freelance workers find their next assignments.
At the home page of Monster.com, the center position occupied by Monster Talent Market (and linking directly to the success stories of heroic figures) has been assumed by MonsterTRAK, a service that enables graduating college students and alumni to gain access to job listings posted by specific employers who wish to target graduates of that school. (In November 2000 Monster.com acquired JOBTRAK, which had built relationships with more than 1,000 campus career centers.) While MonsterTRAK offers job search tools, scholarship listings, message boards, and a career advice library, the focus on stories of successful individuals has disappeared. Cultural icons continue to be available in The Monster Store.
The power of “Tedmania” sweeping across the city in Monster.com television commercials has been replaced by a 30-second spot on “Your Next Job” that urges employment seekers to view work as a “long-term life enhancement upgrade” in which they should “think big … be happy … [and] never settle” for an ordinary career. This message continues to appeal to the sensibilities of “emerging workers.” However, using the power of “The Monster” to advance the ordinary guy in the labor market is no longer relevant in an era of corporate retrenchment and labor surplus, the commercial implies, so job seekers need to manage their own “expectations” and make the best out of the jobs they find, reporting to the future on Monday morning and bringing along “your own coffee, the good kind!” The “Never Settle” philosophy “encourages Americans to continually strive to enhance their lives and careers” and pursue excellence, says the chairman of Monster (TMP Worldwide, 2002). In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Americans need to emulate the valor of Olympic athletes, says Monster, because “all Americans … deserve the opportunity to find and pursue challenging careers.” In a single flash of the advertising image, the nation’s leading Internet career site dropped the message of leveraging labor market power and adopted the sort of “corporate opportunity” discourse projected by the in-house corporate sites and DirectEmployers.com.
The quest of Internet career sites for ideological influence was always a difficult one because it occurred in a hegemonic free market economic environment where major corporations held, and continue to wield, the resources that shape employment opportunities for the vast majority of the American workforce. The argument that individual job seekers could use the revolutionary properties of the Internet to enhance their labor market power was ephemeral, a manifestation of a particular set of economic conditions during a short-lived period in which employers competed with one another for skilled employees. Once the dot-com bubble burst, Internet career sites revisited the messages they projected and moved toward an instrumental approach to job search and a perspective that elevated the cultivation of opportunity in corporate America above the freedom to work in your slippers.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Georgetown CCT Program Director D. Linda Garcia for her insightful comments on an initial draft of this article. A later version was presented to the 31st Popular Culture Association conference in Philadelphia, PA, 12 April 2001.Footnotes
1. Media Metrix (now comScore) defines WWW Reach % as the “percentage of projected individuals that visited a designated Website or category among the total number of projected individuals using the World Wide Web during a given reporting period” (Media Metrix, 2000, 39).References
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About the Author
Daniel Marschall was a Visiting Researcher (2001-2002) in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He obtained an MA in Communication, Culture and Technology (CCT) from Georgetown University. His work has appeared in the Information Communication & Society (ICS) journal, The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Journal of Career Development, and elsewhere. He has edited books on urban politics, office automation and high performance work systems. He is writing a book based upon a longitudinal ethnographic study of computer programmers, tentatively entitled The Company We Keep: The Evolution of a Software Development Community. He is a member of the Association of Internet Researchers and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).Address: Georgetown University CCT, 3520 Prospect Street NW, Suite 311, Washington, DC 20057.
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