It was around the year 1999 that Internet-based recruitment services truly took off in China. Job-hunters quickly turned to the Internet as a possible source of help and were not dissatisfied. By 2001, there were more than 200 websites relating to employment and recruitment opportunities. The popular ones, such as Beijing-based Zhaopin.com and ChinaHR.com and Shanghai-based 51job.com, were responsible for catering to a massive 70% of the expanding market. The highest total for Zhaopin.com was an impressive 1 million page views per day and 1000 new job listings every day. Globalization and common use technology has definitely opened up the doors for Internet-based recruitment services in China, as is evident from the above statistics (People’s Daily, 2001).

Job-seekers in China however, showed mixed responses to this use of Internet technology as means of attaining employment. Some were ecstatically positive about the entire affair such as Zeng Yunqiang, who works for a foreign-funded company in Pudong. Yunqiang used the online recruitment services available on the Internet to secure a job for himself and rid himself of the hassles of the traditional methods. According to him, “It was like jumping into a sea. I could update my resume online and instantly contact companies by e-mail.” But other people had less successful results and consequently, less positive views about Internet-based recruiting services. Jhin Zu, a student enrolled at the Fudan University, failed in his attempts to find a job online. Zu, who was a journalism major, said that even though all of his room mates registered online in search of jobs, the responses from companies were rare. Even when the companies did give feedback, they often said that these students lacked the required experience (People’s Daily, 2001).

However, in spite of the probability of lack of suitable response, the Internet recruitment services do remain a feasible method of job-hunting in China. The country has a shortage of candidates as its main employment problem and needs as many recruitment options as are available to secure the needed staff. Foreign companies which are operating in China realize this and are hence very aggressive and creative in their staffing efforts. Companies with established in operations also consider the Internet as an effective employment tool because newspapers, though are inexpensive, create the problem of delay owing to the 1-2 month publishing backlog. Also, an absence of qualified personnel for management, finance, human resource, marketing and other professional positions remains a problem for Chinese employers. Hence, they view the Internet as another tool which they must exhaust to attain a solution to their problem. As for job-seekers, there exist both categories: the ones who believe Internet-based recruitment services to be the solution their every trouble, and those who have had less-than-favorable experiences. But, desperate job-hunters still use the Internet as an effective job-search tool (Gross, 1997; Kucznski, 1999).
In the U.S., more and more companies are using online sources for recruitment and by 2000, 47% of employers were said to use the Internet for recruitment. Specifically, research showed that a large number of companies (42%) recruit their professional staff this way, while 36% scout for Managerial level employees and only 23% hunt for employees to fill manual positions. According to Imogen Daniels, employee resourcing advisor, IPD, “The Internet as a recruitment tool is here to stay. I anticipate more employers switching to this method of recruitment”. (47% of employers use the Internet for recruitment)

A survey conducted by Austin Knight Inc., a recruitment and employee communications firm based in Sausalito, California, found that around two-thirds of the companies surveyed believed the Internet to be a more cost-effective tool for recruitment than all other available tools. Employers cited the following advantages: increased likelihood of finding the perfect choice as there is access to more people as well as a broader selection of applicants, a greater control over target employee, access to people with a technical background and expertise in computers, as well as ease of use and economy (Starske, 1996).

These advantages may remain, job recruitment web sites may be the most cost-effective option available to employers and their numbers and use may be growing, but a study released by Forrester Research Inc. found that these web sites still do not work as well as they should. Analysts for the Cambridge Mass. firm that though the process of job search might be made a whole lot easier, the sheer magnitude of the task has led to a whole lot of inefficiency. The quality of job-recruiting web sites varies from one site to the next and there is no fixed standard. Aside from this, online resume tools have time and again proven to be unproductive and the massive amounts of resumes distributed over the thousands of recruitment web sites have created a messy clutter. This mess is holding back the industry, estimated to grow to $7.1 billion by 2005, from significantly moving ahead (Featherly, 2000).

According to Charlene Li, a senior analyst at Forrester, “It's sort of a mixed bag, but basically people are not very satisfied. There's a huge amount of promise, and in some cases they make the whole job search very much easier. But because it's easier, it's also a lot more cumbersome. The promise isn't being fulfilled (Featherly, 2000).”

Even with the inefficiencies involved, there is talk of increasing online spending on recruiters’ parts. By 2004, this spending was supposed to increase by 52%. The share of print advertising and fee-based search agencies in overall spending budgets was expected to drop. User on the other hand, do not always have posituive experiences relating to online job-hunting. Some job-seekers find job web sites difficult to use and also that a lot of the job listings are the same across different web sites. The old problem of not getting reposnses after submitting resumes surfaces here as well, which reduces the quality of the experience for these users (Featherly, 2000).

All the same, the future is still bright for the concept of Internet-based recruitment services, and the existent problems of inefficiency and an over-cluttered environment are all targeted to be sorted by the use of technology in this area. According to Li, “what's going to happen is that these job sites are going to evolve into ... a place where you manage your career just like a stock portfolio.” Hence, the use of online job sites is only going to become more popular with every passing day (Featherly, 2000).