Article from ePhilanthropy eZine

Just as it is often difficult for people to find what they are looking for on the Internet, it is frequently a challenge for the people themselves to be found when they want to be.
For businesses dealing with this issue, Internet companies have long capitalized on the frustration by selling merchants the opportunity to increase their visibility among pages of search results. Now job seekers and other individuals are being offered similar ways to raise their Web profiles — for a fee.
At least two online career services, for example, now offer job candidates some sort of listing enhancement. The Careerbuilder.com site has a "résumé upgrade" service that lets users pay to have their résumés appear near or at the top of the list when an employer conducts a search. On Monster.com, meanwhile, candidates must leave the ranking to the luck of the search software but can pay for a premium service that includes, among other features, the promise that their résumés will appear in bold text amid the plain-text search results.
Other examples of these hey-look-me-over features include options for individuals who are selling things on the Web — as on eBay, where sellers can choose from a menu of paid "listing upgrade" services to give their wares more prominent placement.
While some Web site operators oppose the idea of letting people buy their way to the top because it may seem to reduce the validity of search results, others see it as a way to let serious users distinguish themselves from the pack.
Careerbuilder.com, operated from Chicago, collects $20 to $150 apiece from job seekers who pay for the résumé upgrade option, which moves their listings toward the top of the search heap. "Obviously, the more you pay, the more on top you are," said Dawn Haden, Careerbuilder's vice president for human resources.
The fee is good for 30 days and functions somewhat like a bid. If one candidate has paid $40 and no one else in the results listings has paid more, then the top slot goes to the $40 bidder. In the results list, the upgraded résumés appear with a faintly shaded background and an orange check mark — a distinction employers may or may not bother to decipher by reading the key at the bottom of the page.
So does preferred placement translate into better results?
In some sense, it does. Careerbuilder has offered the option since 1999, and according to Ms. Haden, employers click on upgraded résumés 200 percent more often, compared with the regular ones — a statistic she attributes to time pressure and the way people use search features. "As an employer, not that many people have the time to go through hundreds of résumés," Ms. Haden said. "They're going to pull them up in the order of the search."
At least one example bears that out. Kristin Hunavy, whose résumé came up first in a list of 2,348 search results for a systems administrator in the New York area, said she had paid $40 for a Careerbuilder upgrade because she had been getting no responses from employers. (On Careerbuilder and many other job sites, anyone who posts a résumé can track how many times it comes up in employers' searches and how often it is actually viewed.)
"The number of searches that it's come up in and the number of clicks it has gotten has doubled since I did it," said Ms. Hunavy, who lives in Elmhurst, Queens, and was laid off from her previous position as a Lotus Notes developer for a technology company in early December. But here's the catch: although her résumé has received more exposure lately, that has not led to any phone calls from employers.
"It hasn't worked one way or the other yet," she said. "I'm not really sure if it was the right thing to do or not."
According to Ms. Haden at Careerbuilder, fewer than 10 percent of the job seekers who use the site take advantage of the upgrade service. Among those that do, the $20 option is the most popular. The site does not track hiring rates for its users, Ms. Haden said, and so far the upgrade service has not been a significant source of revenue.
One of Careerbuilder's competitors, the Monster.com site, has pursued a different model. Job candidates can pay $7 a month for a premium service that includes "résumé enhancement." Although this feature does not change the order of the search results, it promises to draw attention to a premium member's résumé by listing the title in bold and adding colorful graphics that correspond to particular skills.
Jeff Taylor, Monster's founder and chairman, said the premium service represented less than 1 percent of the company's revenue, but he did not have statistics on how many people used it or if it increased the chance that a résumé was viewed.
"What we offer today is a purely skill-based system where people who have the right skills are going to come up higher in the search," Mr. Taylor said. "If you can buy your way to the top of the job-seeker pile, then the employer is going to have a less valuable experience."
That, of course, is the balance Internet companies have to weigh — the business trade-offs of stacking the deck — and why different business models are emerging in various markets.
On eBay, for instance, people selling merchandise can choose from a whole rate card of options to help empty their attics — from $99.95 to be listed as a featured item on eBay's home page to a mere 25 cents to have a photo appear with an item's listing in the search results.
Kevin Pursglove, an eBay spokesman, said the company did not release information about which features were used by members. But in general, he said, items that included a photo tended to generate more bids and higher selling prices than items that did not.
Sellers can typically post one photo free with the information about each item. But for additional photos or services, eBay charges a variety of fees — like 75 cents to "supersize" a picture.
But elsewhere on eBay and some other Web sites, photos are emerging as a listings enhancement for which sellers are willing to pay. The New York Times on the Web, for example, charges $16 extra to include a photo, floor plan and video with a listing of a home for sale and $10 extra for a photo with a classified ad for a car.
So far, charging for listings enhancements or preferred placements has not caught on in a setting where people might seem most eager to put a good face on things: online dating services. Last week, Yahoo Personals began offering members the option to include audio or video clips with their listings in addition to photographs, which have always been an option. But Yahoo is not charging for that enhancement — at least for now.
Yahoo Personals would not make someone available to talk about the service last week. But Tim Sullivan, president of the leading online dating service, Match.com, which lets members post photographs free, offered his perspective on the subject.
"Any model that has listings like eBay or apartments or jobs or personals — or just flat-out search — is a balance between maximizing revenue and providing utility and value to the actual users of those search results," Mr. Sullivan said. "We could probably charge people for premium placement on Match.com, but if it became our primary way of sorting search results, it would undermine the value of what Match.com offers."
Mr. Sullivan did not rule out the possibility of charging for listings enhancements like audio or video when they were introduced in the future. But he said he did not expect video clips to be wildly popular.
"The quality of a video that one produces oneself," he said, "isn't always the right thing to add to a profile."