Q: After years of dreaming about starting my own business, I finally took plunge a little over a year ago. To say least, my dream quickly became a nightmare. The business didn't do nearly as well as I had hoped. I ran out of money within six months and had to take out a second mortgage on my house just to keep things going. I have now closed business and am left with a pile of bills that will probably put me in personal bankruptcy. I don't mean to take it out on you, but instead of telling people how great having your own business is all time you should also warn them that starting a business is not easy and can be devastating when things go wrong. -- Gene K.

A: Gene, I hope that I have never given anyone impression that having your own business is a walk in park. To contrary, I'm like proverbial Chicken Little when it comes to warning readers of obstacles and pitfalls that await those considering entrepreneurial plunge.

To quote myself from a column I wrote earlier this year, "If it was easy, my friend, everybody would do it."

Just to make sure we're in agreement, let me reiterate standard warnings once again. Starting a business is incredibly hard work. It takes long hours and deep pockets. It demands unbridled passion and unquestioned commitment. It requires that you give of yourself until you often feel there is nothing left to give. And sometimes, even after you've done all that you can do and given all that you can give, business fails.

Period.

Blood, sweat, and tears can only carry you so far in business world. Good intentions and grand ideas won't pay office rent. You can not make payroll with Monopoly money.

I certainly don't mean to make light of your situation. In fact, I know exactly how you feel. I failed so miserably my first time in business that I swore I would never think about working for myself again. All I wanted to do was to find a nice, secure 9-to-5 job that provided me with a nice steady paycheck. I yearned for opportunity to grow fat and happy on someone else's payroll for a change.

I never again wanted to have to think about customers or employees or withholding taxes or accounts receivable or anything else even remotely associated with being in business.

I just wanted to crawl in a hole and die because my business had failed, and in my All-American, macho male, "you are what you do" brain that meant that I was a failure, too.

Getting over failure of a business can be extremely difficult, especially if you are one of those entrepreneurs (like I was) who wrongly relates success or failure of a business to success or failure of you as a person.

The goal of hiring is to get best candidate for job. The challenge is finding that best candidate. How do you reach them? In present economic times each open position brings in 100’s of resumes. How do you handle them? It is also to be expected that 95% of resumes received are not appropriate for particular job. How do you identify best? Recruiting cost which includes publicity, your time and recruiting commissions for 3rd party search firms add up. How do you reduce them? This article provides answers to above questions.

How to Reach Candidates

Traditionally, companies used referrals, networking, advertised in local newspapers or went to a search firm. Referrals and networking are still lowest cost options. That failing, companies now have numerous options.

Internet job boards are a good place to start. Companies such as Monster (www.monster.com), Hotjobs (www.hotjobs.com) and CareerBuilder (www.careerbuilder.com) spend a lot of money advertising to prospective job seeker. In 2003, Monster’s advertising budget was $115 million. This attracts sizable traffic – 1.6 million daily visitors and about 36 million resumes in their database. This is not a pitch for Monster.com but these numbers are indicators of reach of online job boards. Monster.com, HotJobs.com, CareerBuilder.com and numerous other job boards are a strong source of applicants for any job.

Your website can be a good source of applicants. The problem here is traffic. How many come to your site looking for jobs. Publicizing jobs on your website costs you nothing, so go ahead but you may not be able to generate enough applicant volume from your website alone. To paraphrase Willy Sutton’s famous answer, Why do you go to job boards Willy? Cause that’s were jobs are.

The best way to build a sizable applicant volume for sure is to advertise not just in 1 job board but on multiple boards. You can choose 2 big boards and one niche board like your local newspaper (in Atlanta, you can use www.ajcjobs.com ) or specialty boards like emplawyer.com (for lawyers), jobsinthemoney.com (finance), engineerjobs.com (engineers) etc. You should also publicize open position on your website. (Contact author for a free, categorized listing of popular job boards using Alexa Traffic Rank)

How to Handle Resume Volume

Automatically! If you advertise in say 3 job boards and your website, you can expect at least 200 resumes. You do not want them coming to your e-mail box as this would require you to open each mail, save resume etc for each and every one of them. This becomes tedious and time consuming. You want them to be automatically routed to a database or a resume management system.

Your resume management system should be able to process incoming resumes, extract information from resume, and build a list of applicants with their name, contact information and a summary, so that you can glance at list to see how your publicity is working. Sophisticated resume management systems go a step forward and extract experience, education, summary and objectives from resume. This is especially useful in identifying best candidates without actually reading every resume.