Of the 55 per cent of respondents who said they used the boards, only five per cent thought the response they received was 'excellent.' Forty three per cent thought the service was 'good' and 35 per cent said it was 'average.' Seventeen per cent thought the response was 'poor.'

Forty-three per cent said the Internet had made the recruiting process easier while 55 per cent felt there was no difference.

The survey showed that less than a third of 150 participants reported their 'cost per hire' had been reduced because of Internet recruiting. Twenty-eight per cent said there had been 'no change' and 44 per cent hadn't yet measured the internet's effects on their costs.

Twenty-nine per cent of agencies surveyed said they used newspapers to advertise vacancies and another 27 per cent used recruitment consultancies. The internet ranked in third pace with 12.6 per cent of vacancies.

From companies/ agents using the Internet to recruit:

• fifty-six per cent of hires came from job postings;
  
• six per cent from CV databases (totalling 62 per cent for job boards);
  
• thirty-six per cent from the company's own website; and
  
• two per cent came from search engines.

Alan Whitford, Managing Partner of the Abtech Partnership and one of the organisers of Totaljobs.com's seminar series, said: "These findings run parallel with some of the information coming out of the US, the internet is not being used to its full potential by agents looking for workers. Sadly for those of us in the industry, only 10 per cent of companies actually have a dedicated Internet recruiter.

"The survey's key finding was the way it showed a continued upwards trend in the use of job boards and the internet in general for recruiting staff. The other significant finding is the growth of advertising on the web for sectors other than IT, for example engineering, administration, secretarial and sales.

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Richard Powell, Shout99