When HotJobs.com launched its online recruitment site in 1996, it was almost "exclusively an IT board, listings for programmers making $40,000 [a year]," said Emily Hickey, a product manager for the site. But as the Internet grew exponentially and the ever-tightening job market left companies scrambling to fill jobs, sites like HotJobs.com have moved upscale.

Now Hickey said that less than half of the listings represent traditional MIS jobs, while higher-paying sales, marketing, and engineering positions are increasingly taking their place. Positioning itself as "the experienced professional's job board," HotJobs.com has been making a conscious effort to play to this more upscale job market.

And they're not alone. Of the 5,000 or so job sites that exist, sites that recruit for non-technical and management positions have indeed become a hot area. Lack of qualified talent and the ability to solicit prime jobs much less expensively than they could through a headhunter have driven many top companies, from Disney to Dell, to extend their searches online - either at professional-oriented job boards or through the matchmaking-style sites such as Career Central that operate more like an electronic executive search firm.

Steve Garrison, a senior consultant with HotJobs.com, said that 85 percent of recent college graduates expect to find a job online. The question is, why would the most attractive, experienced, and employed professionals - the passive job market - need to look online for jobs? Garrison believes he has the answer, and it goes back to well before the Net's recent popularity.

"Since the corporate downsizings of the 1980's, people have started to realize that working for multiple companies is a good thing," he said. "People are saying, 'I have to manage my career, because no one else is going to do it for me.'"

In other words, the Internet is yet again facilitating another change that had already been set in motion. Online recruiters agree that while the commonly held belief is that the best job candidates aren't looking because they don't need to, the proliferation of confidential and high-caliber recruitment sites has created a market where everyone is looking.

"As we say in our ads, welcome to the new job market," said Jeff Hyman, CEO of Career Central, who ads that 90 percent of his 100,000 members are in the passive job market.

And while standalone sites like HotJobs.com and Career Central have built credibility and critical mass through strong offline advertising and growing word-of-mouth support, then entrance of major traditional players will add to the competition.

Susanne Wedemeyer-Losch, vice president of marketing and sales at Futurestep, the online resume matching arm of the executive search firm Korn/Ferry, said that Futurestep was created specifically to deal with the $75,000 to $150,000 a year middle manager positions that are usually not lucrative enough to warrant the traditional large search firm's attention. Executive search firms are typically paid a fee of 25 percent to 33 percent of a position's first-year salary. Futurestep charges the same 33 percent as Korn/Ferry.

But Wedemeyer-Losch adds that client companies benefit from the expertise and support of a traditional executive search, with the speed and efficiency of the Internet.

By applying Furturestep's proprietary matching algorithms to its cache of 220.000 professional resumes - candidates' salaries average $98,000 - Wedemeyer-Losch said Futurestep has been able to fill positions within as little as 10 days.

But Garrisoin of HotJobs.com, who has more than 20 years of experience working for traditional search firms like Ward, Howell and Heidrick & Struggles, is skeptical of how well traditional firms will fare in the age of Internet recruiting.

Garrison, like most online recruiters, believes that most upper-echelon or specialized jobs will never move online, but he maintained that these jobs represent only about 10 percent of the traditional search business. As online recruitment moves further up the job market food chain, these sites will increasingly eat away the revenue of the executive search business. Much like the channel-conflict issues that have been highly publicized at Barnes & Noble with its online efforts, companies like Korn/Ferry could eventually be cutting into their own core business.

Another factor at work here is cost. For $600, a company can post 20 job listings for three months at HotJobs.com; for a flat fee of $3,495, Career Central promises to deliver its clients a set of five suitable candidates who are interested in the job and the company. While results are not guaranteed and the hit rate for these standalone services may be lower than a traditional executive search, the cost is a fraction of the $33,000 a company would need to fork over to fill a $100,000 marketing slot throught Futurestep.

Wedemeyer-Losch said clients will still look to services like Futurestep for their results, expertise, and added benefits, such as loaning videophones to candidates so employers don't need to pay to fly them out for first-round interviews. She added that she sees going online as a way to expand Korn/Ferry's business.

Garrison doesn't believe recruiters will move forward unscathed. "The economy created a boom market for executive search," he said. "But within three years, you'll see the volume of search firms start declining."