Have you ever suspected that the online job application you spent so much time completing disappeared into cyberspace never to be seen again?

Unfortunately, that was the case for many Web sites, according to the results of a study conducted by online recruiting specialist CareerXroads. The company conducts an annual review of the Fortune 500 firms’ Web staffing pages in search of the best online job-hunting experiences. This year, CareerXroads created a fictitious candidate, Vinnie Boombotz, and had 25 human resources executives use this alter ego to apply for as many jobs as possible on the Fortune 500 sites.

You can check out Vinnie’s full resume at http://www.careerxroads.com/vinnieb/, where you’ll see that he is employed as a certified protection associate at Bad-a-Bing Corp. and calls a New Jersey town called Lotsamoola home.

Like Vinnie’s invented resume, the online job hunting experience wasn’t pretty. According to CareerXroads, 28 of the country’s biggest companies didn’t have a single trace of hiring activity online. Nearly 25% of the sites didn’t have a careers button on their home page. And most of the responses Vinnie received after entering his online profile were generic and didn’t reference the job title for which he applied.

If Vinnie were a real person, surely he would have appreciated the attention he got from the Wall Street Journal, in which Kris Maher interviewed companies whose automated recruitment systems encouraged Vinnie to apply for specific positions. (Go to http://www.careerjournal.com/jobhunting/usingnet/20030707-maher.html for the full article.)

The good news, however, is that 20% of the corporate job sites do a great job of reaching out to job seekers, providing a clear path to job opportunities and giving meaningful information.  For a list of the top 25 corporate staffing sites, check out the complete report at  http://www.careerxroads.com/2003Top25/2003Top25.pdf