We’ve been saying for a long time that matching technology will fundamentally change recruitment advertising — and while we think lots of recruiters will do deep-dive searches online to identify “passive” candidates, we still think most recruitment will take place through advertising and matching sites.

            Now SmartMoney magazine has reported on job-matching sites, highlighting four it considers “top contenders.” The article by Jami Makan notes that at a traditional recruitment site, “hitting ‘send’ [on a job application] often feels like dropping your résumé into a black hole.” It says the four sites it lists “aim to improve your chances by playing matchmaker.”

            Matching sites offer great opportunities, but there are two key drawbacks that may keep them from ever becoming a mainstream recruiting and job-searching tool:

            — Prospective employees have to go through a tedious, sometimes very lengthy, process of inputting their skills and qualifications; employers have to list their requested or required job qualifications for each position. While people are willing to do that for dating (see EHarmony.com), there’s no indication that most job-seekers or employers would be willing to do that for their positions.

            — Critical mass is, well, critical, and most of the job-matching sites don’t (yet) have the reach or the clout of CareerBuilder.com, Monster.com, TotalJobs.com and many of the major (or niche) sites. Unless there’s a large enough database of jobs or candidates, a matching site can’t make matches.

            Back to the SmartMoney article. We’ve covered three of the four sites it writes about:

            — OneWire.com, which is focused on high-level careers in finance. (We wrote about it in August in a clients-only article.)

            — Jobfox, which is trying to incorporate social networking and matching services with recruiting. Rob McGovern, CEO of Jobfox, was also the founder of CareerBuilder. (We’ve been covering Jobfox since its launch, including this article.)

            — QuietAgent.com, which is operated in conjunction with UnitedWeWork.com. QuietAgent.com is free for job-seekers and only charges employers, with an “early bird promotion” rates ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 annually, depending on company size. Its sister site UnitedWeWork is free, at least for now. QuietAgent offers a proprietary 140-point matching process. We covered it in July.

            — Bintro.com describes itself as “a free matching service for everything.” It offers “employment and services” matching, “charities and volunteering,” “partnerships and joint ventures,” investment, and mentoring matches. But the site is pretty sparse, and there’s no way to search it to see whether it has any real content (i.e., prospective matches) or not. Furthermore, Bintro is listed as a service of Paradigm5, a Delaware corporation, but there’s no other information — contact info, corporate info, telephone number, physical location, etc. — on the site. That would make us extremely hinky about providing even the most basic information. Don’t know where SmartMoney came up with this one, but we’d steer clear.

          There’s one more matching site that’s definitely worthy of note, although it gets (at best) mixed reviews. TheJobNetwork.com, operated by RealMatch / RedMatch, works with hundreds of local newspapers in the U.S. There’s no doubt that the RedMatch technology works — I introduced it to the States six or seven (or eight? Dang, my memory’s fading) years ago. But it suffers from the “critical mass” and “I have to enter too much information” syndromes that may be the death of all of these systems.