First, there are the job seekers, consisting of both graduating M.B.A. students and alumni already in the workforce. They pay nothing. To register, they take 20 to 30 minutes to fill out a "member profile" on Career Central's Web site, providing detailed information about their experience (degrees, job titles, languages spoken) and their desires (salary expectations, company size, willingness to travel, preferred geographic location). Their profiles reside on Career Central's database.
Then there are the business schools. They pay nothing, either. By signing on, they simply agree to distribute Career Central's Web address or registration diskettes to their students and, often, their recent alumni. What's in it for them? They look cool for offering their graduates improved access to companies that, as Hyman himself could attest, aren't easy to find.
Finally, there are the employers. They pay. However, they're not granted direct access to Career Central's database of candidates. Rather, for a fee of $2,995 per search, they submit their specifications to a "recruiting search consultant" at Career Central, who then queries the database on their behalf.
And it's here that Career Central's slick automation takes over. The candidates on the database who match the employer's specs--and whose own desires match the opportunity--are automatically sent E-mail informing them of the job opening (a process the company calls "JobCasting"). If the JobCast titillates their interest, they send a reply E-mail with a rÉsumÉ attached. Career Central's software then automatically detaches and prints the rÉsumÉs.
Within five business days of their request, employers receive a packet containing the rÉsumÉs of at least 10 qualified, interested candidates. If they don't--if Career Central can't find enough candidates--they pay nothing. (Once the rÉsumÉs are shipped, Career Central exits the process: unlike executive recruiters, it leaves interviewing and background checking to the employers and exerts no pressure to make a job placement happen. "We're Switzerland on this deal," declares vice-president of sales Skip Sanzeri.)
Underpinning Hyman's system is a series of assumptions. The first assumption is that headhunters, for all their full-service frills, really spend most of their time identifying and tracking down qualified candidates. By that logic, headhunters don't provide much more than Career Central does. "We're providing 80% of the value for about 10% of the cost--and in five business days," says Patrick Burns, Career Central's vice-president of strategic alliances. "We'll lead you almost to the lake to drink. You just have to walk the last 20 yards to quench your thirst."
A second assumption is that job hunters want confidentiality and control. The problem with posting a rÉsumÉ to a Web site is that the whole world--including one's current employer--can see it. Hence Hyman's decision to forsake the Web for E-mail: candidates can decide on a case-by-case basis which companies should get their rÉsumÉs.
A third assumption is that, to be of real value, a recruiting service has to reach what is oxymoronically known as "the passive job seeker"--the employee who is satisfied but wouldn't mind hearing about a dream job. (Newspaper classifieds typically reach a more disenchanted lot.) Here, again, the virtues of E-mail prevail: Career Central's system is a "push" technology if there ever was one, delivering job opportunities to candidates' desktops without the candidates' even asking for them.
That's presuming, of course, that candidates have taken the time to fill out Career Central's member profile in the first place. Cindy Lundin, Career Central's director of corporate marketing and a Kellogg graduate herself, claims it's not unreasonable to expect even passive M.B.A.'s to make that 20- or 30-minute up-front investment. "M.B.A.'s will find a great job on Monday," she says. "On Tuesday they want to know if there's something better out there."
A fourth and final assumption is that employers crave speed. An executive recruiter might take two or three months to present a list of candidates. "We can JobCast a search in half an hour," boasts Hyman, "which is faster than a headhunter can even go to the bathroom." And instead of having to wade through the piles of low-caliber rÉsumÉs that a classified ad would yield, employers presumably end up with a small batch of on-target ones, saving still more time.
As most of Hyman's M.B.A.-wielding talent pool would know, the 1990s have spawned a buzzword for the kind of strategic play Career Central represents: disintermediation. Use technology to remove the traditional middlemen (headhunters) between buyers (companies) and sellers (M.B.A.'s). It's a play that perfectly suits that popular Silicon Valley conceit--that there ain't a market around that a little silicon can't render more efficient. "Listening to Jeff," says Lun Shin Yuen, an eight-year Intuit veteran and database wizard who became Career Central's cofounder, "I really couldn't punch any holes in the concept."
The operation
Today, Hyman and Yuen work in a low-slung, standard-issue office building honeycombed with cubicles, in Palo Alto, Calif., just a mile down U.S. 101 from their former employer. Of the nearly 70 employees buzzing about (Hyman hired 6 of them off Career Central's own database), most are veterans of one high-tech start-up or another.
