The Matchmaker

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.

In one cubicle, Jonathan Hart, one of 11 "recruiting search consultants," is conducting a search. It began when he spoke to a hiring manager at a client company by telephone, translating her plain-English specifications (for a marketing vice-president) into a computerized query. The database returned a list of 81 potential candidates. Hart sent each of those job seekers an E-mail about the opening, and now the E-mail responses are beginning to roll in. "You can see the numbers moving," notes Hart, his eyes flicking across an on-screen tabulation of "yeses" (as in, "Yes, I'm interested in that job") and "nos." The final tally of yes responses is 13, and so 13 rÉsumÉs are printed out and overnighted to the client.

A successful search--or so Hart hopes. There's always the possibility that the client will balk at those 13 candidates and insist that Hart redo the search with slightly different parameters. "Waffling costs us a lot of money," says Hyman. "The business model wasn't built to be profitable redoing a search 20 times." He says he's sometimes had to draw the line with especially finicky clients: "It'll drive you out of business if you're too nice."

Such "massaging" is necessary about 20% of the time. And another 10% of the time, Career Central is unable to net those 10 qualified, interested candidates at all. That situation is another money loser: it means Career Central doesn't get paid, even though it has already incurred most of its variable costs, which total $1,200 per search.

Hyman says that 150 business schools, including all the major ones, are working with Career Central. The company's literature lists among its clients such whiz-bang technology companies as Amazon.com, Marimba, Cellular One, and PeopleSoft, as well as blue-chippers like Bank of America, NestlÉ, Toyota, and Andersen Consulting. More than 50,000 M.B.A.'s--about 85% of them graduates already in the workforce--have registered in its database. (That's out of the roughly 1 million M.B.A.'s U.S. business schools have churned out over the past 12 years.)

Other numbers are rather less impressive. From December 1996 to August 1998, Career Central performed about 700 searches, resulting in 100 job placements--a placement rate of 14%. Until recently, a placement was a rare enough event to occasion a minor celebration in the Career Central offices, though Hyman is shooting to boost the rate to at least 30% by the end of 1999, and ultimately to 50%. While most placements have been in the ranks of middle management (average salary: $90,000), a few have been executive-level positions: the company once placed a vice-president at E*Trade.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6  NEXT