The Matchmaker

Tweet

On the egg side, a nationwide sales force of 25 finds paying clients. The sales job can be difficult, notes Lundin, "because we're offering something brand-new. We can't say, 'We're the best x that's out there.' " And hiring at many companies is decentralized, with departmental hiring managers, not the human-resources department, responsible for the decision. A study completed in August by the publisher of Electronic Recruiting News reported that, out of 2,620 recruiting professionals polled, 13% were aware of Career Central's existence.

That same study reported that Career Central ranked in the bottom quartile of the top 45 electronic-recruiting services, in terms of both overall customer satisfaction and quality of results. "On a score of 1 to 5, nobody gave them a 5 out of 5 on any of those metrics," says John Sumser, the study's author. "And you've got to have at least some of those, or else you don't have a word-of-mouth campaign."

Oh, and Career Central also faces a bit of competition. One industry analyst estimates that fully 60% of recruiters have established some sort of on-line presence. Barbara Ling, author of The Internet Recruiting Edge, notes the explosive growth of niche sites, such as the one for African American M.B.A.'s. Korn/Ferry International, the world's biggest search firm, has launched its own Internet initiative, FutureStep, with even fancier database- matching technology. And perhaps most scary of all, two giants have moved into the on-line recruiting space--Excite, with its purchase of start-up Classifieds2000 Inc., and Amazon.com, with its acquisition of Junglee Corp., a maker of "spidering" software that automatically sifts through job postings on company Web sites and deposits them in a job bank.

Finally, Career Central's success to date has been built on a sizzling economy and job market. What happens when those cool off? "Executive searches are very expensive. We'll start to look like a value," argues Hyman. "And we get a flat fee, so when salaries drop, revenues won't. Plus, if we're smart, we'll use a downturn to acquire a ton of job candidates.

"It's going to happen," he says. "I don't lose a lot of sleep over it."

Jerry Useem is a senior writer at Inc.

THE CEO
NAME: Jeffrey Hyman

AGE: 30

FAMILY: single

PERSONAL FUNDS INVESTED: in the low six figures

EQUITY HELD: about 15%

SALARY: about $60,000--"only enough to get by. The money can do more good by leaving it in the company."

PREVIOUS JOBS: product management at Intuit; sales and marketing at Black & Decker

What The Experts Say

COMPETITOR
Man Jit Singh, chief executive of FutureStep, an on-line recruiting venture of Korn/Ferry International and the Wall Street Journal

A 14% placement rate--I chuckled when I saw that number. And I did some quick math. If you're paying $2,995 per search, that works out to a real cost to clients of $21,500 to make a placement. And since the average salary of each placement is $90,000, that comes out to a 24% commission, which is almost precisely what a contingency recruiter would charge. Except in this case, you have to do all the work, all the screening, yourself. That changes the economics of using Career Central dramatically.

I also think Career Central is attacking the wrong problem. With the connectivity of the Internet, finding rÉsumÉs is becoming the easy part--a commodity. The hard part is assessing the data. And Career Central performs a low-end keyword match and does little in the way of assessment. It's Kmart: you get it off the rack and see if it fits.

INDUSTRY OBSERVER
Margaret Riley Dikel, publisher of The Riley Guide, a primer on Internet job searching

I wish these guys well, and I think their niche approach is smart, but I think they're setting themselves up for some unexpected pitfalls. For instance, this notion that they're providing 80% of what a retained executive-search consultant provides--it's far less than that. Identifying a list of candidates is actually a fairly quick process. Where headhunters really earn their money is wooing candidates to the altar, which in a labor-shortage environment is becoming particularly difficult. Recruiting, as they say, is still something of a "black art." The people at Career Central may know technology, but it doesn't sound to me as if they really know what a headhunter does.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Technology Newsletter

Email Address: