The Matchmaker

 

As for Hyman's comment that he "can't imagine pissing through $10 million," he should take a look at Intellimatch. It had all sorts of exclusive technology that set it apart, a database of 300,000 candidates, and $10 million in venture capital. And it declared bankruptcy last January--$2.3 million in debt. Building a brand in this market is not cheap.

INDUSTRY OBSERVER
Paul Hawkinson, publisher of The Fordyce Letter, a search-industry newsletter based in St. Louis

The concept is certainly not new. The only new ingredient is the Internet, and that doesn't necessarily make for a more tasty cake. Back in 1960, there was a company called Careers Incorporated. It used computers to do the same sort of discounted rÉsumÉ generation. The model has replicated itself at least a dozen times since then, and I don't see any of those companies still around.

The fallacy in all of these types of operations is that they view the process as merely slot filling rather than problem solving. Most managers fail not because they can't do the work but because they don't fit in with the company's culture. So as Bill Vick, the founder of Recruiters OnLine, has said, recruiting remains a contact sport. Career Central may call its employees "recruiting search consultants," but they're still just coding clerks who don't have the foggiest notion about a company's personality, or culture, or the fact that its CEO won't hire anyone who's taller than he is.

I have no doubt Career Central is going to put together some glitzy brochures and turn some heads. And it will even find some customers, because the rapid turnover among HR professionals makes them a relatively easy target for Career Central's services. But for Hyman to say that the traditional headhunter is "toast" is a reiteration of a forecast that I've heard for decades. Surprise--recruiters are still around and will be for decades to come.

POTENTIAL CUSTOMER
Michael Messier, vice-president of human resources at Open Market Inc., a four-year-old software company based in Burlington, Mass.

The price is low enough, and with Career Central's money-back guarantee, it's a decent value proposition. The worst that could happen is that I'm not happy with the service and I ask for my money back. But I'd caution Hyman about his statement that the recruiting industry hasn't changed for 100 years. It's clearly not true. I started my career in the early 1980s as a headhunter, when it was basically file cabinets full of rÉsumÉs. Now at least 75% of large recruiting firms have some kind of sophisticated rÉsumÉ-retrieval system such as Resumix or Restrac in place. Those are databases into which you can fax or E-mail or scan hundreds of thousands of rÉsumÉs and then use optical character recognition to sort by relevance. Technology has been applied.

VENTURE CAPITALIST
William Egan, partner at Burr, Egan, Deleage & Co., in Boston

Hyman has built something of value here, but it might be of more value as a wholesale, not a retail, operation. Hyman looks at the fact that many headhunters are using his service and seems to take it as proof of headhunters' impending obsolescence. But I would think that headhunters are actually grateful for, not fearful of, the existence of Career Central. It allows them to cheaply outsource their front-end task of finding candidates and focus on their real value-creating activity: the personal element. And the personal element is something Career Central will never be able to offer if it sticks with its arm's-length "Switzerland" approach, which I think makes for a pretty incomplete retail concept.

So Career Central might consider becoming a wholesaler to executive-search firms. That, of course, would require a less-ambitious conception of itself--realizing it's an evolutionary provider of efficiency rather than a revolutionary new business model. And if headhunters were to become his new clientele, Hyman might have to tone down the "stick a fork in 'em" rhetoric a bit.

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