Career Central:
Recruitment Made Efficient
Resume-matching service Career Central takes the guesswork out of online job
searching and recruiting.
Jeff Hyman knew there had to
be a better way to conduct the employee-recruiting process. After all, he had
been there himself, both as a young M.B.A. graduate and as a recruiter for
Black & Decker and Intuit.
Coming out of the master's
program at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management,
Hyman desired a career in the high-tech world of California’s Silicon Valley.
However, although Kellogg is a prestigious M.B.A. school, and Hyman had good
grades, he soon found out that high-tech firms don’t do much recruiting at
Northwestern. Undeterred, he traveled to the West Coast on his own tab, cold
calling potential employers and setting up interviews. In what he calls a
stroke of good luck, Hyman met some well-connected people who eventually led
him to a job at Intuit.
But what about all those
M.B.A. grads who don’t get so lucky, Hyman thought. And what about all the
high-tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area that need a way to connect
with M.B.A. grads? The answers to those questions were the seeds that would
grow to become Career Central.
Career Central (formerly MBA Central)
is an e-mail-based recruiting service dedicated to matching qualified M.B.A.
grads, software developers and marketing professionals with potential
employers. For job seekers, the service is free. Candidates register using
Career Central’s exclusive JobCast software, which can be downloaded from the
company's Web site or obtained via snail mail. As part of their profiles,
candidates indicate experience and education, as well as preferences such as
position, salary and location desired. Career Central then e-mails to
candidates job openings that fit their profiles. If a particular position
interests the candidates, they upload their résumé to Career Central, which in
turn sends a paper copy of the résumé to the prospective employer. The service
is confidential in that employers know nothing of the candidate until he or she
e-mails a résumé to Career Central, authorizing the release of that information
to the chosen employer.
“The biggest complaint we’ve
heard from hiring managers and human resource executives is that they simply
cannot find enough qualified technical applicants,” says Hyman. “On the other
hand, developers tell us they’re deluged with job offers, many of which do not
interest them.” Hyman feels that Career Central's solution addresses both
problems.
For employers, the service
costs $2,995 per search per position, which guarantees them a minimum of five
software candidates or at least 10 M.B.A. or marketing candidates. The client
simply calls Career Central’s toll-free number to set the recruiting process in
motion. Clients speak with a search consultant to describe the type of employee
needed, then Career Central sends e-mail messages to candidates who fit the
description.
Career Central touts itself
as neither a résumé database nor a recruiting Web site; rather, it is a means
through which employers can be linked to job-seekers confidentially and
cost-effectively, says Hyman.
“It’s a service I would’ve
wanted when I was looking for a job right out of M.B.A. school,” says Jeffrey
Hyman, the 30-year-old president, CEO and co-founder of Career Central. “It
truly is a no-hassle way to connect with top employers. Candidates basically
have job prospects handed to them through e-mail.”
The company started out as
MBA Central in June 1996 with only two employees, Hyman and co-founder Lun
Yuen, and focused only on the pool of recruiters seeking masters graduates. The
two founders met as fellow Intuit employees in a classic case of good timing. Yuen,
who holds an M.S. in computer science from Stanford University, was leaving
Intuit around the same time Hyman wanted to start MBA Central. And at that time
the Internet was truly beginning to be recognized as a viable medium for
recruitment.
Yuen, drawn to the prospect
of starting a new company and having personally experienced recruiting
frustrations, thought partnering with Hyman, who had been putting a business
plan together on the side, simply made sense.
“His idea was so sound in my
mind,” says Yuen, senior vice president of technology. “The thought of starting
a new company had always excited me, and Jeff and I really clicked.”
The company, which was born
in Hyman’s apartment, quickly grew to six employees when the founders hired
four engineers. Days and nights were spent in the “office” as the crew entered
the challenge of raising capital. As the word spread about the fledgling
company, the investors came. To date, the company has raised about $15 million.
The company eventually
upgraded its workspace from Hyman’s apartment to a full-fledged office, and a
year after its inception, MBA Central began to see a need in the software
development and marketing fields for the service it provided.
“Clients loved our service
and asked us why we didn’t offer it for other fields,” Hyman says. “When we, in
turn, asked our clients what other areas they’d like to see this type of
service in, they mentioned software developers, programmers and marketing
professionals.”
MBA Central added the
service for software developers in June 1998, and several months later, it
launched the service for marketing professionals. Soon after, the partners
changed the company name to Career Central to reflect its new, expanded focus.
The Internet, more and more,
is being used as an employment-recruiting tool. Web sites such as The Monster Board, CareerPath and America’s Job Bank allow users to post their
résumés online and contain extensive job banks that advertise positions in
nearly every occupation imaginable. Perhaps surprisingly, that is one of the
main reasons why Hyman does not consider those types of Web sites to be
competition for Career Central.
“We’re a specialist site,
not a generalist one,” Hyman says. “We serve people with specific backgrounds,
education and experience. Career Central is not the type of site that has
something for everyone. Both our clients and the candidates know exactly what
they want and exactly what they should expect to receive.”
That is, Career Central
e-mails job opportunities to candidates, while many employment and job-search
sites require users to actually come to the site and search for the type of job
they want each time they visit. Furthermore, Career Central guarantees that its
clients will only receive résumés from candidates who meet their qualifications
since the company selects which candidates will receive the job notifications.
Most other employment and job-search sites do not offer such control.
“With those other sites,
employers are bombarded with résumés because there is no monitoring of who gets
to apply for the advertised positions,” Hyman says. “Our clients have a much
shorter stack of résumés on their desks than clients of those other sites, and
that’s also good for the candidate because with less résumés to sort through,
there is a better chance that his or hers will be considered.”
Hyman views newspapers,
recruiting organizations and headhunters as Career Central’s main competition,
but even when discussing these rivals, he is confident of his company's
competitive advantage. Newspapers, he says, typically advertise only local
positions, while Career Central is a national service. Therefore, he believes,
from the client’s perspective, it is necessary to advertise in at least 10
major newspapers to get results similar to those Career Central produces.
Additionally, Hyman says, employers using newspaper advertising are still
flooded with résumés, many of which are from individuals who do not meet their
specifications. And from the candidate’s point of view, Hyman notes that
hundreds of dollars in newspaper subscriptions would be saved if qualified job
seekers utilized Career Central’s services.
“Through Career Central,
candidates have access to job opportunities with companies across the
nation," he explains. "Why spend the money to subscribe to the daily
papers of major cities, and then spend the huge amount of time it takes to
search through all the ads? Career Central essentially sends ads that match the
kind of job candidates are looking right to their e-mail boxes.”
Hyman cites speed and cost
as the to main reasons Career Central beats the services of headhunters, noting
that headhunters typically take several months to deliver, and their fees
normally are a percentage of the new employee’s salary. For top-notch M.B.A.
grads, software developers and marketing professionals, headhunter percentages
can fall in the $30,000- to $40,000-range, says Hyman. And, says Hyman,
headhunters don't guarantee their services.
Hyman says the Career
Central gang, which has grown to 60 employees and is expected to double this
year, has exceeded its goals. With the addition of the software and marketing
service, the tiny start-up company that debuted out of Hyman’s apartment is now
on the fast track to revolutionizing the recruitment process. Career Central,
which commanded less than a half-million dollars in revenue last year is set to
exceed the $3 million in revenue mark this year.
The company’s future plan is
to continually improve the services it already offers. There are no current
plans, however, to adapt the service for other markets. Hyman says some thought
has been given to expanding Career Central’s services internationally, but he
notes that there are substantial challenges involved in the process. Not only
are there language and currency differences to contend with, but recruitment
and placement practices, e-mail usage and technology-adoption rates vary
substantially between domestic and international markets. Therefore, Career Central finds jobs in the United States for
international candidates, but does not find international jobs for U.S.
candidates.
“We’re serving a real need
right now, and these fields are growing,” says Hyman. “We want to focus our
attention and energy on improving what we already offer because that is what
the clients want. The fields Career Central services are in demand and
growing.”
The company uses a variety of marketing techniques to grow its existing
services, including networking through face-to-face meetings with potential
clients, developing strong relationships with M.B.A. schools, and placing
advertisements both online and in print publications, such as newspapers and
magazines. Additionally, according to Heather Martin Maier, the company's
senior vice president of marketing, Career Central also relies on word-of-mouth
publicity, which she says has worked very well so far.
Martin Maier explains that Hyman has been an excellent spokesperson for
promoting the company. “Jeff is a very dynamic young entrepreneur,” she says.
“He knows how to network. He attends career fairs and keeps a good relationship
with graduate schools.”
Perhaps the most creative of
Career Central’s marketing efforts involves Hyman’s car. Painted on the side of
his little Honda del Sol is Career Central’s logo and URL, a move that Martin
Maier says perfectly illustrates the personality of Career Central: friendly,
fun, affordable and on the move. And Hyman — who started his first business at
age 13 in Clearwater, Fla., creating and maintaining customer databases for
retailers — believes that is what his business is all about.
“It’s so fun and rewarding
to hear clients say they’ve never had such an easy time recruiting,” Hyman
says. “We’re customer-friendly, and their satisfaction is what makes this job
so good.”
Company: Career Central
Founders: Jeff Hyman and Lun
Yuen
Industry: online career
services
Location: Palo Alto, Calif.
Founded: 1996
Employees: 60
Revenues: $3 million
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