November 1, 1999

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New-Media Companies Come Calling
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Some of the best matches come from old-fashioned networking. Pseudo mines the pages of Lux's and Harris' Rolodexes. Dinsdale says he finds good people through friends. "You're getting a reference as an underlying base," he says. "The person you're getting it from knows you and what you are like. It's like prescreening candidates."

"When you're moving very quickly toward funding or an initial public offering, you want to see good-quality people," says Lux, who often turns to outside recruiters to fill open management positions quickly.

Redwood Partners has taken an aggressive approach to recruiting in the dot-com age. In addition to screening candidates, Redwood works closely with client companies in developing their businesses from the ground up. That level of intimacy makes it easier for the recruiting firm to find the appropriate candidate and exact its fees in the form of traditional payment as well as through an equity stake in the client company. Says Schoenfeld, "We truly become partners."

A recruiting firm's ability to find the best candidates in the pack is doubly important where job seekers use the Internet to post their resumęs. "The more a skill is listed on a resumę, the more it shows up on a search," says Mark O'Brien, president of RecruitDynamics.com in New York.

As the dot-com companies ascend and create more demand for technical talent, a rapidly growing number of IT workers are striking out on their own to fill the labor gaps. Aquent Partners put its temp agency to work for these independent professionals, who seek jobs by the project.

"One-fourth of the American workforce works independently, from sole proprietors to contractors," says Steve Kapner, principal at Aquent Partners. "Four-fifths of those are by choice. I don't think it works trying to force the independent professional into a traditional job-seeker role."

IT professionals make the perfect contract workers, he says, because the enterprise can hire them for their specific skills to complete a project.

Aquent provides a variety of support services for the independent as well-from back-office services to health insurance. And the company has created a talent agency to represent independents who may not want to solicit and negotiate for work on their own. "Not just Michael Jordan gets an agent," Kapner says. "Our agents negotiate and handle the interactions."

RecruitDynamics.com has job seekers and perspective employers fill out detailed profile sheets that the company then matches to come up with the right fits. O'Brien says IT is perfect for a model that eliminates the inefficient middleman and, he says, the approach has allowed it to slash fees by 10% to 15%.

Until the dot-com fever settles down-which may come only as the stock market and IPOs cool-IT managers should try to protect their own talent turf and make wise career decisions for themselves.

Reprinted from ITWeek

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