Recruiter Takes Hunt to Web
Refines the business model of placing tech salespeople

NEWSDAY
MARK HARRINGTON

IT'S A CHILLY DAY in January when salesrecruits.com, the new Internet operation of recruiting firm PeopleComm, finally goes live. Amid the popping sound of dot-coms crashing to earth around him, Steve Morgan scoots his chair toward the computer screen in his Great River office recently and urges a visitor to come closer and take a look at his site.

The thought of another must-see dot-com in this environment has all the appeal of a sno-cone in an ice storm, but that's before Morgan opens up the first online resume and scrolls down to the salary requirement for a certain high-powered software sales vice president.

I squint across the distance, more to keep my eyeballs in their sockets than to see, and I scoot closer.

How much? Outrage begins to mingle with the shock as Morgan, president of a tech recruitment firm, PeopleComm, moves on with the demo. "The traditional search model really isn't a good model," he's saying, but I'm still working the math, trying to figure out how many times that sales VP's salary is divisible by mine. It's difficult to move on.

For 18 months, Great River-based PeopleComm was into recruiting the old-fashioned way: It hounded people. If you needed a salesperson in the technology field, Morgan was the one you called. And if you fit a desired job description, he or his staff were the ones likely to find you out and hound you.

You can make a good buck recruiting, but it's a cumbersome, rejection-filled, time-consuming process with lots of dead ends.

Morgan began realizing this soon after he launched his company, which coincided with the dot-com craze of 1999. That's when he got the idea for a method to transform the business to dovetail into the new millennium.

With the help of a technical staff and partner Rich Mancini, who is vice president of recruiting services, Morgan began developing salesrecruits.com.

It's a considerably narrower version of those unwieldy job-hunting Internet sites from the likes of Monster.com and hotjobs.com.

One difference is that salesrecruits.com focuses just on the software and technology sectors. But there are others as well. For instance, according to Morgan, not everybody gets in.

Sure, anybody can type salesrecruits.com on their Web browser and see the opening page. But PeopleComm screens all potential job candidates with a telephone interview before it deigns to allow them on the master list. If you don't have more than five years of sales experience in the software/technology fields, don't bother, they say.

If you're a company looking to recruit, there's a similar screening process-you have to show a willingness to pay the approximately $20,000 a year subscription fee.

But once you get past that, the world of salesrecruits.com opens up substantially, and it's a pretty trick. As a candidate, you can block any company from accessing your resume. That's particularly helpful if you want to keep your current job while searching for a higher-paying one.

Morgan says confidentiality is key to the success of the site, just as it's a key assumption in the recruitment business.

To demonstrate, he punches in a password and accesses the resume of a high-powered sales executive, Jack Powell, complete with his work and home phone numbers, his goals, his dreams, his interest in spicy romance novels and his salary.

I tap Morgan on the shoulder. "I know that guy!" I say. "Wait till I call him tonight. I didn't know he was looking!" Morgan's hair seems to rise a little as he turns to see if I'm kidding (which I am).

"How do you know him?" he asks, his smile twitching tentatively on.

Jack Powell, of course, is not a real salesrecruits.com candidate. In regular use, the database of information is tightly locked down. But it's easy to see how that database could be more than helpful to a company recruiter.

There's even a way for candidates to upload pictures of themselves.

The process of filling out the PeopleComm online questionnaire (to which candidates attach their standard resumes) takes about 15 minutes, and it can be as thorough as a job interview. The subsequent telephone screening can take just about as long. Once you're in, Morgan says, you can set it so that you get automatic e-mails of jobs that fit your criteria, and companies and individuals can sort out information on candidates or jobs any which way but loose.

Over the next several weeks, PeopleComm will input its database of a thousand resumes onto the system, which Morgan said went live to the public hours before our January meeting. It was, of course, a momentous occasion for a relatively new company that operates on the cash it generates (Morgan said it did $1.1 million in volume last year).

Morgan, who emphasizes the "Comm" in the name stands for communication, not dot.com, insists he isn't troubled by negative perceptions about Internet-based companies. There's still a market for companies with focused new uses of the Net.

He says he expects to triple sales this year, which presumably would push his own salary into the sphere of those he lists on his site. At that point, don't expect any sympathy from me.