Marketers Wanted

SAY YOU’VE JUST lost a top marketing job because your new spouse pressured you into demanding a raise. If you need another post quickly-so as not to lose your marriage as well-you might want to think about taking your job search into cyberspace.

Palo Alto, CA-based Career Central-which already operates two executive placement services for MBAs and software executives-is expanding its offerings this month to include marketing managers.

Career Central (www.careercentral.com) attempts to recruit marketing execs for companies ranging from Internet start-ups to Fortune 500 corporations, says founder/CEO Jeff Hyman. With the addition of the marketing service, Hyman’s looking for 50% revenue growth by next year.

Here’s how the service works: For no fee, a job applicant contacts Career Central and takes 20 minutes to fill out an online questionnaire covering work experiences and preferences. The candidate’s name then gets added to a database and the individual receives what Career Central calls its confidential Jobpost e-mails when an apparently fitting job materializes. An interested candidate replies via return e-mail and can attach an electronic version of his or her resume (which reportedly is never disclosed to anybody except the prospective employer).

Companies that hire candidates through this method would pay Career Central a fee of just over $3,000, which Hyman says is about 10 times cheaper than what conventional executive recruiters charge.

“Let’s say a large corporation has a $90,000-a-year job to fill,” he says. “An executive recruiter would typically charge $30,000 to find a candidate and it could take several weeks.” He says Career Central can guarantee 10 candidates within a week.

Career Central has about 30 salespeople calling on prospects nationwide for the marketing service. It also plans to run banner ads on about 150 marketing-related Web sites and to send direct mail to subscribers of such magazines as Brand Week and AdWeek.

Earlier this year the company started a software executive recruitment service, building it up through ads in Computer World and similar computer publications. So far, Career Central has about 600 client companies and a job-seeker database of 75,000, of which 25,000 fall under the MBA category. Hyman started the company about a year and a half ago when he was a student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business.