Help Wanted for Sites That Pitch Talent

When a team of 16 Internet engineers attempted to auction off their services on EBay in April, they demonstrated the gun-for-hire mentality of geek mythology in what seemed like a sure-fire venue. The suggested opening bid: $3.14 million.

But even EBay’s auction-crazy customers found the price too steep, and nobody bid.

Nevertheless, those ambitious engineers sparked a trend. Since then, several Web sites have sprung up for “people auctions.” Among the entrants are Monster.com (https://www.monster.com), a subsidiary of TMP Worldwide Inc., Advoco.com (https://www.advoco.com), a start-up that provides a market for expert advice and services, and Bid4Geeks.com, (https://www.bid4geeks.com), which hawks technology workers.

They follow numerous online recruiting sites--including FreeAgent.com (https://www.freeagent.com), Romac International (https://www.romac.com) and Interim Services Inc. (https://www.interim.com)--that invite people to post their resumes in hopes of attracting employers. Some businesses, particularly technology companies, turn to such sites for leads in today’s tight labor market.

The notion of being an independent contractor, with employers knocking on your virtual door, lucrative job offers in hand, holds such powerful appeal that more than 47,000 people have posted work profiles on Monster.com’s Talent Auction (https://talentmarket.monster.com) since it launched July 4.

Unfortunately, few employers have taken the bait.

Of more than 100 randomly selected offers of services posted by potential employees in California, none had received even a single bid.

“It’s been a little slow,” conceded Craig Besant, vice president of marketing at Monster.com.

“It’s so new at this point that we haven’t seen the activity from the employer side to mirror the activity from the contractor perspective,” he said. “To a certain degree, we’re having to teach them that behavior.”

Besant, who said online recruiting cuts the time and costs involved in hiring, defends auctions as a superior way to find employees. But skeptics argue that such auctions might make sense only under special circumstances.

“It will take a very aggressive organization that may be willing to risk paying too much or getting too little,” said Gerald T. Crispin, vice president of the Society for Human Resource Management and author of “CareerXroads,” a book on recruiting employees over the Internet.

Crispin said people who work in clearly defined jobs could be better suited to auction-based hiring than those whose skills involve a great deal of subjective judgment.

“You may find [auction-friendly jobs] in unusual places,” said Crispin, suggesting that independent truckers, for example, might find auctions useful.

The model of a totally decentralized and networked work environment harks back to medieval times, when artisans plied their trades independently, coming together temporarily for projects only to go their separate ways once the work had finished.

“What’s missing is the intermediary, the guy who is putting these teams together, marketing and selling them to the employer,” said Michael Boyd, a human resources analyst with International Data Corp.

Instead of behaving as true intermediaries that pitch candidates or bring project teams together, the Web sites act as passive centers where people post their professional wish lists.

The notion of contracting directly with an individual also puts off large employers, made wary by recent court rulings that contractors are entitled to benefits they hadn’t previously received, Boyd said.

And if talent auctions don’t take off during these boom times, when employees are scarce and workers have the upper hand in negotiations, what happens when the economy goes south?

“I doubt that I would debut a service like this in a down economy because it would be tough to get a toehold,” said Monster.com’s Besant.

To say they have a toehold now appears to be optimistic.

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Jonathan Gaw can be reached at [email protected].