The Talent Market

And when Dick Bullwinkle picked up the phone last December, Harvey Carter was the person he called. Bullwinkle needed an investment that would pay off big and pay off fast. He sought his solution on the talent market - and his salvation in Carter. After drawing up a two-page summary of the yearlong assignment at the plant in Carpinteria, Carter went searching for a hot stock. His goal: a project manager with experience in bringing high-tech equipment from concept to market.

IMCOR's database in Stamford churned out five prospects whose experience matched the assignment. Members of the company's eight-person research staff called each candidate. Two of the five seemed promising and expressed interest in the project. Another candidate came in through a posting on the IMCOR Web site.

Carter then grilled each candidate. He worked with each of them to develop "a supertargeted résumé" - in other words, an investment profile - that Bullwinkle could read and analyze. "They all looked perfect on paper," Bullwinkle says. He brought in all three for face-to-face interviews. Carter was present at each interview, assessing Bullwinkle's reactions and fine-tuning the recruitment process. Bullwinkle eventually went with an engineer and former company president named Keith Swanson - who happened to live in Santa Barbara, just 10 miles north of Carpinteria.

"He had a perfect résumé," says Bullwinkle. "It was like he was reading our mail." Since coming on board, Swanson has put the project on track, and the company's new machine will be unveiled at a make-or-break trade show in November. Bullwinkle relied on IMCOR to be his investment adviser. And the company did all of the things that a good financial adviser would do: assess long-term goals, probe tolerance for risk, run the numbers on prospective investments. The only difference was that the object of investment was human - rather than financial - capital.

Is this the future - smoothly operating yet sometimes volatile talent exchanges; individuals priced as efficiently as financial instruments; a new breed of agents, brokers, and advisers?

Ask the man in whose talented hands the future of DAC Vision now rests. "One robin does not make a spring," Keith Swanson says. But for people with the talent to produce results and the savvy to play a new game, "there's a real market."

Daniel H. Pink dhpink@ix.netcom.com , a Fast Company contributing editor, is writing a book about the free-agent economy. Visit the following companies on the Web: MacTemps http://www.mactemps.com , M2 http://www.m2net.com , and IMCOR http://www.imcor.com .