Forced to Face the Web

But when asked to describe his mood at the off-site, Liberatore speaks plainly. "Fear," he says. "We'd all been so immersed in executing our traditional business that we missed the big changes that were springing up on the Net. We were in danger of losing our oxygen supply -- the one-on-one relationships we've built with candidates and employers -- to these job portals."

As Liberatore saw it, the Monster.coms of the world had made it painfully clear that traditional staffing companies were built on a vastly outmoded distribution model. "A staffing firm interviews 10 candidates, and the good ones place 2 out of the 10," he says. "So 8 people are disappointed with the service. Moving the business online would make us much more efficient at matching the right candidates with the right companies -- which in turn would give us a real shot at balancing supply and demand."

"In the end, every staffing decision comes down to convenience and price," adds Dunkel. "And as we thought it through, we all came to realize that the Web was radically changing the economic-value proposition of hiring people. As information on companies and candidates becomes more pervasive, there's going to be more efficiency -- and therefore more convenience. By using the Web to drive convenience, our productivity will come up, and we'll have pricing power."

Romac's senior team came to a rough agreement that the company must race to build a big Web presence. If it didn't, the online job boards would become the critical "first point of contact" for companies and candidates. But Dunkel and Liberatore were convinced that companies like HotJobs and Monster had vulnerabilities of their own.

Romac's own research showed that while people are finding jobs on the Web, many of them aren't getting jobs on the Web. In a Yankelovich Partners survey of 1,000 people that Dunkel had commissioned, 40% of respondents said that posting a résumé online is equivalent to sending it into a black hole -- never to be heard from again. And more than one-third of them complained that there's no good way to follow up with a company, or to get feedback, if they don't get hired.

Dunkel and his team saw an opening against the job portals. They would use the Web to improve the company's ability to connect with candidates and employers. But they would also leverage Romac's 2,300 recruiters to build online contacts into real relationships. In a sense, Romac's recruiters would now become advocates for the job hunter. They would lend a human touch to the high-tech job search.

Romac would enable anyone applying for a job on the company's Web site to consult with a recruiter by sending email, by calling an 800-number, or by visiting a Romac office in person. Recruiters would shotgun the job hunter's search, standing ready to answer questions like "Who's interested in me? What happened to my résumé? Why didn't I qualify for that job?" The goal would be to convince people that Romac offers something that the job boards don't: long-term, personalized career advice.

It was a bet-the-company move. Romac would shift its business to the Internet and launch a multimillion-dollar ad campaign touting a new company name: kforce.com ("kforce" is an abbreviation of "knowledge force"). The risks were huge. It had taken 35 years to build the Romac brand. Investors and employees were sure to wonder why the company wanted to torch its good name. After all, this was no Internet startup with nothing to lose. It was an industry leader with 2,300 employees and almost $750 million in annual revenues. Dunkel refused to fool himself about what lay ahead. "I knew," he says, "that we'd have to write off the balance of 1999."

Burn that Brand

Immediately after returning to Tampa, Dunkel assembled a skunk-works team consisting of staffing and IT veterans and told them to "execute the charter" -- that is, to work secretly to build a prototype of kforce.com. The team had six weeks to nail that goal.

"If we hadn't set them up as a skunk works, the boot of the bureaucracy would have just crushed them -- and I would have been powerless to stop it," says Dunkel. "The day-in-day-out effort to execute the traditional business is hard enough. We couldn't ask people also to give their heart over to building a new concept. It's not possible to do both. So we set up this separate unit and told it to work in warp drive. We had to move fast, so we could stake out our territory as the first staffing company to move online. By moving swiftly, we'd get mind share."

Led by Liberatore, the team put in a marathon stretch of 18-hour days, producing a working model of kforce.com by June 1999. The site's most innovative feature, dubbed "SkillMercials," suggests a digital reinvention of a video dating service. Job seekers create a script online and post a 60-second streaming-video clip touting what they have to offer to employers, who in turn view such clips at kforce.com. (A company can likewise make a pitch to job seekers by cutting its own "OrgMercial.")