We're for Hire, Just Click

Amid the mountains of baseball cards and cookie jars up for grabs on eBay's Net bazaar, one offer stood out this spring: "Team of 16 employees from major ISP willing to leave as a group," the posting read. "Total minimum bid would be $3,140,000." To even the most avid online collector, this seemed far-fetched--not to mention medieval--as if a package deal of techies could be bartered like a set of Limoges china or Star Wars lunch boxes. Surely it had to be a hoax.

Jeff Taylor knew what he was seeing was no joke. Since January, Taylor, the founder of Monster.com the pioneering online job board, had been hatching his own plans for a Web service that would let job seekers put themselves on the block. And although the eBay geeks didn't sell themselves, the fact that they had given it a go was enough, in Taylor's mind, to "validate the process." So last month Monster rolled out its "talent market," where independent contractors and freelancers can trumpet their skills and put themselves up for auction to prospective employers.

To Taylor, the logic for a human auction is even more compelling than the one for things, and his is one of a number of e-companies that are changing the way employers buy labor. As with eBay, the talent market eliminates the middleman and levels the playing field between buyer and seller. But an antique cigar cutter never has to sell itself. People do. "Marketing themselves is the most difficult thing for free agents," says Taylor, who heads the interactive division of recruiting ad giant TMP Worldwide, which bought Monster in 1995. "This puts them in the driver's seat."

Sure, athletes are bought and sold all the time; but it sounds ridiculous to shop a UNIX programmer or architect. Yet the timing is perfect for such a bold experiment in the burgeoning field of e-cruiting. Not only is unemployment near record lows, but Silicon Valley is also facing a severe shortage of qualified techies. There are 500,000 vacancies, a number expected to grow to a few million. In such a tight labor market, the Net may be just the tool for the growing ranks of job-hopping free agents to flex their bargaining muscle.

One of the eBay human auctioneers, John Kinsella, recently started an online jobs venture, bid4geeks.com where techie teams can gauge how much they're worth. Meanwhile, eLance, a Jersey City, N.J., startup founded by two Wall Streeters, will soon launch a different sort of auction, where firms will be able to post projects--white-collar tasks like Web design, consulting and marketing--and solicit bids on them. Another player, Freeagent.com is set to offer a similar service.

Since the talent market launched a month ago, some 35,000 customers, from programmers to Elvis impersonators, have filled out their profiles, eagerly awaiting an offer they can't refuse. Unlike traditional auctions, though, bids aren't binding--there is more to picking a new boss than simply finding the right salary. So once the auction period ends--anywhere from one to five days--an accepted bid sets the stage to close the deal. "It gives you a starting point," says David Braverman, of Woodmere, New York, who runs a marketing agency and, after a week on the site, is putting final touches on a project with a Web retailing startup.