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The Net scare
The Web will survive this week's spate of site attacks. Can it get past the hysteria?
By Scott Rosenberg
[02/10/00]

Mozilla dreams
Can the open-source browser redeem Netscape's name and give Microsoft a run for its money?
By Andrew Leonard
[02/10/00]

Free the night life!
Former Netscape programmer Jamie Zawinski has spent his life making software free. Now he wants to liberate San Francisco's fading club scene.
By Andrew Leonard
[02/10/00]

Criminal code?
A judge's decision to ban a DVD-playing Linux program and all discussion about it outrages the free-software community.
By C. Scott Ananian
[02/09/00]

The waiting game
Will John Romero's Daikatana ever hit the shelves? When it does, will first-person shooter players still care?
By Howard Wen
[02/08/00]

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THE AGENTS OF SILICON VALLEY
The new executive recruiters don't just find talent for a hefty fee -- they're players, making or breaking careers and companies.

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By Janelle Brown

Feb. 11, 2000 | Reno Marioni has held three jobs in the past five years -- as director of marketing at a now-defunct Java start-up called InfoScape, director of product marketing at Marimba and, now, founder of a start-up called Adventure Zone Network. Like most tech industry veterans, he's accustomed to switching jobs as readily as suits. But even as he's zigzagged across Silicon Valley, there has been one constant in his career: a woman named Deb Steiner.

Steiner is a recruiter at Rod Asher & Associates who first contacted Marioni nearly six years ago out of the blue to see if he was interested in a job -- one of a multitude of recruiters who would cold-call him to gauge his interest in new positions. But he developed a rapport with Steiner, and eventually her calls resulted in the job at InfoScape. They kept in touch, even as that job went sour. He's passed her name on to his friends and family -- Steiner helped Marioni's brother, Tony Swenson, get a finance job at a start-up called Niku -- and now that he's starting a company of his own, he plans to use her to fill his own executive ranks.

"Even when she knows I'm not looking for a job, she'll call me and tell me she has something interesting that's up my alley," says Marioni. "She's just out there watching out for me."

Marc Hedlund, founder of a start-up called Popular Power, has a similar tale. He was cold-called by a recruiter named Robin Reed while he was a director of engineering at Organic; that relationship -- which resulted in a job he loved, as head of the Internet division at Lucas Films -- has endured for over three years. Hedlund is using Reed to fill the ranks of his own company now. As he puts it, "It's not hard to find a job; but it's hard to find an interesting job. Finding someone to represent you, who has a familiarity with your interests, helps."

The landscape of the job marketplace in Silicon Valley has changed dramatically over the past few years. In the age of the Internet, not only do salaries rise in step with the increasing demand for talent -- and exciting new opportunities crop up almost daily -- but start-ups often fold or change their direction on a dime. With so much change swirling through the economy, savvy workers interested in their personal bottom line are wise to keep a recruiter or two in the Rolodex.

"Twelve years ago people believed that a recruiter calling into a company was a traitor. Today, people realize that the pact between employers and employees is broken. People used to have only two to three jobs in a career; that's changing. They need to watch out for their own interests," explains Nancy Albertini, founder of high-tech recruiting firm Taylor Winfield. "In the past, a company was in charge of your career. Today, you are in charge."

Recruiters, then, are brokering the changing relationship between employee and employer -- not only are in-demand employees looking for someone to represent their skills, but Net start-ups short on time and resources are desperate for someone to help them find that talent. The recruiters are getting both status and wealth as a result. As Albertini puts it, "The recruiting field is getting to be where agents have been for a long time. In Hollywood, agents are as big stars as the stars are."

Next page | Having the right brand-name recruiter