perationIT is carving a niche in the online job market with an interesting mix of triteness -- win T-shirts -- bribery -- enter a $5,000 drawing by listing a resume or referring a friend -- and discretion -- executives control which companies can view their resumes. So far, OperationIT fills that niche well.
   "There's no resume slamming, " say Donna Heidemann, manager at the Spencer Reed Group office in St. Louis. "We get six to 12 qualified candidate resumes per day from OperationIT. Theses are real candidates, not some form letter blitz."
   Heidemann hasn't seen that type of quality response from Internet sites before. "Recruiting in the Midwest on the Internet stinks," she says bluntly.
   "We're one of the few job sites focused so narrowly," says Bryan Effron, director of operations at OperationIT. Not just any IT positions, Effron says, but "senior-level executives and high-end technical people. Always a Tiffany approach."
   Effron says the focus on IT helps candidates and employers, because the job categories mirror IT functions. "Generic sites handle IT or computer jobs much more broadly," Effron says. "Since we categorize within the industry, we have listings for CIO through all the categories down to different administrators."
   "When e-mail from OperationIT hits, I pay attention," say Lee McElroy, hiring manager at SEI Information Technology consultants. "Other job boards may splatter you with lots of garbage, but they [OperationIT] screen that out."
   "We have a three-part profile for applicants," Effron says. "There's a summary for quick reference, the candidate's own resume and a summary based on their goals and objectives. It's as close as we can get to an interview process."
   McElroy uses all the major job sites, since he's trying to double the number of consultants at his company from the 420 he has nationwide today. Since McElroy hires candidates directly, he must pay OperationIT -- there are no charges to candidates.

Heidemann uses OperationIT to widen her search for full-time employees. Finding IT executives up to executive vice president levels requires fighting a tough battle for candidates, but Heidemann gets good responses from OperationIT. "Candidates trust OperationIT to be discreet," she says. "This is a big selling point for that level of candidate, and also for the shy, passive job seekers who don't want to tell the world they're looking."
   This discretion may be a strong contributing factor in one of the statistics of which Effron is most proud. "We have about 30 percent applicant uniqueness," he says. "Those candidates list resumes only on our site. That's amazing in today's market."
   Effron and OperationIT are determined to shake up the online recruiting market even more. They just launched a "pay for performance" program for their client companies using the site.
   "Just three months ago, we invited top-tier companies to come to our site, use all our features, and don't pay us on a monthly basis," Effron says. "When they hire someone, they pay us."
   This model starts to squeeze into the headhunter market, an area avoided by other online job sites.
   Plenty of back-end programming

supports this new transaction model.OperationIT must track and monitor which companies use the different parts of their site, where they search and which resumes they download.
   "We hope this starts a trend," Effron says. OperationIT already has more than 70,000 active candidates in its system, and Effron feels confident it can manage this new approach to revenue generation.
   Still in beta mode, OperationIT's IT Business Center matches small IT service companies with open projects at other companies. 1,200 companies have taken advantage of the currently free listings by getting exposure on one of the most visited job sites on the Web today.
   OperationIT started as an experiment for a brick-and-mortar regional recruiting firm called StaffIT that added an online branch called ITLynx. Similar to guru.com or freeagent.com, it posted project skills online for employers to see. The success of the Web division merged StaffIT and ITLynx into OperationIT and a national rollout spending "a ton of money rebranding with the new name," Effron says.
   SEI's McElroy, for one, believes OperationIT has the right idea: "They're going to be a contender."