So in early 2006, Mr. Solomons and Jason Berkowitz, a co-founder of Hyrian, started the Hyrian OnDemand division, geared to recruiting for companies with 50 or more employees. To make it economical, Mr. Solomons said he divided the process into pieces. “Teams of our employees are devoted solely to advertising and copyrighting, others to coordinating and prescreening of candidates. There are teams that do interviewing and dealing with clients and others that concentrate on networking to contact potential candidates.”
As a result, OnDemand could handle greater volume, Mr. Solomons said, and he developed a variety of prices. To deliver a senior staff employee like an information technology specialist earning $100,000 and more, Hyrian charges $5,900. For an employee, earning up to $18 an hour, it charges $1,900. And if called upon to attract and hire a chief operating officer or other senior executive, its fee is $9,500. “Volume of business reduces the risk that a single assignment will fail to achieve a hire and you’ll lose all your time and effort. Reduction of risk reduces prices,” said Mr. Solomons, who is now 36, repeating a lesson from the long-ago dinner table. With growing business, Hyrian OnDemand is adding to its own work force of 250.
Customers use Hyrian OnDemand to save time, said Christopher Campbell, president of Asset Smart Software, a Santa Monica, Calif., company that began 31 years ago with programs for the aerospace industry and now has software that manages properties worldwide for global companies. Business is brisk so Asset Smart is expanding its work force to about 20 employees from a dozen. The recruiting service “saves us the effort of canvassing resumes, interviewing candidates. It is very time consuming,” Mr. Campbell said.
A larger Hyrian customer, Akeena Solar Inc., of Los Gatos, Calif., has 170 employees and a human resources department. But Tom Gerner, director of that department, uses the recruiting service because, he said, it has “an infrastructure, a capability to contact and examine potential employees on a national and worldwide basis.” He added, “They charge about what we would have to pay to do the job and this saves our people for other work.”
As Hyrian’s success shows, the personnel recruitment field is thriving in these times of low unemployment and the beginning of baby boomer retirements. Mr. Solomons would not disclose the company’s revenues but acknowledged that it was a reasonable assumption that the firm’s annual revenue is more than $25 million. based on the fact it has 250 employees.
