For better or for worse, welcome to the Information Age. Recruiters at Trouver.net make about 150 phone calls a day trying to clinch employment contracts between high-tech professionals and employers in places like Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Wood confirmed she just recently hired two people from New York. The impression someone gets talking to one of Shealy's recruiters over the phone must be vastly different from the impression a person gets walking through Trouver.net's front door. A dozen people talk simultaneously while popular rock music emits, more than softly, from two large speakers mounted on the wall.
Computers sit on collapsible tables.
Baseball caps and tee-shirts are de rigueur. The real money is in commissions, the amount of which Shealy would not reveal. Both Shealy and Wood said they could not run their businesses in the Wood River Valley without the Internet. Half a century ago, when the recruiting business was in its nascent years, Wood said, the telephone, the local library and the U.S. Postal Service were the major tools of the trade. Recruiters now surf the Web for all the information they need on a new company they're after, call the company's human resources department and shoot off a candidate's resume in an instant through a fax server.