TAKING STOCK         

Business journalists looking for a position that includes international travel and a six-figure salary are out of luck, but investors looking for an interesting IPO may want to take note.

CareerBuilder.com claims it is one of the largest independent career sites on-line. The web site also includes an on-line magazine, job-search tools and career-related information. But those aren't the only offerings. CareerBuilder also manages on-line job sites for 18 media companies, including Business Week, USA Today Online and NBC Interactive. And there's something called TeamBuilder, which lets employers go electronic to manage recruiting. Customers include Taco Bell, Bell Atlantic, Intel and Sallie Mae.

On-line recruiting could be a $1.7 billion market by 2003, according to Forrester Research Inc. Combine that with today's historically low unemployment rate, and CareerBuilder might catch on. The idea is to help companies manage the work of hiring employees -- posting jobs, screening applicants, sorting and routing resumes, responding to applicants automatically, setting up interviews and making the hire. The Internet has powerful matchmaking potential, and CareerBuilder hopes to exploit it.

The company also has impressive management talent. CareerBuilder was founded in 1995 by Robert McGovern and Jim Winchester -- both former vice presidents of Legent Corp. Legent, which has since been acquired by Computer Associates International, was the fast-growing software company founded by Northern Virginia programmer-turned-venture capitalist Mario Morino.

CareerBuilder's investors include software industry executives and venture capital funds like New Enterprise Associates, Thompson Ventures and FBR Technology Partners.

Reston is also home to Proxicom Inc. (Nasdaq, PXCM: pending), which has announced plans to go public.

Proxicom sets up e-commerce sites, extranets and intranets for customers such as MCI WorldCom, Bell Atlantic, Citibank, Ritz Camera, Microsoft, Intel, AOL and Marriott.

Check out the case studies published on the Proxicom web site. There's the intranet Proxicom reconfigured for GE, which has 14 major businesses and more than 200,000 employees in 100 countries. GE had an intranet, but it wasn't being used. Company officials, however, wanted to turn it into the primary route for conveying up-to-the-minute product and pricing information, job postings, training resources, company news and policy changes. They wanted it to become the place for individual business units to file and retrieve reports and financial data.

Proxicom refocused GE's intranet to make it easier to use. It designed templates so that workers without any programming know-how could create and update their own web pages. It made the intranet more accessible. And it added Proxicom Forum, an interactive discussion tool, to enhance communication and training. "Before Proxicom began working with GE, its intranet received an average of 10,000 hits per day," a company report says. "After Proxicom redeveloped and implemented the new intranet, usage quickly grew to more than 120,000 hits per day."

For Mobil Corp., Proxicom's focus was e-commerce and the transmission of electronic data to and from more than 300 lubricant distributors. It set up an Internet-based system to replace a DOS- and Windows-based network that was costing $100,000 a year. Distributors use a password to access the system, get up-to-date product information and track or place orders.

The Washington Post reports that Proxicom is being compared to MicroStrategy and Network Solutions, and could be 1999's hot IPO that "defies the conventional wisdom that profit must be sacrificed to achieve rapid growth." Revenues have grown from $1.2 million to $42 million in five years.

Proxicom and CareerBuilder are in their quiet periods, and no analysts are tracking them yet. But both companies are worth watching.