Job seekers who e-mail their résumés to recruiters are often frustrated by the results: Their résumés end up in a black hole, and their follow-up e-mails and voice-mail messages fail to inspire a response. Now a new IT recruiting firm aims to change all that while making it easier for employers to find qualified candidates for open IT positions. Ready to Hire promises job seekers a high-touch relationship with its recruiters while it streamlines hiring processes by giving employers access to a database of prescreened candidates.

Based outside of Philadelphia in Willow Grove, Pa., Ready to Hire places IT workers at all levels, from help desk associates on up to IT executives.

The company’s eight recruiters vet all job seekers over the phone. They ask candidates about their education, work history, job responsibilities, skills, salary, certifications and ideal job. If a candidate is not willing to answer all of the recruiters’ questions about his work history, he will not be added to Ready to Hire‘s database, says Bill Wiseley, a principal with the firm.

Recruiters communicate with candidates every 45 days to make sure the candidate’s profile is up to date. They also offer informal advice on résumé writing or interviewing during the course of their conversations and correspondence with the candidates to which they’re assigned. Ready to Hire also keeps candidates’ résumés and references on file. The high-touch recruiting service is provided to job seekers for free.

Each recruiter specializes in a particular IT discipline, so the recruiters know when a candidate may be stretching the truth about, for example, salary or job responsibilities, says Wiseley.

Employers pay a monthly fee to access Ready to Hire’s Web-based database, which currently contains profiles of 5,500 candidates. Clients can search the database using any term, including a candidate’s location, a particular skill or salary range. Ready to Hire didn’t disclose the subscription fee; Wiseley just said it was “one to one-and-a-half times a placement fee.”

Ready to Hire President Colleen Haviland says the subscription model will save employers money. “People pay for the service, not per hire. A company can make 30 placements and only pay a monthly fee,” she says. “We think this will cut a corporation‘s agency fees in half.” Haviland adds that the average agency fee for an IT hire is $20,000.

Because candidates are prescreened, employers also benefit from faster searches. “We complete step one of the hiring process in advance for our clients,” says Wiseley.