TALLINN, Estonia -- Juri Kaljundi and Jurgen Tamm have brought their company back from the brink.

CV-Online operates local job sites in Central and Eastern Europe and has a new pipeline set up to link Western European employers and Eastern European job seekers. It was started on a few thousand euros, which the site's founders raised, in part, by selling their used Saab. The site has spent most of its life making profits on revenue that rose to 400,000 euros in 2000.

CV-Online's roots are old-fashioned: It was started as a spinoff from job fairs organized by Mr. Kaljundi, then a 22-year-old student, and his partner, Jurgen Tamm, then 24. Beginning in late 1996, they gathered fellow students' CVs, entered them into a database and charged companies about $300-a-head for job placements. Then, Mr. Kaljundi says, "we realized it would be easier if we let the companies search the database themselves."

CV-Online had happened upon a model that was already up and running in many Western countries, but novel in the former Soviet Bloc. Mr. Kaljundi and Mr. Tamm had the advantage of hailing from Estonia, a little country with an unlikely love of technology. Internet use in Estonia is the highest in Central and Eastern Europe, and the country has more Internet-connected computers per capita than France or Germany, according to a September 2000 report from the EU-funded European Survey of Internet Society.

But then, in August, the crunch came.

"We saw that the business was growing in all our countries. But we also saw how the private and public markets [for capital] had changed," recalls 26-year-old Juri Kaljundi, co-founder of the Web-based recruitment company.

Investors suddenly seemed wary of plunking down capital for any dot-com -- much less an outfit based in a country they couldn't find on the map.

Following a pair of acquisitions and high-profile campaigns across Central and Eastern Europe in the first half of 2000, CV-Online (www.cv.ee) abruptly cut costs to almost nothing, scaled back ambitious expansion plans and looked like it was heading for obscurity.

But the company gained a new lease on life through the cutbacks, and it secured second-round funding of three million euros ($2.8 million) in February. The investment came from two investors who had already taken more-modest positions in the company at the beginning of 2000 -- U.S. Internet guru Esther Dyson and local investment bank Lohmus Haavel Viiseman -- and from a Central and Eastern European fund, 3TS Venture Partners AG.

CV-Online's plans to connect its Eastern European base and Western markets may have something to do with the support it has raised. CV-Online aims to link programmers and technicians in the former Soviet Bloc to Western companies in need of specialists.

The second-round investors gained a majority stake in CV-Online's holding company, Dutch-registered CVO Holdings NV, through the deal and promptly brought in an experienced Scottish chief executive, Norrie Sinclair, to succeed CV-Online's Estonian management.

Mr. Sinclair, who succeeded co-founder Jurgen Tamm as CV-Online's CEO in February, comes from the traditional recruitment industry. He previously headed Nicholson International's Central European and Turkish operations.

CV-Online's main business will continue to be its local operations, says Mr. Sinclair. The company now has offices and Web sites in Estonia and six other countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Russia.

But a sister company, CV-Europe, with its own Web site (www.cveurope.com) was set up to link Eastern and Western markets. CV-Europe's Web site is linked to CV-Online's local job sites in Central and Eastern Europe in a way that makes it easy for Eastern European job seekers to post their resumes (or curricula vitae) on both for local markets and for Western Europe. The CV-Europe site currently has only about 3,000 resumes, but just began hiring its own staff -- a salesperson in the U.K. and an operations manager in Eastern Europe.

Mr. Kaljundi, now a vice president at CV-Online, says he expects the service to be most active in Russia and southeastern Europe, where local job markets are less developed but skilled programmers are plentiful. Romania "is probably the largest source of good IT people who are willing to go to Western Europe," Mr. Kaljundi speculates.

CV-Online had its sights on foreign markets even before it became clear that job sites would have to be international. They had already begun expanding within the Baltic States when they received their first injection of capital in January 2000, which allowed them to open offices in the major Central European markets. They acquired two existing sites and their databases -- Profese.cz in the Czech Republic and Hungary's Munkaforum.

Although CV-Online lost money during its expansion in 2000, the company projects that it will be profitable for the full year 2001 on revenue of between five million euros and six million euros.

"By the time people like Stepstone or Monster come to Central and Eastern Europe, it will be quite expensive for them to compete with us," says Mr. Sinclair.

With more than 11,000 corporate clients across the region, the company offers simple, manageable portals for job-seekers, and added services -- like basic applicant screening -- for companies seeking staff.

The company earns most of its revenue from the companies that pay for access to their databases of 70,000 CVs.

Now, CV-Online is looking to consolidate its position in the markets it occupies and -- like some of its Western European counterparts -- wants to back into traditional recruitment services.

"We don't view ourselves as an Internet company," says Mr. Sinclair one Friday afternoon during a flying visit to Riga, Latvia. He argues that his company will compete with traditional human-resources companies, an opening that isn't available to dot-coms from the West competing on his home turf.