If you just want to put together a "quick and dirty" version of this you could probably use Wordpress to Enter in each person as a "post" and then instead of presenting a "blog roll" type front end set Wordpress to use a custom static page that has the links to sort your directory by different criteria (which you would use the Wordpress "tags" feature to add custom sort values to each post) and then maybe a "search" function (which you could implement through google).

You could probably set up a functional prototype of this based of the twentyeleven theme that comes with Wordpress. Then you could get a designer to do some CSS tweaks to get it looking halfway decent for not all that much.

This could very easily also be done custom by someone who knew their way around PHP and SQL. (PHP deliver the content to and from the client from the SQL database). Most every hosting provider allows you access to mySQL databases, after all that's really all that Wordpress is. To get it all done custom is probably going to cost you a somewhat pretty penny but I'm guessing there are many on this forum and other places who could help you.

I recommended it elsewhere but I swear I'm not working for them but you should check out Robin Nixon's Introduction to PHP, MySQL, and Javascript from O'Reilly. If you've been trying to do this for years in ernest to no avail you may just have to pony up the cash or roll up your sleeves and get it done yourself.

OK, this would be really easy to do on Wordpress. You would probably want to be able to sort by geography, so that would be your primary drilldown. Of course, you'd also have the search feature....

Anyway, it would be really easy to create a form so carpenters could enter their resume info into the DB.

Then you'd simply want that information to show up on posts.

Just putting a little thought into this could really make it work well. I might think about this over the night.

Of course, you could always just go to hotscripts and find a script that works right out of the box.