As seen in Install crontab on CentOS, the crontab package in CentOS is vixie-cron. Hence, do install it with:
yum install vixie-cron
And then start it with:
service crond start
To make it persistent, so that it starts on boot, use:
chkconfig crond on
On CentOS 7 you need to use cronie:
yum install cronie
On CentOS 6 you can install vixie-cron, but the real package is cronie:
yum install vixie-cron
and
yum install cronie
In both cases you get the same output:
.../...
==================================================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
==================================================================
Installing:
cronie x86_64 1.4.4-12.el6 base 73 k
Installing for dependencies:
cronie-anacron x86_64 1.4.4-12.el6 base 30 k
crontabs noarch 1.10-33.el6 base 10 k
exim x86_64 4.72-6.el6 epel 1.2 M
Transaction Summary
==================================================================
Install 4 Package(s)