A cron job will only run once a minute, not wake up every second.
Right, that’s an issue.
But you could write a PHP program that does a one-second sleep before checking if there's something to do, and a batch job that runs periodically to see if the PHP program is running, and if not, launch it.
I would like to avoid external programs if possible. In the current Oracle environment, there are potentially multiple schemas on a server in which processing can be active. And processing can be started, monitored and stopped from a client application. And only for the schema with which the application is connected.