Blogs

Meet job board king Don Firth

To my knowledge Don Firth runs the largest family of profitable independently owned and self-financed job boards. His boards have a utilitarian look and are designed with the single purpose of helping candidates find jobs in a specific industry. But considering their performance, I wonder if my own company hasn't paid too much attention to polish and content. JobsInLogistics.com, AllRetailJobs.com, JobsInTrucks.com, JobsInManufacturing.com, and TopUSAJobs.com have a combined monthly traffic of almost 3 million visitors.

Eric: For my money Don, you’re the most successful job board entrepreneur I know of. I should say the most successful job board family because it is a family business. What accounts for your success? Do you have a formula? How do you choose new categories?

Search drives the sale; branding just validates it

In a fascinating article about branding versus SEO, search engine watch put into words very nicely a feeling that has been tugging at me for a long time:

Before-

In 1991, if you wanted to buy a portable compact disc player, you had to know:

1. What you wanted to buy (portable compact disc player) R.I.P. Branding
2. What brand you wanted to buy (Sony)
3. What product you wanted to buy (Discman)
4. What store to buy it at (The Wiz)
5. Where to find that store (Menlo Park Mall)

Aside from Step 1, every other piece of information came to you from branding.

After-

Job board widgets

A job widget is a tool used by a job board to display its jobs or search box on other web sites. It's basically a banner, button or skyscraper with customized content which is of course job ads. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, see the right margin for a really good example of a jobs widget. For more about them have a look at Born's widget reviews. Here's a list of job widgets:

Battling seo hackers

Earlier this year I commented on Matt Cutts SEO hacker prediction:

"Would you notice if a strange link appeared somewhere inside your website? How long would it take you to see it? Hacking is a reality for everyone in our industry at one time or another but this is one that could be difficult to detect."

Well, his prediction was right on target. But if this happens to you, you will not notice any of the links the hackers install on your website -- they are invisible.  Our Drupal sites were hit a couple weeks ago and it has cost us plenty of time and energy to disinfect these websites. 

Here is how it was done:

Can't afford to hire locally

In the past, we’ve only hired local sales people but we’re looking at the possibility of hiring remote reps. I know it’s hard to find employees in South Florida and I was wondering if you have any staff that works remotely and if so is there anything you can tell me that would help us?

My answer -- you can't afford not to. We tried for years to grow our sales team by hiring locally. We would hire-train-fire and then repeat. But all the while, I was watching Don Firth (friend and fellow Florida job board entrepreneur) grow his sales team three and four times as fast by hiring virtually from around the country.

Sued for job ad text - 'only H-1s apply'

Both our immigration law and enforcement are pathetic in this country and job boards find themselves in the middle. Doesn't make sense to block highly skilled workers from coming here while letting anyone who can wade through the Colorado river come in and stay. Doesn't make sense to legislate but not enforce and the $45,000 fine is a joke. Story at Computerworld:

DOJ settles H-1B job ad case for $45,000
Complaint filed by Programmers Guild over H-1B-only job ad

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I'm on twitter -- fashionably late?

I'm on twitter now too -- fashionably late according to Toby Dayton. Until recently, I thought twitter was just foolish but somehow in a very short matter of time, I have completely reversed my opinion. It took me a few years to start blogging and I generally prefer to arrive late to a technology party. So, I still consider it a bit early for twitter in spite of Toby. In fact, I am intrigued by my own reversal.

The most important reason, is perfectly articulated by Joel:

Meet Recruiting Nevada founder Doug Geinzer

Doug Geinzer just announced the sale of his job board (and second recruiting business) RecruitingNevada.com. Here’s Doug’s bio:

Doug Geinzer has been in the recruiting business since 1989. Prior to Recruiting Nevada, he owned a media group, which included the Las Vegas Employment Guide; Las Vegas Career Fairs, Las Vegas’ largest career fair company; Las Vegas Job Guide; and Diversity2000 – the first diversity recruiting magazine in the United states, which was distributed to every college campus in the country. Geinzer sold the media group to Cox and Landmark Communications in 1999 and then directed his focus to Classified USA! – Nevada’s largest recruitment advertising agency, which he co-owned with Ted Stepien.

Internet recruiting news

We launched a new website today that aggregates Internet recruiting news (and opinions of course) so please have a look at InternetRecruitingNews.com. I wish there were more relevant feeds available, but there aren't many bloggers or publishers who stay focused enough. Originally, I included an Onrec.com feed even though I was uncomfortable about the number of posts that are off-topic. And then I saw this in my feed:

Depression Awareness Week, 21-26 April 2008

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) welcomes the opportunity provided by Depression Awareness Week to raise the profile of and encourage more employers to address the stigma of mental ill health in the workplace

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