Boomers are an interesting lot – and there’s a hell of a lot of them. A good combination for employers, marketers, politicians, and web 2.0 startup companies looking to build vast piles of money from them, win their favor, or harness their expertise in the work place. There’s a post from yesterday on the New York Times titled “New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age” and it’s a good read for anyone wanting to get a 50,000 foot view of newer social sites like eons, and multiply.

“…there are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.” – sourced NYT

So what’s going on with online social networking tools in this crown jewel of market segments? In a word – lots.

“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.” – Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog Infectious Greed

Said another way, online Boomers don’t suffer from shiny object syndrome (ohhhh, that’s pretty, let’s try that!) like younger generations are famous for. Even as an entrenched Gen X’er at 38 I no longer look at a BMW without having the accompanying thought that you give up a lot of hard earned cash (see: freedom) to drive around in a pretty car. I sure as hell didn’t do that when I was in my 20′s.  Web companies, employers, investors and venture capitalists are all seeing the direct benefits of catering to Boomers and for good reason.

There’s anecdotal evidence now with early web companies in the space that their instincts on Boomer’s stickiness is well founded.

“Peter Pezaris, president and chief executive of Multiply.com Inc., based in Boca Raton, Fla., said he believed that older customers were stickier than younger ones, but said the evidence so far was anecdotal. He said 96 percent of the company’s active users returned each month, a statistic that he said impressed the venture capitalists who considered investing in the site.” – Peter Pezaris CEO Multiply

In the job search engine space we have the boomer focused RetirementJobs.com, a niche Boomer version of CareerBuilder or Monster.  RetirementJobs.com published some interesting research last year that corroborates some of the news featured in the New York Times piece.

“RetirementJobs.com research shows that on top of experience, workers over 50 stay in jobs longer, waste less time at work, and relate better to companies’ older customer base. Employers are increasingly luring 50+ workers given that half the U.S. workforce of 130 million people is scheduled to retire, or take a retirement job, in the next 15 years.”

RetirementJobs.com polled their users and pulled out some interesting charactertistics.

Right at the top is flexibility and lifestyle integration. Freedom.  From looking at these numbers you’d have to conclude that Boomers no longer agree with their youthful battlecry so perfectly echoed in Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee – “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Like any other generation Boomers have their own unique needs and desires and they need their own kind of pad to hang out in online. I believe that the only thing holding them back from being just as addicted to social networking sites as our younger generations is a relevant hang out. Get relevant and people will get connected.

[tags]Boomers, Baby Boomers[/tags]

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CollegeRecruiter.com find themselves in a hot spot. If you’ve read my previous post this evening about mtvU buying RankMyProfessors.com you’ll know that a lot of heavyweights, like mtv parent Viacom, see big dollars in the college market. That’s why niche sites that really know the college world like Facebook and CollegeRecruiter are positioned so well in the coming months and years. Need I remind you that with the coming baby-boomer exodus from the workplace that demand on our next generation of workers may top that of any we’ve seen to date? Hey wait a minute, I’m in the wrong business.

After clicking on the “Add to Google home Page” button on CollegeRecruiter’s home page you’ll see a confirmation page acknowledging that you’re about to swear off all rights to your second born, (it’s all Google-e-gook to me) and presto, as soon as you hit the almighty confirmation button you’re taken to your personalized Google start page. Here’s how it looks on my Google home page where I searched for ‘Dream Job’ in Florida in my favorite industry.

This kind of user personalization and web site functionality has been a strong point for Google in the past year. Not long ago Google rolled out the ability to create your own custom search engine, like the one we used to create Popula8ion.com, which indexes our world of recruiting, jobs, and recruitment marketing over hundreds of sites across the globe. Personalized search is fast, more relevant, and more valuable because you get what you want the first time. The power of CollegeRecruiter’s Add Google button is in its simplicity: it is so easy and fast for users and publishers to put into action. It took me about as long to add CollegeRecruiter.com’s job search engine to my Google page as it did once for John Belushi to yell ‘Toga!’ in Animal House.

I asked CollegeRecruiter.com President Steven Rothberg about his Google addition via e-mail and he had this to say about it:

“Julian, I’ve been reading about “mash-ups” for a while now, where one web service is combined with another and thought that there must be some good potential there for CollegeRecruiter.com. I’m a big believer in first picking the lowest of the low hanging fruit. As the vast majority of web users conduct at least some of their searches through Google and Google has made it so easy to create these gadgets, it seemed logical to me that the lowest fruit to be picked would be to add our most basic feature to Google by enabling our users to add our job search engine to the Google home page with two clicks of their mouse.

I do not expect that this gadget is going to cause our traffic to skyrocket, but I do expect it to cause our repeat traffic to increase noticeably and, more importantly, make our site even more friendly to the job seekers who we serve. It is this devotion to the candidate experience that helped us win the 2007 Weddle’s User’s Choice Award for best job boards.”

That makes as much sense to me as going to college to get ahead of the game.
[tags]CollegeRecruiter.com, College Jobs, College Graduates, Careers for College Graduates, Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter, Google, Google Personalization[/tags]

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Cool hunters are often depicted as shallow wannabes who lack enough individuality to face the world on their own merits. To that I say, damn straight. But that’s just one side of the story. We also associate cool hunters with people looking for an edge, either trend spotters or drivers of important business, consumer, or social change. These are the individuals Malcolm Gladwell writes about in The Tipping Point, the connectors, mavens, and salesmen of our world.

psfk.com announces job board today for Interactive marketing industry.

You might be interested to know that psfk, a web site and community often associated with the words cool, hip, and innovative has just launched a vertical job board or blogboard. It makes me wonder if the world of filling jobs, building employer brands, and recruiting, are somehow finally making a move to a new address somewhere along Hip Street?

psfk’s Piers Fawkes (left) and Simon King (right) scowl and smile their way into the future. That future now includes a community job board.

Piers Fawkes and Simon King, founders of psfk.com are both A-list bloggers and Cool Hunters (yeah, the good kind) who started their site as a way to talk about what was happening in London and New York. Today, they’ve grown their stable of sites to seven and feature content ranging from interactive marketing and fashion, to architecture and business. psfk was among the early adopters of social media, their sites typically feature blog posts, comments and significant interaction from other writers and community members all centered around interesting stuff. psfk has a strong creative bent and that certainly is manifest in the high-design present in all their web sites.

Piers sent out an announcement last week soliciting job content from the interactive marketing community we are mutual members of. Piers extended a free job posting to the community as a trial for the remainder of the month. Disclosure: I sent Piers a posting for Shannon for a job she’s recruiting for on her own team at Hodes Interactive in the Bay Area. Shameless plug for Shan: here’s the job posting for an Interactive Solutions Manager.

I thought you would be as interested as I was to see an innovator’s take on a job board from someone outside our recruitment space. My suspicion is that we could both learn from each other. So I asked Piers to answer some questions for our blog and he obliged. Here goes:

First the press blurb to set some context (I feel that it is additive):

“PSFK the popular forward thinking innovation team, launch a new jobs listing service targeting emerging media, creative staff, employers and head-hunters. PSFK appeals to an audience of switched on creative professionals seeking inspiration in their day-to-day work place. Now users will have the added bonus of an international jobs list (jobs.psfk.com), which is targeted to professionals in companies driving the next wave of design, branding and media.

jobs.psfk.com is the first ever jobs site that uses a map function to help prospective candidates find jobs quickly in neighbourhoods they want to work in and provides an RSS feed for every type of category – plus email alerts. Listings are updated daily and companies at the launch include hip ad agencies, web publishers, video game makers, architects and design consultancies. Although the job site is international, the focus is on London, New York, LA, Berlin, Tokyo, Shanghai & Sydney.”

Now let’s have a conversation with Piers Fawkes of psfk.

exceler8ion: what spurred you to pursue this strategy?

Piers: “2 reasons. (a) we’ve been featuring quite a few jobs on IF! (http://if.psfk.com/if) and wanted to put them in a specific section to make it easier for people to find and (b) as we move towards a publishing business model, revenue from jobs listing will be a pillar of our success.”

exceler8ion: why now?

Piers: “There seems to be all these emerging and exciting companies and agencies but I don’t think it’s easy for people to find jobs in these agencies. We just wanted to put people in touch.”

exceler8ion: what do you hope to accomplish?

Piers: “Help inspirational people work in imaginative jobs.”

exceler8ion: Do you see the site being used to post mostly for full time positions? Or, would you hope for an equal mixture of freelance postings and users given the large contingent of freelance talent common to our space (interactive marketing)?

Piers: “We’ll see how the market reacts. I’m not too sure. In the past, we have featured full time jobs that we’d love to have.”

exceler8ion: how much does a job posting cost?

Piers: “$250 for a month”

exceler8ion: how firmly do you intend to manage the niche job content aspect of your job board?

Piers: “We want to list jobs we’d love to have. Adding jobs to the site is much like the content we put on one of our sites. We only put stuff up that interests us. By doing so, hopefully we’ll maintain a useful service to job seekers and recruiters.”

exceler8ion: Have you seen any pent up demand with your advertisers for targeting this new area?

Piers: “Maybe, it’s noticing an increase in numbers of jobs posted on blogs by recruiters who can’t find people through the regular channels.”

exceler8ion: With the highly virtual nature of our space, how do you think the location based Google maps will play with users?

Piers: “It’s about speed of access. People judge jobs on their location: for example, do you think people consider ad agencies in SoHo more forward thinking than midtown agencies. Location at a micro-level is very important to people in their job and it’s something that’s been long overlooked.”

exceler8ion: Would you like to use the expertise and experience you gain from this to roll out more job boards for your clients?

Piers: “This is just something we want to offer our readers. Maybe we’ll do something around each site – e.g. a fashion one for fashion.psfk (http://fashion.psfk.com). We’ll see. It took us a couple of days to build and prepare for this launch. We’ll go for it and see what the market says.”

exceler8ion: Can you confirm (because I think it’s quite a noteworthy accomplishment) that you put this together in a couple of days? Like as in 48 hours from a) hey I’ve got an idea to b) hey, here’s the finished site.

Piers: “48 hours from the time I decided to code it. Have been sitting around on it for a month or so.”

Did any of those answers turn your head? Sound off, tell me what you think.

Here’s a sample job posting (note the Google Map – I thought it was apropos considering that it was for a Google Job)

A sample job posting on jobs.psfk.com. Note the google map.

Wrap up

Where’s a functional keyword job search? There are two search boxes on the page (both powered by Google) but I couldn’t get either one to work with any reliability. Search engine indexing seems the likely cause resulting in delays between postings and valid search results. Then again, I searched for ‘hodes’ for Shannon’s job which posted on January 9th and had no luck. In another search for ‘TBWA’ I got a hit but then I was taken to the site’s index page showing all the jobs and not a specific job, or jobs, for TBWA. A search function connected to a psfk jobs database would seem much more useful here.

In contrast to this search issue, I love the simple craigslist style (or blog) reverse chronological order of the job postings. Simple works for me – as does the drop down box showing key cities for Interactive marketing jobs. I would add one called “Virtual”. Oh shit, they already thought of that. Not surprisingly, the design is clean, attractive and inviting, something the big boys like Monster, CareerBuilder and other careers sites would do well to mimic. Since psfk has a strong community, I’d love to see some interactive features added to the jobs section. Employer ratings or interview experiences for example, or a comments section where the job seeker or recruiter could ask questions of the job poster. All in all, with the exception of the job search, the psfk blogboard works, and the site’s base strikes me as a solid one to build on.

[tags]Piers Fawkes, Simon King, psfk, jobs.psfk.com, if.psfk.com, Cool Hunters, Blogboards, Job Boards, Niche Job Boards[/tags]

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Will Goldberg trade people for short term profitability?

Pink slips could be in the not too distant future for half of Jobster’s 145 person workforce according to unnamed sources that have been whispering to GigaOM and John Cook, the Venture Capital beat reporter for the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Jason Goldberg, the founder and CEO of Jobster had this to say on his blog about the whole story on December 22nd.

“truth is that i promised our shareholders that we would drive this company towards profitability in 2007 and that’s a promise i intend to keep. period.”

It looks like 2007 may bring interesting times over at Jobster. With a swap in the chief bean counter position now in place, and promises of a profitable 2007 swirling around the investor boardroom, Jason Goldberg will have to test his breathy vision against the invariable loss in trust that only layoffs can create.

Here’s my problem with all this.

Layoffs shouldn’t come easy, and they’re not part of any good business plan for a start up when revenue is growing in leaps and bounds as Jobster’s are. If layoffs were to happen now, it would signal to me that Jason Goldberg, his executive team, and his investors have screwed up. If 2007 profitability were a litmus test, as Jason declared earlier this year, then perhaps the hiring freeze that Jobster instituted recently could have come a little earlier? It’s hard for me to believe that Jason’s people strategy or go to plan would include a cannon fodder scenario (a military term for people being used as an expendable commodity) but you never know. Is Jason Goldberg a better BizDev talent than manager? It’s a pretty common scenario with founders. The vision, skill, and gumption that it takes to start a company (and make no mistake Jason has plenty of this secret sauce) don’t necessarily translate to managing a company successfully. The switch in CFO could have more to do with this than you may think. A smart board will push a visionary like Jason to surround themselves with the management talent to support the long term success of the business. And a smart leader will do the same thing and Jason is known for his smarts. It could be that Jason’s investors are giving him no other choice, either by an outright edict or in a nut twisting investor pressure that only $48 million dollars in investor funding can bring about.

So we’re left with three scenarios to mull over until Jobster makes its real plans public.

1. Jobster management sucks
2. Jobster’s investors have gotten cold feet and Jobster’s management have no choice but to placate them with major cost cutting
3. These rumors are all a load of crap brought about by a disgruntled employee/s.

I’d have to favor number two, with a sprinkling of number three thrown in for good measure. What makes me worry about the rumors is the tone of Jason’s post that I linked to earlier, which struck me as condescending and defensive.

“truth is that i promised our shareholders that we would drive this company towards profitability in 2007 and that’s a promise i intend to keep. period.

you ever had to do that? it’s tough stuff. especially when you are in growth mode. but that’s what it takes to build a valuable business.

…and that’s what we’re doing over here at jobster.

what are you doing?”

[tags]Jobster, Jobster Layoffs[/tags]

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Newspapers and recruitment ad agencies agree. CareerBuilder has gotten too big for its britches. It used to be that ad agencies were the only ones crying in their martinis about working with CareerBuilder. Why? Among other things, CareerBuilder has earned quite the reputation with agencies for ‘stealing clients’ from agencies.

Enter the newspaper partners. They’re on the same side as CareerBuilder, right? CareerBuilder has been THE lifesaver for newspaper companies all over the U.S. for the last 5 years – yielding tremendous profits and product growth and stock saving profit margins. But things have changed. While I was still at Knight Ridder Digital (up until 16 months ago) internal talk was starting to shift about CareerBuilder’s attitudes. Once the can’t miss darling of the company, more and more anecdotal reports from internal people told of experiences with CareerBuilder personnel and practices that smacked of arrogance. People’s teeth were beginning to grind on both the print and online side of Knight Ridder. But the prevailing feeling at the time was that CareerBuilder was doing a fantastic job (just look at their results) and that a little adolescent cockiness was tolerable.

Enter the McClatchy purchase of Knight Ridder. News this morning is that another former Knight Ridder paper, (one of the properties that McClatchy sold) The Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Pa) has joined The Philadelphia Inquirer and Akron Beacon Journal in dumping CareerBuilder for Monster. I’ve talked to some insiders about these deals. It’s a simple money decision. CareerBuilder wants a huge cut (many times inflated over just a few years ago) and newspapers feel like they’re getting screwed. Monster is simply walking in with a sweet deal for the newspaper and signing them up.

Hey CareerBuilder clients… Does any of this sound familiar? The newspapers have been only too happy to leave, based on the experiences they’ve had with CareerBuilder. A month ago I was speaking with a print/online executive from another major market independent newspaper who uses CareerBuilder. Without any prompting, the discussion we had on their online recruitment efforts quickly turned to frustrations with CareerBuilder. Something along the lines of feeling bent over if you know what I mean. I’ve got to tell you, this independent property is one that CareerBuilder would REALLY hate to lose as a partner, but if things continue as they’ve been going, that’s exactly what’s going to happen and either Monster or Yahoo! will happily take their place.

As a contrast, companies like Yahoo! Hotjobs have become known as ‘agency friendly’ and at least in terms of the job boards, great print partners as well. Ah, you say, that’s because they’re not numero uno like CareerBuilder. Good point, but how often does the arrogant company hold onto the poll position in a free market? I think of Oracle and Larry Ellison here and that little web company Salesforce.com that is kicking their ass. And what of Google’s entry into web based word processing and spreadsheet products and the potential impact on Microsoft (another company one could argue has been hurt by market arrogance). On that score, what of Monster, who is happily taking some of CareerBuilder’s customers? Well, much like an older sibling, Monster has shared much of the cockiness that CareerBuilder is now acting out. Perhaps, if it wasn’t for CareerBuilder, they still would be. But, things may have changed over at Monster. There is a renewed effort to be ‘agency friendly’ and the best new friend of newspapers who they’ve long vowed to crush. Monster the web 1.0 disruptor, would appear to have newspaper partnerships as a key facet of their web 2.0 disruptor strategy.

How have your experiences with CareerBuilder been over the last year? How would you rate their customer service, business practices, and pricing? How about their product value proposition (expanding, waning, same)? Talk back.

[tags]CareerBuilder, Career Builder, Monster, Job Boards, Knight Ridder[/tags]

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JG and I spoke today on his way to Toronto to play Poker with Jay-Dee of Recruiting.com and many other recruiting cronies. No, I wasn’t talking to my JG – Julian Gude, rather – Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster. I really wanted to go to play a few hands with those boys, but My JG basically said, “over my dead body.”

Regardless, during the conversation with Jason, I found out that during his talk at the Direct Employers meeting he made it clear that Monster.com provides its users with a poor user-experience. To be specific, he said that:

these guys are literally printing money with a crap product.”

and that Monster users are:

giving their personal info to some companies that Monster has basically pimped out their site to …”

What was he talking about? Interstitial ad pages. You know, those annoying pages that appear and force you to physically click the link to skip the page before you are allowed to see your content. These are now an integrated part of every Monster search. The defined Monster user path: Job Search > Special Offer > Search Results.

Jason is right about this one – bad job seeker experience – but I am curious about the kind of response rates those pages garner on Monster. Julian worked for a short period of time at a clearing house for this type of product that made huge amounts of money for online leads like these interstitials generate. He shared with me that these registration pages are tremendous direct response vehicles for advertisers and that they will bid anywhere from a few pennies all the way up to $100 or more for every one of these submitted leads. So clearly these are huge money-makers for Monster. What affect do ads like these have on brand? I know that my reaction to seeing an interstitial page is that is asking for my personal information is that the company is begging – not the best brand message.

Monster has taken quite a bit of flack in recent years, and while I agree with Jason’s sentiments completely – I DO give Monster credit for almost single handedly directing job seeker behavior away from newspaper classifieds to online classifieds in the Web 1.0 world. It is easy to dismiss them as the money printing dinosaur and as much as we hate it – today, if you ask any job seeker on the street, they will know what Monster.com is, but few will know a site like Indeed.com for example.

While improvements to online Job search are coming in leaps and bounds – the new job sites have a long road ahead of them evangelizing and getting current users to spread the word about their new solutions in order to change job seeker behavior again. It remains to be seen if the new job sites can attract gaggles of job seekers simply because they’ve produced a better solution or if they will need a blimp and a mascot. What is the key to changing the job seeking behavior of the masses? It can’t happen fast enough for me


BTW: I updated my Jobster profile today just to see how the new Superstar tags work. Its cool. Go ahead, add your profile, add me to your faves . Now – if only they would allow me to display my RSS feed on my profile page….

[tags]monster, jobster, intersitials[/tags]

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