Master plan my I!(nternet)
Never mind grand designs: CareerBuilder.com just builds partnerships and drives online technology change

If you look at the milestones of CareerBuilder.com’s decade-old corporate history, you might think it became the leader in job postings (It grew its website listings by more than 60 percent, to 1.4 million jobs, or 45 percent of the market.) and job traffic (This grew more than 100 percent in 2004, to more than 15 million unique visitors each month.) because it adhered to some kind of carefully drawn blueprint.

Well, no. CEO Matt Ferguson admits there’s a business model, but it’s no elaborate master plan – just a simple, savvy approach that keeps it ahead of the curve and in front of its competition.

“Our model is to use the Internet to acquire job seekers at the places they go to for news, information, community and search purposes,” he explains. “If you go there and use creative techniques and packages to engage these people in the job search and then take them through the application process you can get a very wide and high-quality audience.”

If CareerBuilder.com had gone the traditional route – if there is anything traditional about the Internet – it would have just created one great big website of its own and waited for the job seekers to come. CareerBuilder.com has that, of course, but it also has something much more – a partnership network it has built from a base of 16 partners in 1995 to more than 400 today.

CareerBuilder.com looks for partners whose websites are visited by large numbers of prime job seeking candidates. “The main criterion we have for choosing partners is their ability to drive quality traffic to the employers who rely on our services to recruit top talent,” says Ferguson. “The business is always going to be about getting to as many people as you can and engaging them in the job search either through your site or through your partners’ sites.”

CareerBuilder.com powers the online career centers of partners whose reach extends to national, local, diversity and niche web sites. In some cases, CareerBuilders.com has an exclusive with a high-quality partner. “We’re the only job board that promotes within AOL, USA Today and MSN,” declares Ferguson. Once The Tribune Company and Knight Ridder purchased CareerBuilder.com in 2000, and Gannett Co., Inc. became a third owner in 2002, CareerBuilder.com tapped into more than 130 newspaper sites across the U.S. That delivered a whole new audience.

“We could leverage the print business from our owners to capture job seekers who read the newspapers and whom we could move online,” Ferguson points out. Those readers tend to be higher-income and higher-educated individuals. Meanwhile, the 65-to-75 percent of U.S. workers who are non-exempt, hourly employees tend to look at the Sunday classifieds. “So, we could advertise to obtain both audiences,” adds Ferguson. “Being purchased by the newspapers gave us good sales distribution and the capital to acquire job seekers and sell to corporate America.”

CareerBuilder.com also saw the value of targeting people who aren’t actively in the job market, what Ferguson refers to as “poised or passive” job lookers who typically are employed in jobs they don’t especially like.

“Maybe I’m looking at the Chicago Tribune’s site to find the latest news and, while I’m there, I decide to hit the jobs link to see what’s out there,” supposes Ferguson. “This really enables us to bring in a different candidate to employers.”

Ultimately, it’s all about getting the right job candidate hooked up with the right job and right employer. This is where Ferguson sees the greatest potential from the evolving Internet. “Technology on the job matching side is what will really improve and that’s the key for us, because we will drive a lot of that process.” That’s going to happen with the help of FAST Research of Norway, a leading enterprise search company with whom CareerBuilder.com has signed a long-term technology agreement.

Product innovation also is driving CareerBuilder.com’s fortunes. In October, the company announced major upgrades in its Resume Search and Job Applicant Search products for employers. New navigational functions will let employers conduct full text searches across all 9 million resumes in CareerBuilder.com’s database to find specific keywords that reflect their job requirements. They’ll be able to localize their searches to candidates in specific cities and states and make comparisons by pay ranges and the newness of the resumes. They can also e-mail multiple candidates simultaneously.

The same full-text-search capability will let employers call up cover letters, pertinent job experience and other information factors from job applications. They can group applicants by job title, job contact, screening scores and overall ratings and they can flag applicants as good, unacceptable or needing more review.

On the flip side, CareerBuilder.com has created online materials to accommodate the nomadic instincts of a U.S. job force where 40 percent of workers change jobs five or more times during their work lives, and 10 percent change jobs 10 times or more. Job seekers can do quick keyword, location, industry and job type searches, as well as advanced searches; post multiple, confidential resumes and receive automatic job alerts for positions matching their search conditions.

Like the farmer’s work, CareerBuilder.com’s marketing effort is never completed, because people are always in the market for work – whether once in a while or regularly.

“Every year you come out with a new marketing campaign,” Ferguson tells. “Our business is a lot like a durable good. Each year, you have to influence those people who are out there looking for a job right then. And people might come back every other year or every third year into the market, so you’ve got to advertise to reach them each time.”

The necessary complement to the advertising is a 1,600-strong sales force, each of whom can customize his or her caseload, working vertical markets, across industry lines, and generally selling where and to whom they want.

“You’ve got to give people wide latitude to run their own businesses and feel entrepreneurial because that’s how they’ll have the passion to do well,” insists Ferguson. “And what they learn in building their businesses will benefit us as a whole.”

Proactive, adaptable, innovative, flexible – and prosperous, with revenues growing by more than 80 percent through the third quarter of 2004. And all of it without a master plan.

“There is no master plan in the Internet,” Ferguson emphasizes. “Business conditions change very quickly and you’ve just got to be quicker to change than your competitor. You can’t have a master plan and know that in five years companies will recruit in a certain way, for example.”