Genre | Job search engine |
---|---|
Fate | Acquired by Monster, shut down |
Founded | 1996 |
Founder | Richard Johnson |
Defunct | 2011 |
Headquarters | New York, New York, U.S. |
Area served
|
Worldwide |
Key people
|
Richard Johnson, Lowell Robinson, George Nassef, Dean Harris |
Services | Job hunting |
138,000,000 | |
Owner | Yahoo |
Website | hotjobs |
Yahoo HotJobs, formerly known as hotjobs.com, was an online job search engine. Hotjobs. com provided tools and advice for job seekers, employers, and staffing firms. It was acquired by Yahoo in 2002, then acquired by Monster Worldwide, owner of its major competitor Monster.com in 2010—leading to its merger with Monster. com and eventual closure.
The company was founded by Richard Johnson and was based at 24 West 40th Street, 12th floor in New York City, across from Bryant Park. Johnson had previously founded the RBL Agency with Ben Carroccio and Liz Johnson (RBL), a boutique employment agency for technologists. The initial website was launched in early 1996 as RBL Agency which evolved into the Online Technical Employment Center (OTEC) in 1999, and only featured technical jobs. Founding employees Christopher G. Stach II, Earle Ady, and Allen Murabayashi designed and coded the first iterations of the site on Silicon Graphics Indy workstations for C application development, Apple Macs for content creation, and the site ran on Sun and SGI hardware, later the company expanded to collocation data centers and Microsoft desktops for backoffice. The company also integrated NetSuite financials from Oracle.
The company's first advertising effort was as a Yahoo "site of the week", which at the time could be purchased for $1000.
Hotjobs participated in one of Jupiter Communications' first conferences at the New York Sheraton in February 1996. It was here that Johnson spotted Ginna Basinger, who was working for the hotel at the time, and offered her a position as the first hotjobs sales person. The product was given away to the first 100+ clients to gain employment content to attract job seekers.
Thomas Chin joined the organization in October 1996 while attending Columbia University, and eventually became the company's chief scientist.
In the summer of 1997, Johnson decided to expand the operations, and brought Dave Carvajal over from the RBL Agency to join the salesforce and eventually recruit, hire and scale the organization with 8 offices. Dimitri Boylan would also later join to head up the sales and marketing effort. Over Labor Day weekend in 1997, the first remote sales office was opened in Burlingame, CA by Earle, Kelly Michaelian & Michael Tjoa. This was a joint venture between hotjobs & otec. Ginna Basinger moved from New York to California to manage the office, hiring the company's first non-New York employee, Michael Johnson, in August 1997 as an Account Executive. Quickly outgrowing the space, the Burlingame office was moved to downtown San Francisco in the Summer of 1999 where it remained through the disposition of the company in 2002.