By Dave Mendoza, Master Cybersleuth, Affiliate Partner, JobMachine Inc. (720) 733-2022

Andrew Banever is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of JobTarget, a service many recruiters have used without knowing they have used it.
They power the majority of the private-label association and trade publisher job boards (currently over 1000 of them). JobTarget is one of those rare startup stories that succeeded without millions from venture capital and does not have a publicly stated goal to “change the recruitment industry”. They have grown into a profitable, 30+ person company simply by focusing on building a great service.

Six Degrees: What is the future for JobTarget?

Andrew: Well, as you may have seen we have become much more public. We want to establish greater communication with our customers so that we can make sure we are doing everything we can to serve their needs. Without claiming too much credit, I do think that JobTarget has played a pivotal role in making niche-recruitment an option for companies.

But, what we’ve done is created an unintended negative by-product. Companies now see the value in doing broader marketing campaigns across multiple niche job boards when they look for job candidates. This has now created an administrative problem. Recruiters need to register across multiple websites, build their ad on each of these websites, then they have to manage multiple invoices. We intend to address this problem with the new JobTarget OneClick service.

Without being too salesy, JobTarget OneClick is a job board research and job distribution tool. There are two ways it can be used. Recruiters can use it when they have one opening to post. They can come to oneclick.jobtarget.com, search for job boards (or get a free proposal from our job posting consultants). From this portal, you can get information on niche job sites and preview them. Once a recruiter has identified the job boards they want to send their job to, they can build their ad once and we take care of posting the job to all the job boards. This lets a recruiter post to any job board on the Internet, including Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, and Dice. If a recruiter does not find a job board they want to use when searching OneClick, they simply add it and we take care of posting their job to that site as well. Employers and recruiters can use this tool whenever they have a job to post. It is important for recruiters to know that when using OneClick they will pay the exact same rate as if they went directly to the job board itself. We share revenue with the job boards. The only additional fee they may incur is for a small subset of job sites, like Craigslist, where we have to go and manually post the job. Overtime, the number of these job boards where there is a posting fee is shrinking as we get more job boards integrated into the network. Right now, there are over 1000 job boards where you would pay the exact same rate as if you went directly to the job board.

The second way OneClick can be used by a company is to manage all of a company’s job postings.
OneClick is a full job distribution tool. For a very low monthly fee ($299/month) JobTarget will import all of your company’s jobs into the system. We can even spider these right from the company’s own website. The recruiter can then simply choose which job sites to send a job to without ever having to re-key in the job description. Job postings can also be setup to auto-route to job boards. For instance, a company may decide to always send jobs to Monster.com, the system handles that. Not only does this system let you post jobs, you can make edits and remove jobs from this system too.

Overall JobTarget makes managing job postings easier and more affordable than ever. It solves the administrative function and enables companies to use all the sources they desire to find job candidates. This leads to more qualified candidates applying for a company’s jobs and ultimately to better talent being hired into a company. That was always our company goal. We feel we are now accomplishing that.

Six Degrees: So it’s almost like a cooperative advertising group of job boards?

Andrew: That is a good way to look at it from the perspective of the job boards. The job boards join JobTarget OneClick as they see it as a great way to introduce their job board to employers and recruiters. It’s expensive to reach recruiters and most niche-focused job boards simply can’t afford to do that. Through the OneClick consortium they can get exposure to employers and JobTarget can market all of these job boards as a whole. We are effectively marketing niche recruitment to employers and recruiters. In fact, we also do this through partnerships. One of the worst kept secrets is that JobTarget built for SHRM the SHRM Job Posting Center. It is in a beta launch phase, but soon SHRM members will be able to manage their job postings from the SHRM website. This is great exposure for niche job boards to get in front of the 220,000 SHRM members.

But the service is really geared towards the recruiters. That is who it was built for. We see that employers and recruiters are turning to multiple sources for their recruitment advertising and we want to build services to help them do that. If you use OneClick, it’s very clear that we built it for recruiters and employers.

JobTarget’s team are common faces at major industry events such as Kennedy Expo

Six Degrees: Do you blog?

Andrew: This is a blogger’s favorite question. I am sorry to say I don’t. I do see the value it creates. I’m just too busy and quite frankly I don’t think I have enough interesting things to say. I’ll leave it up to guys like you, Joel Cheesman, and Jason Davis.

Six Degrees: Tell me something others may not know about you.

Andrew: I invented the term podcast. It meant something entirely different than what the word has become. You see, I had created the basic concept of a data delivery business and called it Podcast. The business was entirely different that what podcasting has become. I registered the domain name podcast.com. Unfortunately, I was so busy with JobTarget I was not able to push ahead with Podcast. Then in Feb 2005, I started receiving unsolicited emails about PodCast.com. At about this time, podcasting, the audio-delivery format, was being born. I ended up shelving my PodCast business and I sold the domain name to the Internet Real Estate Group so they could build the company PodCast.com, LLC (of which I remain a shareholder). I can tell you I made a very healthy return on my $20 investment.