CareerMosaic

» see careermosaic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 1994 I was ten years old and the phone line in our house did nothing but ring. My first modem was four years away and the idea of looking for work through a website would not become normal in Turkey for another decade after that, and when it did it arrived through Turkish sites nobody outside the country has heard of. So CareerMosaic is a grave I am writing about somebody else's 1994, and the only honest reason it matters here is that it went first.

It was built by Bernard Hodes Advertising, an agency whose business was buying help wanted space in newspapers for corporate clients. That is the detail worth holding onto. The first serious job site on the web was not made by a startup, it was made by the incumbent, by people who already understood that recruitment is an advertising purchase and who could see that the page it ran on was about to change. Sources disagree on whether it launched in July or August of 1994, which is what happens to a launch date nobody thought was historic at the time.

The site called itself an employment and career shopping mall, which reads badly now and was accurate then, since a mall was the only metaphor anyone had for a page of links to other companies. Within the first year it carried listings from two hundred employers and was taking about four hundred thousand visits a month. The early clients were technology companies like Sun Microsystems and Intel, for the obvious reason: their candidates were the only people who were on the internet in 1994.

Its best feature was a forms-based search over Usenet. Technical hiring in the early nineties actually happened in the misc.jobs newsgroups, which were enormous and close to unsearchable, so CareerMosaic put a web form on top of the whole hierarchy and made it queryable. For a few years that was the easiest way in the world to find a job posting, and it worked by indexing something it did not own.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what got buried with it ~

Being first bought CareerMosaic nothing. Monster launched in 1994 too, then went and spent the dot-com years on television advertising, including the Super Bowl. HotJobs did the same. Against that, an agency-owned site with no separate war chest was going to lose whatever its traffic looked like, because job boards run on the same logic as classified sections: employers post where the candidates are, candidates go where the postings are, and the way to break into that loop is to buy your way in loudly.

Omnicom, which owned Hodes, was in the advertising business rather than the website business, and by 1999 the numbers on running a competitive job board were not numbers an agency holding company wanted on its books. The FTC's premerger filings record the transaction between Omnicom and HeadHunter.NET in 2000. The site was folded into headhunter.net, and careermosaic.com stopped being a destination.

~ what it became ~

HeadHunter.NET did not enjoy the prize for long. On 24 August 2001 CareerBuilder, by then jointly owned by Knight Ridder and Tribune, agreed to buy HeadHunter.NET for 9.25 dollars a share, around 200 million dollars in total. CareerPath.com went into the same pile. Two newspaper companies had worked out that the classifieds business was leaving the paper and bought the replacement, which is a rare case of an incumbent industry seeing it coming and acting.

So CareerMosaic ends up two acquisitions deep inside CareerBuilder, and the Usenet index it was built on is a museum piece. What survives is the shape. Every job site since has been a database of postings with a database of resumes facing it, and a search box in between. CareerMosaic had that working in 1994, on a web that was one year old.

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