HeadHunter.NET

» see headhunter.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A job board is a local product wearing a national name. Its whole value is the density of listings within driving distance of the person reading it, which means HeadHunter.NET was worth precisely as much to me in 1999 as a Georgia newspaper would have been. There is no distance to confess here beyond that one. This is a grave about American hiring infrastructure, and it is here because of a single design decision the site made that almost everything since has copied.

It started in 1996, founded by Warren Bare, and ran out of Norcross in the Atlanta suburbs with money behind it from ITC Holdings, a Georgia telecom family. It went public on the NASDAQ as HHNT on 19 August 1999, which was very close to the top of the market for that kind of listing.

Here is the decision. Monster and the rest sold job postings the way a newspaper sells classified inches: you pay, your ad runs. HeadHunter.NET let the posting in free and then sold the position. Its own homepage in early 2000 told job seekers to post a resume free or upgrade it to appear at the top of a search, and told employers, in a sentence that has aged into something much larger than itself, that only HeadHunter.NET lets you position your jobs ahead of the competition so curious professionals see your jobs first.

It worked at least well enough to produce numbers worth printing on the front page. The site counted 184,153 total jobs and 340,463 resumes for January 2000, against 3,369,000 users. Computer jobs alone were 99,173 of that listing total, which tells you exactly who was hiring through a website in early 2000 and who was not.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually sold ~

Two more things on that homepage are worth pulling out. One is a promise of applying online in complete privacy with no registration required. In 2000 that was a real differentiator, because the fear that your current employer would find your resume sitting on a job site was the single biggest reason people would not put one there.

The other is an offer to cross post your listings to over 250 free sites. That is a company openly telling employers it will spray their job into every free board on the internet on their behalf. It is spam sold as a product feature, with a completely straight face, and it worked, because the alternative was doing it by hand.

~ what it bought ~

In 2000 HeadHunter.NET bought CareerMosaic from Omnicom. CareerMosaic had been built in 1994 by an advertising agency and was, by most counts, the first real job site on the web, and by 2000 it had become an asset an ad holding company no longer wanted on its books. HeadHunter folded it in and retired the domain.

That purchase is interesting for what it says about the sequence. The first job site on the web lasted six years and was bought by a four-year-old company from Georgia. The four-year-old company from Georgia then lasted eighteen more months.

~ what it became ~

On 24 August 2001 CareerBuilder agreed to buy HeadHunter.NET at 9.25 dollars a share, around 200 million dollars in total, with Knight Ridder and Tribune each putting in half. Antitrust clearance came through on 6 November and the deal closed two days later. HeadHunter was carrying more than 2.5 million unique visitors a month by then and had 377 employees.

Two newspaper chains had spent real money buying the thing that was taking their classified revenue. It was the right instinct and it did not save them, because in the end the classifieds did not settle at CareerBuilder either. They moved to a search box, and then to a professional network that persuaded people to maintain their own resumes for free and forever. The headhunter.net domain stopped resolving years ago. What is left of it is the pricing model: free to list, pay to rank. That sentence now describes most of the internet.

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