"Vendor Files" is back… Just in time for HRTech, and American Staffing Association and maybe Linkedin …

What goes around comes around… In Canada, a mere 15 years ago , I owned a firm called the CEO Group. Part of our product line was to launch the Canadian job board industry. We launched the predecessor to Workopolis, who at the time was owned by The Globe and Mail only. We also launched the predecessor of www.working.com which was owned by Southam (most of the prominent daily papers across Canada) which at the time was owned by the famous Conrad Black.

The daily battles were not with the technology or the focus of the job board but with the papers/owners themselves. It was changing the traditional model … It was frustrating as hell to build this model in Canada and when I look back at it, funny at its best.

Here are some memorable stories to make you realize how far we have come in a mere 15 years:
1)       I recall training a bunch of Nortel, McDonald Detwiller, Glenayre people with Yves Lermusi (now CEO of Checkster in 1997) and they firmly declared that there was no way their employers would let their employees have internet to a desktop and never an email account. (we should have sold our Nortel share then!) . We also told them the Internet was in Color and they could not believe it! This lead to some great relationships that we continue to cherish to this day.
2)       I remember negotiating with Getty Images for a picture of a sunflower for an ad campaign and they wanted to charge me a fee per time the image was shown on the internet as well as in print. They wanted tens of thousands of dollars to license this image. Crazy and Stupid.
3)       I remember a plane ride to Vancouver where we talked about connecting all the resumes we collected at career fairs and putting them on a searchable resume database on the internet (not on a cd like they were distributed before), but searchable. We decided against it as we didn’t think anyone would put their profile on the internet (we changed our minds on this and launched the first resume database even before Monster in 1995).

The point is we fought hard to change consumer behavior in those days and it was a costly and expensive battle. It was aggravating and exasperating at the same time. We knew we were onto something big but in Canada we really never had the financing or the resources to compete with the US markets, where Venture capital money was swimming around anyone who could spell internet. Companies like Monster and Yahoo (Dan Finnigan now at Jobvite) had raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

It was a good ride and a great learning experience.

So back to the state of the Canadian Job Board market …While Canwest/Southam and the Globe and Mail, although committed to “having a job board”, were definitely not committed to eating the lunch of the daily classified section on the “revenue producing side of the table”. The big competitors were Monster, Hotjobs, and Careerbuilder. When I sold my firm to the Washington Post (part of Brassring/Kenexa/IBM ) in 1998, the new owners then decided that they were going to enter into the Job Board market and be the next “Monster “. So they asked me to migrate these relationships back to the paper (even sold them our software and people) and worked on a strategy to become the next Monster. Of course that strategy never did materialize as the Washington Post decided to put their money in the US market and invest in CareerBuilder (which they have now sold). And in Canada, The Globe and Mail sold a significant portion of the Workopolis business to their “rival”, the Toronto Star. A wonderful person came into clean up the opportunity and rename the GlobeCareers - Workopolis. Her name was Kim Peters. She fought the daily battles of the newspaper’s industry in Canada, got the proper funding to build an empire and frankly did a pretty good job. She was much more skilled and tactful than I ever could be. Of course, internet years go by and she was turfed and then later showed up to clean up the mess at Southham, now Canwest. They really did nothing with their properties as they pushed all the responsibility back to the recruitment sales manager who of course did their best to drive print and ignore online. Kim once again built this empire, although not nearly as powerful (as I suspect she had no upper management commitment or money), but she did the best she could do with the resources she had.

So now you had The Toronto Star and Globe and Mail and Black enterprises (French Media) owning the Workopolis brand and Working.com with the brand behind rich properties like the Vancouver Sun Province, the Ottawa Citizen , the Calgary Herald and basically most other major Canadian cities. But that was not to last with the Toronto Star buying out the Globe and Mail ownership position in Workopolis and recently forming a relation with all the remaining Southam/Canwest Papers.

Well the Canadian media empires have disintegrated and the traditional job board model is falling apart with the likes of facebook and Linkedin and even more disruptive technology like Indeed and Eluta (yes Kim did a stint here as well). The newspaper is once again trying to align to build a national force with the announcement that Working.com (Southam/Canwest which is now called POSTMEDIA ) and Workopolis are now one. So the guys who invented the Industry, the Globe and Mail, are now the only paper not part of this network, although they have recently teamed with Eluta. But who cares … after all, now they are fighting for their lives in Print and online as a new set of disruptive technology takes over….. Craigslist (1 Million new job postings a year), Kijiji, Linkedin and, most important, facebook.

This week I meet with several large staffing firms and although their market is booming ( up 27% this year alone) , they all expressed severe dislike for 2 things and low and behold the top of their list LINKEDIN. Companies don’t like to be held hostage which is the work that most frequently came up when referencing Linkedin. Hostage builds competitors and opportunities for others. Second behind Linkedin was Monster, although many of these firms have clearly vacated this platform.