Last Friday the members of the NicheBoards group met for its 5th annual conference in South Florida. What a treat to sit down and discuss business in a room full of tob job board operators! The information sharing is often valuable but if nothing else, the meeting serves as good therapy -- it's always nice to complain together! The meeting agenda itself serves as a good health check too, a bit like a pilot's preflight checklist to remind us of projects and priorities that may need revisiting or reviving.
Throughout the day, I was struck by the complexity of our business. There's now too much involved for any one person to know all the details. Our company has a body and life of it's own now that makes any one person look small relative to the whole.
Here's how NicheBoards got started-
I was called for jury duty in Ft. Lauderdale and for the selection process had to stand and say my name and occupation "Eric Shannon, I run a job board". To my surprise another prospective juror stood up and said, "Jim Moylan, I run a job board too".
We were both selected for the trial and sat on the jury together! I enjoyed chatting with Jim of CallCenterJobs.com so much, I decided to call Don Firth who I knew lived near Miami and ran a logistics job board. He and I had dinner with our wives at an Indian restaurant and discussed how we might cooperate. We decided to do some joint advertising but Don really expanded the scope of our idea by recruiting a number of other top boards and voila!
We've been working together now for 5 years with very little turnover, but this year we welcomed TalentZoo.com from Atlanta, who brought new life to our meeting with the same flair and style that's evident throughout their website -- thanks Rick and Amy!
We're all very supportive of Peter Weddle's International Association of Employment Web Sites and many of us are charter members. You'll notice the website is powered by the LatPro team. Our belief and investment in the association is a direct outgrowth of the great experiences we've had with NicheBoards.com. Watch the IAEWS for big growth this year!
