Doug Geinzer just announced the sale of his job board (and second recruiting business) RecruitingNevada.com. Here’s Doug’s bio:
Doug Geinzer has been in the recruiting business since 1989. Prior to Recruiting Nevada, he owned a media group, which included the Las Vegas Employment Guide; Las Vegas Career Fairs, Las Vegas’ largest career fair company; Las Vegas Job Guide; and Diversity2000 – the first diversity recruiting magazine in the United states, which was distributed to every college campus in the country. Geinzer sold the media group to Cox and Landmark Communications in 1999 and then directed his focus to Classified USA! – Nevada’s largest recruitment advertising agency, which he co-owned with Ted Stepien.
And the recent announcement:
Greenspun Media Group (GMG) continues its growth with the acquisition of Recruiting Nevada, a local Internet company that publishes Nevada’s largest network of employment Web sites.
For the past two years, Home News Community Newspapers of Nevada has partnered with Recruiting Nevada on a quarterly basis through the Opportunity Boulevard Career Fair. This strategic acquisition will immediately introduce new career opportunities to a significantly larger audience of job seekers while also offering employers increased response rates as Recruiting Nevada’s online presence begins to extend to Greenspun Media Group’s local, regional and national group of award-winning publications.
Eric: Doug, congratulations on your second successful venture! What accounts for your consistent successes? Do you have a formula?
Doug: Thanks Eric. Hard work and tenacity usually get the job done. Luck always helps as well! The formula is simple – find an existing problem, develop a solution, deliver it to a small customer base and constantly solicit feedback to further develop the product and the rate card behind that product. When you find the ‘sweet spot’ – duplicate, duplicate, duplicate.
Eric: With so many successful ventures, has anything you’ve tried failed?
Doug: My failures outnumber my successes. I just don’t talk about them much. I learn from them and move on, never looking back. In the employment space, one of my biggest failures was back in the early 1990s when we developed an employment television program that aired Monday to Friday at 9:00 – 9:30 in the morning on a well-rated television station.
We were successful in our sales efforts and found ourselves selling the airtime at almost two-times the established rate card. However, I quickly learned that jobseekers will not sit on a couch to watch 20-30 second slated messages that are no different than what they can search and find in other mediums at their leisure and control. It was a hard lesson to learn as I refunded every dollar received back to our clients just to save face.
Eric: WOW, that's a valuable lesson... What first attracted you to this industry?
Doug: When I first moved to Las Vegas and was looking for a job I did not have the best experience and felt that I could change that for jobseekers looking to relocate in the future. All that existed was the daily newspaper and it simply listed jobs, but did not offer any guidance beyond that.
Our first newspaper – the Las Vegas Employment Guide, set out to change that. We delivered helpful tips on everything from job searching to resume writing, interview skills to top employers to work for. That, coupled with my past experience as an HR Director and knowing that finding good talent is a challenge, kept me engaged in the industry.
Eric: What changes do you see coming?
Doug: I think the job board waters continue to get murkier and murkier. Anyone with a computer in their basement can start a job board. This causes mass confusion with our most needed asset – the jobseeker. Because there are so many players in the market the jobseeker does not know where to start or who will deliver the most relevant results. This may cause them to lose faith in our product.
I also believe that we will continue to see more collaboration between traditional and new media. Existing media properties have loyal audiences that can be leveraged. And ‘employment’ will remain a very compelling piece of content.
Eric: Could not agree more Doug... Can you talk about the economy - how should job board owners react in a recession?
Doug: Typically economic slowdowns drive innovation. Now is a great chance to become remarkable and stand out from the rest of the clutter. I think this economic slowdown will consolidate the industry a little and allow the better job boards to improve their presence.
We all need to continue delivering value to our clients – both the jobseeker and the employer. And as owners we should be looking at what can do to become better and improve the overall experience for both.
Eric: What do you enjoy most about your business?
Doug: I like solving problems. To work on workforce shortage problems not only at a company or industry level, but also at a regional level, is truly exciting to me. There are so many facets and dynamics to the issues that it always remains a challenge. And at the end of the day, I know we are building a better community (in Nevada) for decades to come.
Eric: What first drew your attention about diversity?
Doug: Frankly, I got tired of hearing about ‘affirmative action,’ when I knew that diversity was just doing ‘the right thing.’ The challenge was getting employers to understand the difference between the two and the benefits of diversity. There is a huge difference between forcing somebody to do something by regulation, and getting them to embrace a process because it delivers better results.
In 1996 we began publishing (what I believe was) the first diversity recruitment magazine in the country. It took several years to educate employers on the difference between affirmative action and diversity. I would like to think we were part of changing that mindset. Today, diversity is an accepted practice among most employers and we are working on the next step in this ‘journey’ of becoming better employers.
Eric: You’ve acquired some very important domains recently -- can you tell me how you got interested in domains and why you purchased them? What are your plans for developing them and how do they tie into RN?
Doug: Well actually Recruiting Nevada owned about 30 Nevada-centric URLs that were recently acquired by GMG. If you look at the URLs they are not only regional job boards, but niche-regional boards. This was a business model that we put in place many years ago and have found great success.
GMG owns and controls some very valuable Internet real estate including Vegas.com and LasVegas.com, and recently went into a partnership to operate Mexico.com. We are still determining what our overall strategy will be, but I imagine it could include the aforementioned as well as other media properties owned by GMG.
Eric: What websites do you visit everyday besides your own?
Doug: I actually manage all of the media that I consume on a customized Google homepage. I monitor well over 50 different RSS feeds, but frequently visit Cheezhead, Internetinc, JobDig, JobBoarders and Editor and Publisher.
Eric: Do you follow the progress of all the ‘better mousetrap’ job boards funded by VCs or just stick to your knitting? If you watch them, do any have promise?
Doug: If you look at most of the business models of the VC funded job boards, they are aggregators or verticals. They entered the market with the help of job board owners (using our content), but now have become middle-men and often times compete for traffic we once owned, in hopes of reselling it to us.
I think some of the players leaning towards a ‘candidate matching system’ have some promise. The better you can serve both the employer and the jobseeker, the more successful you will be.
Eric: Keen insights Doug, and that's the problem with 'free classifieds' - few can resist it... Have you ever been tempted to bolt on any of their clever features like tagging, referral systems, social networking, audio, video etc?
Doug: We usually experiment with everything to see if we can find some success. If we see any uptick, we explore a little further. Most of this seems to be marketing people trying to monetize employment in areas other than the traditional introduction of jobs. I am certain some of it will stick in the future, like video.
But at the end of the day – employment is typically done at the local level and that is where many have gone wrong. An employer would rather look at 10 super-qualified candidates who have double opted in on their interest for their position, rather than 300 who were selected by a system by some level of demographic profiling, yet have no interest in furthering their employment search.
Eric: What have been your biggest challenges building RN?
Doug: Developing a technological platform that is specific to Nevada employer needs. Nevada is unique. We have been the fastest growing state in the United States for nearly 20 years. The talent we need most like nurses, doctors, teachers and engineers, do not live here yet.
It is our job to get them to relocate to Nevada. Your standard ‘job board technology’ does not accomplish this. So we have developed many of our own technologies to get the job done. As much as we did not intend to be a technology company, we have become one.
Eric: Is it getting harder or easier to launch a job board? How much would you budget for launching a new board from scratch?
Doug: Today, just about anyone can launch a job board. There is very little barrier to entry. I have seen ‘free-ware’ software out there now. The problem is – you get what you pay for.
We learned early on that it was best to develop our own technology because our clients have specific needs. You can’t just build a box and expect everyone to fit inside of it. Plus – there is an ongoing maintenance expense associated with running a successful job board. I would budget a couple of hundred thousand dollars to ‘do it right.’
Eric: What advice would you give an entrepreneur about to launch a job board? How about a career fair? What does it take to succeed?
Doug: Be a big fish in a small pond. Know your product, but more importantly – know the community you serve. Be willing to ‘get involved’ and volunteer your time to be a solid community leader. Employment is what drives most of the economy.
Eric: As a job board, why would you want to be acquired by a newspaper company?
Doug: Greenspun Media Group is not your traditional publishing company. Their primary businesses include the newspaper and magazine publications In Business Las Vegas, Las Vegas Home & Design, Las Vegas Magazine (LVM), Las Vegas Weekly, Home News Community Newspapers of Nevada, Ralston Flash, Vegas2Go and VegasGolfer magazine.
GMG is also the parent company of Niche Media Holdings LLC, publishers of luxury magazines, which include Art Basel Miami Beach, Aspen Peak, Atlanta Peach, Bal Harbour, Boston Common, Capitol File, Florida Inside Out, Gotham, Hamptons, Los Angeles Confidential, Michigan Ave, Ocean Drive, Ocean Drive Espanol, Philadelphia Style, Style the magazine of the Venetian and Palazzo resorts, Trump, Vegas and Wynn.
GMG is owned by the Greenspun family, which also publishes the Las Vegas Sun daily newspaper, owns the Web sites VEGAS.com and LasVegas.com; Vegas TV, KTUD TV 14, Las Vegas' number one independent TV station and Las Vegas ONE, a partnership with KLAS TV-8 and Cox Communications on an all-news cable channel.
Their reach is tremendous. Their readership is valuable and the cross-marketing opportunities are unlimited.
Thanks Eric.
Eric: Thank you Doug! It's very clear to me now that your success is no accident and flows from a penetrating and visionary understanding of the internet recruiting field. I wish you the best of luck with your new endeavors.
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