To my knowledge Don Firth runs the largest family of profitable independently owned and self-financed job boards. His boards have a utilitarian look and are designed with the single purpose of helping candidates find jobs in a specific industry. But considering their performance, I wonder if my own company hasn't paid too much attention to polish and content. JobsInLogistics.com, AllRetailJobs.com, JobsInTrucks.com, JobsInManufacturing.com, and TopUSAJobs.com have a combined monthly traffic of almost 3 million visitors.

Eric: For my money Don, you’re the most successful job board entrepreneur I know of. I should say the most successful job board family because it is a family business. What accounts for your success? Do you have a formula? How do you choose new categories?

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.

Free classifieds site and craigslist competitor OLX.com raised $13.5m yesterday which brings this Buenos Aires based company's funding to $23.5m. TechCrunch has the story and some interesting comments left by accomplished co-founder Fabrice Grinda:

Want to make a living from your blog? This is Michael Arrington, writing about how VC money is flowing into the blog business and touching on the dogfight:

And writing good content is only half the battle. You have to figure out the complex, dynamic web of politics between bloggers and mainstream media before you post to know where to get support. And you’ll need support in the form of links from other prominent bloggers. An early push can take a post and make it a headline on TechMeme, which leads to page views and notice by sponsors. But since blogging is almost by definition a conversation between bloggers, fights tend to break out over emotional issues. Cliques develop. Can you count on them to support you down the road?

Chris Russell is the founder of AllCountyJobs.com a fast growing network of local job boards in the Northeastern, US. Recently, he launched JobBoarders.com a social network for job board owners and employees. He also built and sold RecruitingFly.com a news site for the online recruiting industry.

AllCountyJobs.com is a regional job board network. This network of sites covering Connecticut, Southern New York, Western Mass & Eastern Mass and Rhode Island reaches over 125,000 monthly jobseekers. Their tagline is "Go local, get hired". AllCountyJobs.com is also the home of Jobs in Pods, the first ever audio job board.

This is a great read, don't miss it.  Congratulations again to Laurel!

New York City has always been a magnet for oversize ambitions and big dreams. When Laurel Touby showed up here, in 1985, her fantasy was to become a successful writer. She imagined spending her days in a big loft, hobnobbing with artists and the urban literati. In reality, breaking into journalism was a difficult and lonely affair. So Touby started throwing parties to cheer herself up and meet other writers. Good move, because she wound up building her parties into mediabistro.com, a hot job-posting and community site favored by journalists and media executives. So hot that last year, Touby sold her company to Jupitermedia, a digital content and research company, for $23 million. 

I especially enjoy sports and coaching movies because they often provide a great metaphor for business life. Here's a list of the ones I've enjoyed:

The Heart of the Game

Before Rony Kahan co-founded vertical job search engine Indeed.com, he was building JobsInTheMoney.com and collaborating with us in the NicheBoards.com group. He’s one of the brightest sparks in job board industry and it was no surprise when he made such a splash with Indeed.com. It’s true I’ve said there are too many new job ventures. Nothing I said in that post applies to Indeed. Rony is in a class all by himself.

Jack Welch has a great column in Business Week about the balance between managing for short and long term results. The question was "Since there is such a bias in the markets for short-term results, how can you prepare for the long term?"

The answer: "In a word, that's management!"

He uses examples from a couple of key areas to show that this balancing act between short and long term results is what good management is all about.