There was a time, believe it or not, when we thought LatPro might raise $10 million in venture capital and head for an IPO shortly thereafter, lol. Today, I don't envy the public companies and am glad we didn't raise the money. Here is a list of those less fortunate job board companies who call themselves public corporations.

The last time I talked to my good friend Rick Myers over at TalentZoo.com he mentioned that it would be fun to hear more about the obstacles we have faced (without giving the impression that we are losers, lol). So here we go.

"Enterprise" class my ***!
Outsource every #!@*&% thing you can...

In some previous posts I have mentioned that we have been plagued by some technology problems this year.  One of the things 'driving' us crazy have been Seagate hard drive failures - but not their "enterprise" class drives which seem to have higher initial failure rates according to user reviews.

So, who isn't launching a niche job board these days?

I have been talking about growing competition in the job board marketplace for a long time... if you read my review of the job board industry, you found the list of niche job boards launched or acquired by monster and careerbuilder even before CB announced WorkinRetail.com. There are other sites there that remain anonymous and unannounced.

If business were like baseball, credibility would be first base, authenticity second base and good branding third-base.  But how to hit a home run? According to Patrick Hanlon, author of Primal Branding, you score big when your customers open their hearts to you so that your product or service becomes a meaningful part of the culture your clients move in.

Reading Primal Branding was the experience that gave me the courage I needed to trust my instincts about authenticity. The implications for job boards and other Internet businesses are significant.  Just have a look at the number of anonymous job boards in the top 100 niches.  This is a situation that can only hold in a low competition environment with little transparency.

Job board experts agree that running a job board is getting more difficult as time goes by -- but launching a board is easier than ever. In a couple of hours, without even pulling out your credit card you can create a reasonably functional and good-looking website with today's social networking tools or blog software.

How times have changed... To start LatPro in 1997, I learned to program in Visual Basic and wrote all the code myself for a little more than two years. That code was all replaced in 2000 and today comprises 162,000 lines of java code, 310,000 lines of PHP code and 43,000 lines of html. Much of it will get replaced again. At LatPro, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on our software and infrastructure.

Yesterday, I talked about why I blog so today let's talk about why you should blog if you run a job board.

Competition is heating up geometrically. Transparency is being forced on us all as secrets become evermore difficult to keep. The winners will be boards that build credibility and authenticity.  You can have high credibility without a blog but if you want authenticity, start blogging.

Had an interesting conversation with Mike O'Brien and Nick Jimenez at climber.com a few days ago and when I asked them how I can improve my blog, they said 'transparency'.  They wanted to know why I blog -- so here it is:

Why do I blog?

When I first met Allen, he was fairly new to the job board industry but talked about its similarities with the newspaper digitization industry which he pioneered beginning in the early 80s.  Launching in 2005 his company onTargetJobs.com has built a substantial portfolio of niche job boards. His most recent acquisition of RegionalHelpWanted.com valued near $100 million was onTargetJob’s largest to date.   I had been planning to interview Allen for some time and with the changes in management at onTarget, this seemed like the right moment. Don't miss reading Allen's bio and resume while listening to techno music.

This is the 2008 guide to the top 100 US job board niches -- the 2009 Top 100 job sites report is here. For each employment niche it lists the top 3 or 4 niche job boards. This report excludes:

• job boards that lack top Google rankings
• boards with with high Google rankings but very low credibility or authenticity.
• sites that require job seekers to pay or register
• job search engines that aggregate other job board postings