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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the first of a series of interviews with the pioneers of Internet recruiting -- it's fitting Bill Warren is the first because he was creating job boards before most of us knew what the Internet was! Enjoy:

Bill, I first heard about you in Mexico from your partner Jose. I understand you co-founded OCC.com with him before selling OCC to Monster. What attracted you to online recruiting so long ago?

When I was VP-Industrial Relations for Admiral Division of Rockwell International we had used CompuServe and Prodigy for communicating job vacancies between different Rockwell plants and divisions. When the Internet opened up to commercial use in 1992 I realized it had great potential for recruiting and employment.

Was OCC your first business?