Meet SalesTrax.com president Gary Upah

Founded in 1998,  SalesTrax caught my attention with its December '07 announcement that job postings would henceforth be free -- unusual for a top-ranked job board.  You can find their job posting policies and pricing here. SalesTrax is based in the Kansas City area and offers "a comprehensive array of Internet services, nationwide career fairs, and direct placement services". 

I wanted to find out from Gary how offering free job postings has worked out and I think you will enjoy reading his story!

Gary: Necessity. I was a recruiter in the mid-ninety's and competing against the telecom and dot.com industries for sales talent. While looking for new ways to find sales professionals, I became acquainted with the young job boards that were out there such as Dice, Careermosaic and Headhunter.net. At the time, they were trying to figure out a business model, but they looked like a great source of progressive young sales talent for my company.

Eric: Was this your first business?

Gary: Technically yes, but I'd had years of experience setting up small businesses and hiring sales professionals in the financial services field.

Eric: How did you get started and why?

Gary: During the dot.com era, the Internet seemed like the venue of choice for progressive minded talent so I decided to start a local job board to help me recuit talent for my financial services practice. During due diligence, I found that I wasn't the only sales recruiter struggling to find talent. dice had demonstrated that there might be a place for profession-specific boards, and there was not a sales-specific board on the internet yet (that I could find) so I expanded the project to include all industries, but kept to the niche that I knew well.

Eric: Why do you run job fairs and how did you get started in career fairs?

Gary: A year into the internet business, I learned that the internet made for a better distribution platform than a profitable busness model, and that you had to have incredibly deep pockets to build a brand on the web. Job fairs gave us an opportunity to generate revenue in a more traditional way, while building our resume database and developing brand recognition.

Eric: I'm told that job fairs are the first to suffer in a recession - what's your experience presently?

Gary: What recruiting service doesn't suffer during a recession? In addition to running job fairs, we also provide Internet and direct placement recruiting services. Our mission is to be able to help companies recruit sales talent at all levels - job board, career fair, and direct placement, and to bundle services together where it makes sense. Generally, there are companies and/or industries that are active if you look hard enough to find them.

Eric: What have been your biggest challenges or headaches building your job board?

Gary: The biggest challenge for all new Internet companies is earning a profit while building a brand. One of my most frustrating challenges in building a job board was attracting job seekers before we had job postings, and attracting job postings before we had job seekers.

Eric: Why did you go free in December of '07 and how did it impact your business?

Gary: We started to offer free job postings hoping to attract more companies to the site, which would give us more up-selling opportunities and attract more candidate traffic. while this change did bring more job posters and seekers to the site, it has not seemed to attract the level of client that we are targeting. Something about the word "free"....We may tweak our program a little down the road.

Eric: What changes do you see coming to the job board industry?

Gary: It's still a developing industry and there are opportunities for growth through improved technology. However, there are so many players out there now that I think we will see a lot of consolidation withinin the industry in the next few years and that it will be tough for new entrants to survive without a truly unique technological element.

I also see the standard fixed rate pricing model migrating to a pay for performance model, much like the direction banner advertising has taken the last few years.

Eric: What do you think is most unique about your board?

Gary: While our board itself is not that unique, the different ways that we populate our candidate database and the ways that we help job seekers certainly are. For instance, 30% of our resumes are not found on the big boards.

Eric:  I have a feeling that has a lot to do with your job fair and headhunting business... should every niche job board owner also be dabbling in recruiting? 

Gary: I wouldn’t suggest it unless you’ve got a strong constitution and big bank account!  Headhunting is something you have to do full-time in order to sustain the client relationships and hear about the openings before anyone else.  To dabble in it can be very expensive due to the uncertain, contingency compensation nature of the business.  We do our direct placement through a network and split revenue with affiliates so that we can focus on maintaining affiliate relationships instead of client relationships.  That also allows us to focus the bulk of our resources on the more profitable parts of the business.  On the other hand, you have to sell a whole lot of job postings to equal the revenue of one direct placement!

Eric: Well, my experience bears you out -- We got involved in contingency recruiting in 2000 placing about a dozen people for MarchFirst before they went out of business.  A couple years later we had to return $30,000 in their bankruptcy proceedings… but even before that happened, I never liked contingency recruiting for the risk.

What do you enjoy most about your business?

Gary: I enjoy helping people. On one hand, you have frustrated, overworked recruiters who can't find good talent, and on the other, you have stressed out job seekers with a mortgage to pay. the only business that I feel might be more rewarding is running a dating site.

Eric: Do you think running a job board is getting easier or harder as time goes by?

Gary: It's defininitely getting harder. When we started 10 years ago, job boards were new and companies were willing to give it a try. Now, job boards are the standard and you have to really differentiate youself in order to get your share of the available dollars.

Eric: What advice would you give an entrepreneur about to launch a job board? What does it take to succeed?

Gary: Know beyond a doubt what your unique selling proposition is, and if your target audience will buy it. There are just too many experienced players currently in the game who are well funded and cutting edge for a new player to stumble into the business and hope to succeed.

Eric: What do you read?

Gary: I recenlty finished Lee Iacocca's new book Where Have All the Leaders Gone? and Keith Rosen's new book, Coaching Salespeople Into Sales Champions. I also read a lot of business magazines.

Eric: What do you do for fun? How does running your business fit in with your lifestyle?

Gary: Most of my passions involve my family and the outdoors, and I try leaving evenings and weekends available for both. Like most entrepreneurs, I put in the 20 hour days to get started, but now strive for a better balance. The key is to hire quality employees and then get out of their way.

Eric: Thank you so much for your time Gary, is there anything else I should have asked you about?

Gary: No, but thanks for the opportunity to share our story.

This text was transcribed using Dragon NaturallySpeaking software so please forgive any typos you might find...