Project

• Overview / Forward

The ability to communicate digitally for the price of a [nearly free] phone call led to Bulletin Boards- communities hosted by organizations such as Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL. Their success led to the 1994 introduction of the Netscape browser and the inevitable commercialization of the ‘World Wide Web’.

Commercial internet access was sold to consumers as hundreds of websites grew to hundreds of thousands intended for “everyday use”. The role of in-house and external recruiters started changing as they watched where qualified candidates went online tools and by the end this decade they had begun to disintermediate the global newspaper classified help-wanted advertising industry- a multi-billion dollar cash cow that was approaching 10 billion dollars in the United States.

Amazon, launched in 1994 as a bookseller in Seattle, Washington.1

At SHRM’s 1996 Annual HR Conference in Chicago one in four attendees had the attendees had an email address. One in then had been on the world wide web. They were also exposed to new sources for jobs. Job boards like DICE moved from a BBS to the world wide web. Online Career Center (OCC), The MonsterBoard, Career Mosaic and Careerbuilder as well as hundreds of other sites made their appearance by the mid 1990s. 

The rise of dotcoms led to an exponential growth in technology applications as well as in the jobs related to the technology. The US in particular saw the rise of “cultural” additions to the workplace like ‘Casual Fridays’. Office perks exploded as offices became less formal and businesses experimented with new ways to entice workers to spend more time onsite.

Company sites quickly became a new source to post jobs because it was direct and less expensive. Primitive though they were candidates who could figure out how to find and access online jobs found they could apply for a job by (initially) emailing or faxing their resume- a real edge in time as they could do it whenever they wanted rather than waiting for Sunday Newspaper’s help-wanted classified section to be published.2

As these job boards developed…and the accuracy of search engines improved, it became easier than ever for candidates to post their resume or complete application forms and allow employers to consider them. 

It became so easy to apply by email to multiple jobs that recruiters were overloaded with applications. In the days of print, they were used to a dozens of candidates applying per job per week- not hundreds.3

Employers, especially large employers, increased their reliance on internal recruiters to sift out unsuitable candidates at every level…as long as they had new tools to deal with the data. 4

The transition from print media to digital classified advertising spelled the end of Newspaper Help Wanted dominance as THE source of hire and set the stage for Sourcing and Recruitment Marketing specialties.

The 1990s also saw the introduction of modern search engines. Yahoo! launched in 1996 as a directory of links to recommended sites. Google launched in 1998 as a keyword search-based site that saw the user as a better judge of relevancy than a quasi-editorial group of evaluators. Internet users quickly migrated to Google because its model allowed easier searches through more pages of content, but few – even within Google’s walls – could foresee how the company could generate any revenue from search alone. Within a couple of years, Google had figured out that it could monetize those searches through the careful placement of highly relevant ads paid for by the advertisers on a cost-per-click basis, a model that then found its way into online recruitment with TopUSAJobs and, later, Indeed.

90’s Milestones:

• 1990 – DICE launched in San Francisco.5
• 1990 – H1B Visa Program launched with the 1990 Immigration Act. 6
• 1990 – Americans with Disabilities Act passed 7
• 1991 – Civil Rights Act passed 8
• 1991 – The world Wide Web opened to the public.9
• 1992 – The Online Career Center (OCC) is arguably, one the first job board on the Internet.10
• 1992 – First text message sent.11
• 1993 – Jobserve launched in the UK.12
• 1993 – TMP Worldwide’s recruiting arm launched.13
• 1993 – Family and Medical Leave Act passed.14
• 1993 – Bernard Hodes Group launches CareerMosaic.15
• 1994 – The Electronic Job Board Revolution by Joyce Lain Kennedy was published.16
• 1994 – The MonsterBoard is launched.17
• 1994 – Netscape browser introduced.18
• 1994 – Yahoo is launched.19
• 1995 – Bill Vick launches Recruiters OnLine Network (RON) 20
• 1995 – CareerBuilder launched originally as NetStart.21
• 1995-2000 – 1st generation ATS systems explode: Resumix vs. Restrac.22
• 1995 – Interbiznet begins publishing daily recruiting news…and editorial.23
• 1995 – Craigslist Founded.24
• 1995 – David Lord Launches Executive Search Information Services (ESIS).25
• 1996 – CareerXroads 1st edition published.26
• 1996 – HotJobs.com launched.27
• 1996 – Employer brand established as an HR management marketing tool.28
• 1996 – Samsung’s SCH-100 launched.29
• 1996 – Adecco formed.30
• 1996 – Viasite (Taleo) founded.31
• 1996 – SHRM’s Annual Conference included, for the first time, a session entitled ‘HR & The Internet’.32
• 1996 – College Recruiter launched.33
• 1996 – Local Boston Community Newspapers pioneers online content and training.34
• 1997 – Job scraping (job aggregators) emerges,35
• 1997 – AIRS is founded.36
• 1997 – O*Net published as the Dictionary of Occupational Titles sunsets.37
• 1998 – The phrase “The War for Talent” was coined by McKinsey & Co.38
• 1998 – Google launched.39
• 1998 – ERE Media started.40
• 1999 – Brassring founded.41
• 1999 – EMA acquired by SHRM.42
• 1999 – HR.com founded.43
• 1999 – Monster and HotJobs premier Superbowl Ads.44
• 1999 – WEDDLE’s Guide to Employment Sites first published.45
• 1999 – Recruiters Internet Strategic Education (RISE) is launched.46
• 1999 – Mr.Ted Launches.47
• 1999 – Talent Connections founded in Atlanta48

References

1. Amazon Launches in 1994
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Amazon
2. The 90s Called. They Want Their Job Postings Back – SourceCon
3. Surveys responded to by 100s of employers and 100s of thousands of candidates that applied to the  employers participating in the Candidate Experience Awards suggested that applications per opening grew again exponentially after the 2008 recession.
   https://www.thetalentboard.org/
4. “The battle was on with print media, which was already showing a growth decline by the end of the 1990s. Recruitment agencies, who were capitalizing on the early job boards and were growing rapidly in line with economic growth and demand, and job boards, who were showing real signs of significant growth, fueled by advertising from both agencies and hiring companies, and their own corporate career sites.  For the first time companies were faced with choice over where to spend their recruitment budgets and amped up their tracking metrics like source of hire, cost of hire and volumes of response. As volumes increased, fuelled by access to more jobs, applicants’ candidate experience suffered, which has become a bigger and bigger issue year on year, particularly with the growth of social media.”
   Source: from the notes of Bill Boorman
5. The Data Processing Independent Consultants Exchange (DICE) began life as an IT BBS in San Francisco, available only to contractors, recruiters, and staffing agencies (it transitioned to the web in 1996.

   https://dhigroupinc.com/about-dhi/default.asp

6. H-1B was created by the Immigration Act of 1990. It originally made 65,000 H-1B visas available each fiscal year and allowed U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations…for a modest price.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa
7. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibite discrimination on the basis of disability. Unlike the Civil Rights Act, the ADA also requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, and imposes accessibility requirements on public accommodations
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990
8. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 was the first effort since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to modify some of the basic procedural and substantive rights provided by federal law in employment discrimination cases. It added provisions to Title VII protections expanding the rights of women to sue and collect compensatory and punitive damages for sexual discrimination or harassment.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1991
9. The first web page may be lost, but Paul Jones of UNC-Chapel Hill in North Carolina revealed in May 2013 that he has a copy of a page sent to him in 1991 by Berners-Lee which is the oldest known web page. Jones stored the plain-text page, with hyperlinks, on a floppy disk and on his NeXT computer. CERN put the oldest known web page back online in 2014, complete with hyperlinks that helped users get started and helped them navigate what was then a very small web.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
10. Bill Warren, a former HR leader at Rockwell International, began using Compuserve and Prodigy to distribute his company’s  openings and, as soon as it was practical, created the Online Career Center (OCC) on the World Wide Web. OCC was bought by TMP, merged with MonsterBoard and eventually became Monster.com in 1999 with Bill as its first President. 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Warren_(businessman)
11. Today’s most popular means of communicating with a candidate began on Dec 3 1992 with  the message “Merry Christmas”. A year later Nokia incorporated SMS Text Messaging in it’s phone.
    https://www.vodafone.com/news/technology/25-anniversary-text-message
12. “When JobServe launched its recruitment service, it provided a daily bulletin of open jobs to subscribers. The service was launched in response to candidate complaints that every time they applied for an opening in trade journals or magazines the positions had already been filled. The IT contractors wanted a new and faster way of communicating and applying for open opportunities and the solution was the one of the first if not the first jobs by e-mail service. Today Jobserve delivers 1.3Mn subscription emails a day.”
    Source: From the notes of Bill Boorman
13. Andrew McKelvey originally founded Telephone Marketing Programs (TMP) in 1967 as a directional marketing company focused on Yellow Pages advertising.In 1993, McKelvey partnered with Don Tendler, formerly of Davis & Dorand, an early recruitment ad agency, to launch and grow a recruitment division for TMP. In 1995 TMP’s recruitment division acquired The Monster Board and Online Career Center (OCC). TMP Worldwide went public in 1996 and its career websites grew and eventually merged as Monster.com in 1999.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radancy
14. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) allows eligible employees to take up to 12 work weeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period to care for a new child, care for a seriously ill family member, or recover from a serious illness.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_of_1993
15. CareerMosaic was among the internet’s first employment sites (not the first as is claimed), and described by the founders, Hodes Advertising, as “an employment and career shopping mall.” It was sold to Headhunter.net and eventually bought by CareerBuilder
    https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/bernard-hodes-group-inc
16. Joyce Lain Kennedy was known as the Dear Abby of Career Advice. Her syndicated newspaper column begun in 1968 could be found in one major paper in every US city. She documented the world of hiring from the candidate perspective and mapped the resources and changing pathways in a series of books over several decades. Her 1994 directory was seminal as it  included how to access and use many BBSs as well as emerging Internet career sites. She also published dozens of editions of ‘Dummies’ books for candidates on how to write and manage online resumes & online interviews in the earliest stages of the digital world we now live in.
    https://thecoastnews.com/dear-abby-of-career-advice-fondly-remembered/
17. MonsterBoard was created by Jeff Taylor who had previously founded a small recruitment ad agency, Adion, in Boston. It  was (one of) the first public job search websites on the Internet, (among) the first public resume databases in the world and arguably the first to have job search agents or ‘job alerts’. Purchased by TMP in 1996 and merged with OCC by 1999 to become Monster.com, the site literally shocked the industry in 1999 when it paid more than a million dollars to advertise in the Super Bowl (Hotjobs.com also bought Superbowl ads in 1999). Monster.com eventually was bought at a fire sale by Randstad.
    
    “I was in IT recruitment at the time and we used OCC to post IT jobs which we thought was revolutionary. I think we were paying a little less than a $1000 a year for unlimited postings. THEN, Monster comes in and merges with OCC. Our first contract with Monster was $30,000. We thought that was insane. We fought it for a while, but we had no choice but to get it because it worked. We were posting over 500 jobs at the time. Monster flew a few of us to see the operations in Boston which was pretty cool. They had a giant control room with hundreds of monitors that showed activity across the globe. They also were very google like with their fun cereal bar and food for employees. To me, this really started to end print advertising and when we moved to job boards.”
    Source:from the notes of Elaine Orler.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster.com
18. Netscape’s browser was the original browser and was once dominant in terms of usage share, but eventually lost all of its share to Internet Explorer and by 2008 was gone.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(web_browser)
19. In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University, when they created a website named “Jerry and David’s guide to the World Wide Web”.The site was a human-edited web directory, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In March 1994, “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was renamed Yahoo! They added a tool to search the directory in 1995. Results here and in ,any other ‘Directories’ were extremely poor until Google and by then Yahoo! could search the internet rather than their directory. Yahoo! acquired Hotjobs in 2002 and was itself acquired by Verizon. Still the 11th most visited site on the web.”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!
20. The Recruiters Online Network was one of the first recruitment destination sites that catering to professional recruiters.
    “In addition to aggregating jobs and resumes for distribution to partners sites we offered community and tools for Recruiters. RON was recognized as a top 100 site. It was sold in 2002.”
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/billvick/?locale=es_ES
    Source: Bill Vick’s notes on RON from his LinkedIn Profile
21. CareerBuilder was created by Robert McGovern as NetStart. The name changed in 1998. In July 2000, the company was purchased in a joint venture by Knight Ridder and Tribune Company and CareerBuilder then acquired competitors CareerPath.com and later Headhunter.net which had already acquired CareerMosaic.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CareerBuilder#History
22. “First Generation ATS systems – the battle of Skills based or Keyword searching. Resumix vs. Restrac 1995 – 2001(ish). This was the first mainstream client server recruiting centric systems that managed resumes, requisitions, applicant flow. They were designed to support paper resumes with OCR systems. Companies had recruiting operations teams that were hired to open,sort, prep, scan and verify resumes into these systems. The system would then sort key skills (Resumix) to make search faster and incorporate the potential for errors in the OCR, or the system would allow for keyword search against the OCR record (Restrac). These systems were implemented in some organizations before they had email accounts. Labels could be printed to send postcard responses that the company had received your resume.
    Fun Fact: Resumix – got its name from Resumes On Unix (where the software was developed at Sun Microsystems).  Both organizations were ultimately purchased multiple times before being fully retired in the industry around 2007,”
    Source: From the Notes of Elaine Orler
23. John Sumser began writing well researched articles (and editorials) about online recruiting topics and publishing them daily- for nearly 15 years, delivering them via email but also archiving them on his website Interbiznet (no longer a url in his possession). When he started the word blog had yet to become part of the lexicon of the digital age. Over the next decade he launched customized training and research analysis to inform vendors and recruiting leaders about the ins and outs of the digital world. Since 2008 John has continued commenting on broad aspects of HR, particularly technology issues, at HRExaminer.
    http://www.HRExaminer.com
24. Craigslist became one of the earliest and quickly the largest market for classified ads on the internet, (including job openings). Some say by charging low fees and not collecting user data. Built into the success of their unique practices was Craig himself, a true geek, he worked as the site’s customer service expert listening at all hours it seemed and even asking for permission of customers to charge or raise rates…city by city. A level of authenticity and trust developed with customers that was impossible to compete with by other services.
    Craigslist
25. David Lord, a career journalist who worked as a daily newspaper writer and editor for 10 years and as Editor at Kennedy Information from 1987 to 1995 when he formed Executive Search Information Services (ESIS) in response to requests from corporations for better information about executive recruiters and best practices in working with them. Over the next 20 years, he helped more than 100 Fortune 500 corporations improve executive search effectiveness. In 1996, David launched ESIX, a research and discussion group for heads of executive recruiting from leading corporations that continues today as ESIX (Executive Search Information Exchange) under Simon Mullins.
    ESIX: Executive Search Information Exchange
26. MMC Group became a partnership between Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin in 1995. It began as a result of their supporting HR and TA leaders who were out of work in the early 90s. Initially they trained job seekers and Recruiters to use the internet to seek out jobs or find people in the only computer lab in NJ at Rider University and in NYC as a featured course for Cornell University. It was initially an added value to their day jobs as a contract recruiter (Mark) and GM of Shaker Advertising’s East coast operations (Gerry). By 1996 they collected 300 recruiting related sites and self-published a detailed directory of emerging technologies – the first of 8 annual editions of CareerXroads which eventually sold around 250,000 copies- mostly from Mark’s garage. By 2002, job boards were too numerous to review and CareerXroads pivoted to establish a community of TA leaders in large companies sharing their evolving hiring practices. Mark retired in 2016 and Chris Hoyt became Gerry’s new partner.
    http://www.CXR.works
27. Launched originally as a tech only site by Richard Johnson, Hotjobs.com rapidly expanded to other jobs by 1997 and in 1999  paid 1.6 million for a SuperBowl ad. That branding effort led to Hotjob’s becoming the most visited career site on the internet in 2001. In 2002 Monster.com made an offer for Hotjobs.com and was quickly sued by the US Gov’t’s DOL as a monopoly. The suit was squashed but it gave time for other offers to surface and Hotjobs.com was acquired by Yahoo – until 2010 when Monster bought Hotjobs.com for ½ the price Yahoo had paid in 2002.
    Yahoo! HotJobs
28. The term “employer brand” was, according to wikipedia, first introduced in 1990. Barrow and Ambler can claim to be the first to have defined it by publishing in the December 1996 Journal of Brand Management a “test (of) the application of brand management techniques to human resource management”. On a practical scale, Recruitment Advertising firms had been developing ‘brand’ campaigns since at least the 1950’s. Employer branding activities as a separate function within TA and HR only came into their own in the 2000s with the growth of social media sites.
    Employer branding
29. In 1990, the number of mobile users was around 11 million, and by 2020, that number had risen to a whopping 2.5 billion. Samsung developed its first CDMA (2G) mobile phone in March 1996, to coincide with the late 1995 launch of Sprint’s CDMA service. This first digital handset, the SCH-100, was extra light and slim, and enabled clear voice communication setting off the smartphone era.  The 2G and 3G services (CDMA and GSM) will sunset by the end of 2022 and 4G and 5G will be the standards.
    CDMA vs. GSM: What’s the Difference?

    “I can argue the cell phone was a catalyst in recruiting because we no longer had to use office numbers to reach people, or call nights and weekends but we could call them on their cell during the workday, and quickly text them. (disclaimer – I did work for Qualcomm and got to watch this happen in real time with our recruiters)”
    Samsung Telecommunications
    Source: From the notes of Elane Orler

30. Adecco formed by merger of two international placement/staffing firms
    find out more about the history of the industry leader in Human Resources solutions
31. Viasite, originally a French language job board, pivoted to become the ATS, Recruitsoft, in 1999. The founders, Martin Ouellet and Louis Têtu, also acquired Yves Lermusiaux’s iLogos as its research arm in the same year. Recruitsoft was renamed Taleo in 2004 and was acquired by Oracles in 2012.
    Taleo
32. “Two sessions were delivered at the Annual SHRM Conference in June, 1996 devoted to the impact that HR might have on the Internet. Gerry Crispin, presenting ‘HR and the Internet” first asked asked the audience of over 1000 HR professionals at each of his 2 sessions the following questions- ‘Do you have an email address?’ and ‘Have you been on the Internet?’ 25% of the audience responded yes to the first question by raising their hands and 10% to the second.
    Source: from the notes of Gerry Crispin
33. One of the earliest niche job boards, Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com’s founder, viewed it initially as an added feature to employers’ ads in any of his College Recruiter employment magazines. (with no option for employers to advertise only online) but within weeks after launching the site began posting ads not served by the magazines for clients still willing to pay just for an online ad. Today, College Recruiter has migrated almost all of its employer customers from traditional duration ads to programmatic, performance-based advertising.
    College Recruiter: Entry Level Jobs | Internships for Students
34. Glenn Gutmacher, working for Community Newspaper Company from 1996-1999 launches several ‘Town Online’ publications and begins, in 1997, his online recruitment training & marketing career offering seminars like Advanced Internet Recruiting Techniques and Marketing Your Business Online to recruiters and business owners.
    http://www.recruiting-online.com/resume.html
    Source: Stroud’s History of Sourcing link to Glenn’s resume from the Recruiting-online.com
35. “The first ‘job scraper’ hits the market, launched by Jungle and Careercast. Sites like these eventually became known as job aggregators. They copied jobs from individual career sites and job boards, and repositioning them into a vertical search engine on the web. Employers found for the first time that they were promoting their job opportunities in one place, and reappearing elsewhere. The early job scrapers, now known as aggregators, came in for a lot of criticism for posting out of date jobs.”
    Source: From the notes from Bill Boorman
    “Arguably the most successful of these is Indeed although Google may still win the title in the end. “
    Source: Notes from Gerry Crispin
36. Founded by Michael Foster, and managed for much of its history by Christian Forman until it was acquired by ADP in 2008, AIRS pioneered sourcing training that recruiters sought to ensure they kept their skills current.
    The History of Sourcing
37. The Occupational Information Network (O*Net) “is a free online database that contains hundreds of occupational definitions to help students, job seekers, businesses and workforce development professionals to understand today’s world of work in the United States.” It replaces the outdated Dictionary of Occupational Titles and includes a more ‘service’ focus than the previous ‘industrial emphasis’ of the DOT. For each job, O*Net includes:
    – Personal requirements: the skills and knowledge required to perform the work
    – Personal characteristics: the abilities, interests, and values needed to perform the work
    – Experience requirements: the training and level of licensing and experience needed for the work
    – Job requirements: the work activities and context, including the physical, social, and organizational factors involved in the work
    – Labor market: the occupational outlook and the pay scale for the work
    
    “There are [at least] two major differences between the DOT and O*Net. The most important one is that the DOT always did a physical validation of each job. So the work was more like a time-motion study. Onet assembles its job descriptions from other descriptions. The second is the fact that the DOT covered 12,000 jobs while O”Net addresses 1,000.
    
    O*Net was implemented as a massive cost savings exercise. My take is that the old way was distinctly better but it was way more expensive. One of the problems I have with the current field of AI in HR is that it, like O*Net, is a summary of reports rather than a product of observation.”
    Occupational Information Network
    From the notes of John Sumser
38. First published in The January 1998 McKinsey quarterly, the authors (Elizabeth G. Chambers, Mark Foulon, Helen Handfield-Jones, Steven M. Hankin, and Edward G. Michaels) made a compelling case based in part on the demographics through 2020 of retiring leaders that would not be replaced by a new generation (supply) while the demand for leaders was expected to increase significantly.
    Three years later (2001) three McKinsey authors (Helen Handfield-Jones, Ed Michaels and Beth Axelrod published “The War for Talent” case studies highlighting a series of employers such as Enron as winning the War for Talent. Many of the employers noted were later bankrupted by their leaders and a few were jailed. #Hubris.
    
    “Please – stop using the ‘War for Talent’ phrase.
    In wars, people die; no one ever died applying for a job or from receiving 117 InMails via LinkedIn or from hearing a hiring manager say, “I know you say they’re a perfect fit – and that might be true – but I want to see more people.
    It isn’t war – but the way in which it’s done does highlight a lack of humanity. We overcomplicate our hiring processes; we look for qualifications that don’t exist; we inject personal biases into our interviews; we grill people for hours yet give them 5 minutes to ask questions; we don’t give actionable feedback – I can go on and on.
    We have one chance to make a great first and lasting impression at every step in the hiring process – yet most in my profession find this to be a challenge.
    You know those thank you emails you receive after interviewing someone? Try emailing the people you interviewed and thank THEM for THEIR time.
    Do this and even if you don’t select them, they’ll speak about the experience in positive ways that no expensive marketing campaign generates.
    No, it’s not a war for talent but a search for humanity.”
    Source: from the notes of Steve Levy
39. Google’s founding by Larry Page and Sergey Brin set off a transformation that will be analyzed for decades. Work and hiring are a small but critical part of it. Fun fact, the founders original name was ‘Backrub’.
    https://about.google/our-story
40. “ERE (the Electronic Recruiting Exchange) was created in 1998 (by David Manaster) as an online gathering place for recruiters. It was designed as a destination where the community could network, share best practices, and learn from each other. David soon began adding conferences, special events, webinars and even, for a few years, blogs for recruiting leaders, sourcers, HR leaders, Staffing organizations etc. as the industry evolved online.
    About ERE Media
41. Brassring started as a job board specifically for technical positions. It would scrape positions off a company’s corporate career site and post them on their site.
    BrassRing.com: Big and Getting Bigger.
42. “The Employment Management Association (EMA) after 40 years of existence was struggling in the late nineties to serve practitioners as vendors began to dominate the membership, leadership and speaking openings. The EMA accepted an offer to merge with SHRM which at the time was intent on expanding their specialist offerings. A direction that only lasted 4-5 years. Representation of recruiting as a profession virtually disappeared from the industry.”
    Source: from the notes of Gerry Crispin when he was on the Board of SHRM.
43. HR.com is the brainchild of Debbie McGrath who by the end of the 90’s had been active, lead and profited from several emerging technology firms. An early pioneer in the developing online quality content and managing online events for HR and Recruiting Today, HR.com’s reach may very well be the largest in the world engaging nearly 2 million in the industry.
    About Us
44. A ‘fresh’ view of the first time recruiting firms spent millions to advertise in the Superbowl from the archives of John Sumser’s Interbiznet. He ends by stating, “1999 has to bring more aggressive approaches to the mining of “passive” candidates. The Superbowl is just the beginning of a new dynamic that will dramatically increase advertising outlays across our sector.”
    http://www.interbiznet.com/ern/archives/990131.html
45. Peter Weddle began publishing details of job boards in the Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition devoted to hiring from the mid-90’s AND BY 1999 began publishing his popular directory Guide to Employment Sites.
    WEDDLE’s Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet: For Corporate and Third Party Recruiters, Job Seekers and Career Activists
46. Barbara Ling, co-owner of RISE expands her “Internet Recruiting Edge” training to an 8 hour training workshop event and for the next decade joins a growing number of pioneers helping recruiters move online.
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbaraling/
    Sources: from the notes of Jim Stroud’s History of Sourcing and Barbara Ling’s LinkedIn profile
47. Jerome Ternyck founded Mr. Ted in 1999 and it became one of the most popular Enterprise ATSs in Europe before being acquired by StepStone in 2010
    Meet MrTed
48. Tom Darrow founded Talent Connections in Atlanta to provide mostly recruiting consulting services  after more than a decade in HR and recruiting leadership roles with Price Waterhouse (PwC) and Accenture.  His services evolved over the years and while today the company is mostly known for HR and Talent Acquisition (TA) Executive Search it is his leadership and involvement in significant volunteer leadership roles for the HR/TA profession including with SHRM, SHRM Foundation, SHRM-Georgia, SHRM-Atlanta and the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) that has not only served his company well but helped develop many other leaders regionally and nationally in the Recruiting industry. 
    www.talentconnections.net