Resurrecting a well-known brand: The rebirth of Jobster

[00:00:13] Welcome to Episode 82 of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast. I am Steven Rothberg, one of your two co-hosts. My other regular co-host, Peter Zollman of the AIM Group, is off today. So pinch hitting for him, as baseball fans would like to say, is my good and longtime friend, Jeff Dickey Chasens, the ex-job board doctor. Jeff, why don't you say hello and tell people what you've been up to recently?

[00:00:41] Sure. Thanks for having me on. I love to pinch hit, even though I've never played baseball. My name's Jeff Dickey Chasens, as Steven said. For many years, I ran a job board consulting business called Job Board Doctor. It lives on with a new job board doctor, Julie Soash. And I am semi-retired in Connecticut, puttering around the house, fighting with my cats, and then occasionally doing work for clients.

[00:01:07] And now I want to introduce Vincent Cruz, Jobster. Vincent, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[00:01:13] Hi, Steven. Hi, Jeff. Yeah, I'm Vincent. I'm the product manager at Jobster, the new one, located in the Netherlands, coming from France. You can hear the accent probably, so sorry for that.

[00:01:26] Never apologize for a French accent. Never, never, never, never.

[00:01:29] As long as people understand it, it's fine, I guess. And yeah, I basically started at Jobster a year ago now as a product manager.

[00:01:40] I have been in the recruitment industry for six, seven years. I have a background in marketing. I did a lot of job advertising.

[00:01:49] And that's why I switched to this role. Yeah, to build basically the best job advertising platform you could get.

[00:01:59] Awesome. Well, thank you. We're definitely going to dig into a lot about, you know, a little bit of like where the new Jobster came from and all that.

[00:02:09] Before we do that, I think it might be a little bit helpful for some of the listeners who haven't been around for as long as, say, Jeff or me to understand, like, just how significant of a brand Jobster was.

[00:02:23] It was kind of for a heartbeat, but it was it was it was a high flyer.

[00:02:28] So just before we went on, I had a look and it basically Jobster was founded by Jason Goldberg.

[00:02:33] And they were all some other people that were also very instrumental there based out of Seattle, Washington in the US.

[00:02:40] And it started in 2004. Jason and his team raised 50 million dollars, five zero, which at the time was a monumental amount of money.

[00:02:50] I mean, in today's equivalent, not in terms of inflation, but just in terms of like, wow, that's a lot of money.

[00:02:57] I would think we'd be talking hundreds of millions.

[00:03:00] You know, if a platform went out and raised three, four or five hundred million and people are like, whoa, you know, where did that come from?

[00:03:06] How did they do that? That's kind of what that Jobster was.

[00:03:09] They went live in 2005. So they raised a bunch of money, went live.

[00:03:13] And within a couple of years, by 2007, they were sort of failing at that point.

[00:03:20] Jason stepped down as CEO. They had mass layoffs.

[00:03:23] And it went from being this really high flyer, almost like a bit of a LinkedIn, like a social media slash job board.

[00:03:33] But we haven't heard much about it for probably for me, maybe a decade or so until I saw that these people in the Netherlands decided that they were going to step in and take the name.

[00:03:47] So, Vincent, maybe you can talk to us a little bit about where this business came from.

[00:03:51] Why, rather than just going out and getting some random domain for $10 or whatever, like how you found the Jobster brand, why you decided to buy it?

[00:04:02] The funny story is until we started posting in March, I think, or April about Jobster that we would launch this new platform.

[00:04:10] Yeah, we had no clue about Jobster being so famous in 2006, 2007, you said.

[00:04:19] I was 18 years old back then. So I, yeah, I could not care less about the job industry.

[00:04:24] I was probably traveling.

[00:04:27] I was 18 years old too, but a lot further than back then.

[00:04:36] Anyway, what happened is, so yeah, we posted this article on LinkedIn and we started to see, oh my God, what's happening?

[00:04:45] Everyone is talking about Jobster.com that's reborn and Jobster is back.

[00:04:51] Everyone from US and we are located in the Netherlands.

[00:04:55] Hey, okay, it seems to be famous before. So we start to dig into it.

[00:05:01] I also gave a call to our founder and say, hey, did you know about Jobster?

[00:05:06] This is Jobster.com to also get a bit of a history of, so actually why, why are we Jobster?

[00:05:16] It's actually a name that we picked that we started was cool.

[00:05:19] We want to do a cool brand.

[00:05:20] And we own the domain Jobster.com.

[00:05:24] So it's part of, we have different business, we have staffing agencies, some job boards.

[00:05:32] And a part of it was Jobster Media.

[00:05:35] So when our job boards were part of JobBear.com, StudentJob.nl, AidenBureau.nl.

[00:05:44] So a few popular job boards in the Netherlands.

[00:05:47] They were all under this umbrella Jobster Media.

[00:05:50] So we thought, okay, we have this Jobster.com domain that we bought years ago.

[00:05:55] Let's use it.

[00:05:56] So yeah, that's how it started to use this name.

[00:06:00] And this domain has been bought by my company, mainly for SEO reason, for all the backlink

[00:06:08] and history and all these things.

[00:06:10] That's, okay, we own Jobster Media.

[00:06:12] Let's buy Jobster.com.

[00:06:14] I cannot tell you how much it was back then, but that's the story behind it.

[00:06:19] Oh, darn it.

[00:06:19] That was going to be the next question, but I'll let Jeff make the next one.

[00:06:24] That is very interesting.

[00:06:26] And I spent a little while poking around your site today.

[00:06:30] And I think one of the main pivots from what Jobster was to your new Jobster is, is that

[00:06:36] Jobster was very much a candidate-focused platform.

[00:06:39] You know, it was a job board of its time, if I remember correctly.

[00:06:43] It focused on matching.

[00:06:44] And the new Jobster is very much focused on the players in the recruitment industry, like

[00:06:52] job boards, like staffing agencies and employers.

[00:06:55] So I was just wondering if you can kind of tell us, you know, from a top view, how it

[00:07:02] operates, what's, you know, what's your value prop to your various audiences?

[00:07:08] You know what you should know?

[00:07:10] You should know the You Should Know podcast.

[00:07:13] That's what you should know.

[00:07:15] Because then you'd be in the know on all things that are timely and topical.

[00:07:19] Subscribe to the You Should Know podcast.

[00:07:22] Thanks.

[00:07:23] Jobster is a tech platform.

[00:07:25] So we don't have like a job board or we are more the tech in between.

[00:07:30] So we facilitate between publisher and the candidates to match with each other.

[00:07:37] So we are technology in between.

[00:07:40] So we connect the two.

[00:07:42] We are programmatic job advertising platform.

[00:07:45] And our goal is to do things a bit differently because, yes, this industry is quite, I want

[00:07:52] to say old, but yeah, it's hard to make things moving.

[00:07:57] We are a bit behind some industry, classic media and e-commerce.

[00:08:03] And that's how Jobster started.

[00:08:06] We use for our own job boards and our staffing agencies some similar tools that are all good.

[00:08:15] But we also saw a bit of thing that needs to be improved.

[00:08:19] And that's how Jobster started with also one of our founders now coming from the media industry.

[00:08:27] Did a lot of programmatic, more in displays on the more classic advertising.

[00:08:34] And the idea is to try to bring this technology to the recruitment industry.

[00:08:40] That's really interesting.

[00:08:41] So, Vincent, are your primary competitors then like Aimwell, AppCast, Jovio, Veritone,

[00:08:50] Hire, which used to be programmatic.

[00:08:52] Okay.

[00:08:52] And is your business primarily focused today?

[00:08:55] I mean, who knows five years from now?

[00:08:56] But today, are you primarily focused on the EU, all of Europe geographically, which I would

[00:09:04] include like the UK in that and non-EU countries or what is your target market?

[00:09:11] So we started in the Netherlands.

[00:09:13] That's the one we know very well for our own other websites.

[00:09:17] So we have a lot of connections here with publisher and customers.

[00:09:22] So we launched in April.

[00:09:24] So we've been running it for six months now.

[00:09:28] And the goal is to expand first to EU, probably UK, Germany, France, and probably at some point

[00:09:36] the US.

[00:09:38] But yeah, I cannot predict that.

[00:09:40] We will see first the EU that the focus is.

[00:09:43] Interesting.

[00:09:45] One of the things that I'm curious about, and maybe you've already run into this, is that

[00:09:51] to my knowledge at this point, AppCast, even though it's US-based, got a big boost in Europe

[00:09:58] because it was acquired by Stepstone and sort of dropped into that machinery.

[00:10:05] In your case, how are you planning to expand out from the Netherlands in terms of what you're

[00:10:13] doing?

[00:10:13] I mean, do you have a sales staff?

[00:10:15] Are you going to be doing alliances with different groups?

[00:10:18] Are you anticipating that you'll be acquired?

[00:10:19] No, for now.

[00:10:21] So we started in the Netherlands with more than our network, I want to say.

[00:10:26] And we are in the phase where we are building a sales team to expand to other countries so

[00:10:33] that the goal is to enter the markets with a few connections there, build a network of

[00:10:38] publishers.

[00:10:39] Some of them are international.

[00:10:41] We work with a lot of publishers that are already also in Germany, France, or UK.

[00:10:49] And yeah, we go there with the sales team.

[00:10:51] And yeah, we basically sell a job store there and pitch what it can bring to them.

[00:11:00] There is a lot of markets in Europe that are a bit more traditional that are used to work

[00:11:06] with only job boards directly with two or three of them.

[00:11:11] So yeah, we want basically also to show them how easy it can be to use a platform where you

[00:11:17] have access to hundreds of job boards all on performance-based.

[00:11:23] And a big part of it is to also reach the passive candidates.

[00:11:27] So it's one of the added value of Jobstir that we don't only have job sites, but we also have

[00:11:33] a big network of publisher websites.

[00:11:36] Think about news websites, niche websites of specific industry where if you're looking

[00:11:42] for somewhere in finance, you can push your jobs on some websites where the audience is

[00:11:50] some people interested in finance.

[00:11:53] Interesting.

[00:11:53] We've got time for one more quick question and because I'm the one talking, I'm going

[00:11:58] to take it.

[00:11:58] Sorry, Jeff.

[00:12:01] You mentioned just now some of the publishers that you have, they're not job boards.

[00:12:06] If I was an advertiser, an employer staffing agency, I would see that as being a big differentiator

[00:12:12] between your offering and those of some of the other programmatic vendors.

[00:12:17] If pretend that I'm a staffing company or an employer and you're giving me like a 30 second

[00:12:24] pitch, why should I be interested in programmatically distributing my jobs through Jobstir instead

[00:12:32] of say, Abcast, Jovio, Veritone?

[00:12:36] What are your key differentiators?

[00:12:37] To reach candidates that you will not be able to reach with a classic method to fill all the

[00:12:44] positions that are hard to fill.

[00:12:46] So the one that are not actively looking for jobs, Jobstir is made in a way that if we cannot find it on

[00:12:54] the active channel, then we expand the reach and we distribute your jobs where people are not actively

[00:13:03] looking and you can build a funnel from there and get some leads and then retarget them.

[00:13:09] Awesome.

[00:13:09] Well, this has been really interesting and I'm happy to see the Jobstir brand back.

[00:13:15] I was like the name.

[00:13:17] It's a great name.

[00:13:19] It's a great name and congratulations.

[00:13:22] And if we have you on again, you will have to tell us how much you purchased the name for.

[00:13:28] I'm going to dive into it.

[00:13:30] I will get the information.

[00:13:32] And in all seriousness, Vincent, if you are able to share that, let me know.

[00:13:38] And we can stick it into the comments or something on LinkedIn.

[00:13:42] I think it would be of interest.

[00:13:44] Maybe it's a private thing.

[00:13:45] Maybe it's not.

[00:13:46] Maybe you got like some amazing deal and you want to brag about it.

[00:13:50] And if not, maybe Jeff will buy it now that he's retired.

[00:13:54] Just looking for ways to spend his money.

[00:13:58] But gentlemen, it has been awesome.

[00:14:00] Thank you so much.

[00:14:01] Thanks for having me.

[00:14:03] Yep.

[00:14:03] Thanks, Stephen.

[00:14:04] Cheers, guys.

[00:14:05] Thanks, guys.

[00:14:05] Thank you.