CareerBuilder Inc.
| Author | Rayna Bailey |
| Pages | 281-284 |
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8420 West Bryn Mawr Ave., Ste. 1000
Chicago, Illinois 60631
USA
Telephone: (773) 527-3600
Fax: (773) 399-6313
Web site: www.careerbuilder.com
By the 1990s newspapers were facing increasing competition from Internet job sites. In 1995, in order to compete with online sites for advertising revenue, the Tribune Company newspaper chains (whose publications included Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the Baltimore Sun, and Knight Ridder, publisher of the Kansas City Star, the Miami Herald, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others) partnered to create their own online job site, which ultimately evolved into CareerBuilder.com. Their aim was to level the playing field with the online competition, which included Monster.com and HotJobs.com, and to win back help-wanted advertisers. In 2002 the Gannett Company, with publications that included Florida Today, the Arizona Republic, and the Fort Collins Coloradoan, became an equal partner with the Tribune Company and Knight Ridder in the online venture.
Visitors to CareerBuilder.com's site increased 50 percent from December 2002 to December 2003, helped in part by the marketing campaign "Smarter Way to Find a Job," created by the company's Chicago-based ad agency, Cramer-Krasselt. CareerBuilder kicked off 2004 with a new campaign, titled "Time to Move On." Also created by Cramer-Krasselt, this $17 million campaign was aimed at employed but unhappy workers.
The "Time to Move On" campaign, which was launched on January 5, 2004, and ran until the end of the year, was a success both with job seekers and with the marketing industry. Not only did it increase traffic to the website to 16.2 million unique visits in the weeks following its launch, up from 7.5 million visits for the same period in January 2003, but it also received EFFIE and Tempo awards, with one television spot, "Bank Teller," being named an Adweek Best Spot.
As the popularity of online career sites grew in the early 1990s, newspapers were feeling the threat from their Internet competitors. Revenues from print help-wanted ads were slipping, as companies shifted their advertising dollars to Internet sites like Monster.com and HotJobs.com. In an effort to compete in the dot-com marketplace and to win back its ad dollars, two of the country's top newspaper chains—the Chicago-based Tribune Company and Knight Ridder, based in San Jose, California—joined forces to create their own employment website. The fledgling company, which began in 1995 as NetStart, Inc., was renamed CareerBuilder Inc. in 1998. By offering access to 130 newspapers and 400 job sites, CareerBuilder.com soon was going head-to-head with online job site
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Monster.com and was pushing past HotJobs.com. In 2001 CareerBuilder.com reported more than 5.5 million unique monthly visits and 300,000 job listings. The Virginia-based Gannett Company joined the partnership in 2002, further increasing its reach online and giving CareerBuilder.com an edge over both Monster.com and HotJobs.com.
Cramer-Krasselt was hired in 2002 to help CareerBuilder with its marketing and advertising. In 2003 the company launched a national campaign designed to reach potential job seekers and to encourage them to visit its website, stating that this was "the smarter way to find a better job." The campaign was awarded a Gold EFFIE in 2004 for successfully changing the rules for how online job sites were advertised, including the decision to decline in joining Monster and HotJobs in buying advertising spots during the Super Bowl. In August 2004 CareerBuilder struck a blow at rival Monster when it won a five-year deal with Microsoft's MSN, valued at $150 million, a contract that...
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