How Cheezhead Helped Save Jobster

By Richard Becker

In December 2006, Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster (one of the first employee recruitment search engines and “somewhat, sometimes” transparent CEO blogs), embarked on a perilous crisis communication adventure when he asked his employees to ignore rumors of a mass layoffs. "Put down your pencils .... calm it down, relax a bit, and have a nice holiday,” he said. “We’ve got big news to give ya before the new year."

Although Goldberg dismissed outsider speculation, despite leaving hints on his own blog over the holidays, 60 of the company’s 148 employees were laid off, which was much worse than any one had guessed.

For my part, the entire story presented itself as a living case study in crisis communication (what not to do) with one question that remained unanswered for the better part of six months: could Jobster erase the reputation damage it endured externally and the employee morale flogging it weathered internally?

While I appreciate there are still plenty of people who say Jobster’s business model (or lack thereof, some claim) will one day be its undoing, I submit that the company has moved beyond the employee post-holiday massacre. Yet, perhaps even more ironic, some of the credit to ending the great Jobster layoff debate doesn’t even belong to Goldberg. It belongs to Cheezhead’s Joel Cheesman in April.

How did Cheesman help save Jobster from existing in a Groundhog Day-like movie over and over again? Simple. After promising a public smack down between himself and Goldberg at a recruiting conference, Cheesman, in his own words, left people with “less rumble, more mumble and fumble.”

True. The worst of the four non-smack down questions was when Cheesman asked Goldberg “what does Jobster want to be when it grows up?” And then, after Goldberg appropriately addressed his understanding of the modern career market (you cannot intern with a master-class spokesperson like President Bill Clinton and not learn a few presentation skills), Cheezhead summed up an even better answer for his so-called adversary, saying Jobster wants to be “a career center for the digital age.” Yep. That will work.

The better questions, perhaps the only questions that really needed to be asked, have never been answered: why did Goldberg hint, then deny, then confirm layoffs at Jobster? And, how can Goldberg think he was being transparent when all of his actions represented the exact opposite of transparency? But alas, asking those questions and two or three follow-ups is what makes for a great aggressive media session. (I’ve had clients reach over the table as if to hit me during mock media sessions before they are reminded that it’s only practice and my questions are nothing but “acting” the part.)

I don’t think Cheesman has had such training so it’s no surprise that he killed the great Jobster layoff debate by jumping the shark in a face-to-face venue that is remarkably well suited for Goldberg (as if we didn’t know that he founded a company with about $40 million in venture capital). Of course, I am not saying that Cheesman “saved” Jobster single-handedly. Goldberg has done a fine job at improving Jobster’s communication, including the Jobster blog.

While you won’t often find the kind of entertaining hot talk and foodie reviews that used to drive traffic there, the blog does read better and includes a few more voices than it once used to. So while the traffic numbers are much lower than before, the blog seems to be better targeted in attracting the attention of people who might be interested in Jobster as customer or investor.

Although Goldberg still likes to hint on occasion, and sometimes without a payoff on those promises, he still tosses out ideas that seem interesting to me. Can anyone really become a sourcer with some simple online technology? Will the pay-for-applicant model really revolutionize recruiting? Can Jobster really keep its communication tight, focusing more on its message than everyone else’s? Will the now Goldberg-employed John Sumser save Jobster-owned Recruiting.com or let it fade away into the abyss of forgotten blogs?

I don’t know. It is certainly something worth watching even though the living case study on Jobster’s layoff debacle has come to a close (I meant to wrap it weeks ago until Jericho fans pushed back the post for days and then weeks). That said, you’ll have to wait for a book that recaps the Jobster case study with some additional insights. Yep. For better or worse, Jobster earned its chapter.

Comments

[Recruiting Animal]

Mr Moustache, Maybe the world doesn't understand the way the creative entrepreneur expresses himself. One of the complaints on Cheezwhiz's blog was that Don JGo says anything that comes to his mind and forgets it a minute later leaving the people who took him seriously dazed and confused. In the meantime, we've lost a someone who was fun to play with.

[Richard Becker]

I agree there is a rashness to his style. On several occasions I visited Jobster's blog to see wild claims that big announcements were under way only to read later it was a small fix on a beta problem (or something like that). Ho hum. And of course, there was that wonderful rumor suggesting that he threatened to, um, rub out some people if they leaked information (when he always seemed to me to be the biggest leaker of all).

No worries Animal. I am sure Jobster will one day provide us something sizzling to write about. You've always suggested (perhaps said) that BIG entertainment value is what you love most about executives. I doubt very much that Don JGo will let you down.

Even though it almost reads as a dead horse, I hope one day that he really does answer those two questions, which can be best summed up by asking ... "what on earth were you thinking?" ... but perhaps you provided the answer better than anyone in your response. Whatever the reasons, he might have forgotten them.

[Colin Kingsbury]

I don't think Joel Cheesman's questions had any impact on Jobster because I also don't think Jason Goldberg's blogging had anything like the negative effect that this presumes. Whatever situation Jobster was in by December that forced them to lay off nearly half their staff, they got there long before blog-gate.

At least in terms of corporate buyers, I doubt the kerfuffle ever entered the picture. Even if they were aware of the brouhaha, it wasn't really a comment on the product. If you find out that the CEO of Ford drives a Chevy, it's a big deal. If you hear that he's a jerk, so what?

Maybe it had some dampening effect on consumers joining the social-network side of Jobster. But if it did, the Great Debate certainly didn't help because no one outside our little niche paid much attention to it. Calling it inside baseball would be too much; it's more like inside parcheesi.

To a lot of people the blogosphere is still seen as a wild frontier full of self-proclaimed experts in pajamas. It's sort of like a Second Life world in which a whole different set of rules apply. It's not something that's taken seriously.

[Richard Becker]

I agree with a some of what you said Colin so I'll stick to the small points where I do not.

First, whether or not Joel Cheesman's questions had any impact. I think the questions killed the layoff conversation. No one wanted to say another word. As far as I can tell, Cheesman was the last to really wrote about it, except John Cook, who quoted Goldberg on May 6: "There's never a good way to manage a layoff. People will always be upset, people will always be unhappy." (He's right and wrong, of course.) So in essence, after Cheesman, there was nothing left to be said, it seemed. Sure, the great debate might have been limited (only 550 views or so on Cheesman's YouTube version), but one else posted about it again. This is stark contrast to it coming up almost every week through April.

My second departure is your take on blogosphere. If you don't think you should take it seriously, you might ask Steve Wynn next time your in Las Vegas. His property became the first to have unionized dealers who took to organizing on the Web. Related to that, if you don't think a poorly handled crisis can have an impact, David Neeleman or Nina Tassler might disagree with you. Oh right, they used to agree with you.

[Colin Kingsbury]

Richard,

OK, I'll give you that the layoff discussion did in fact fade from the front page. I think the Great Debate did Jason Goldberg some good since it was an opportunity for people to see he didn't have red eyes, horns, and a spiked tail. That said, in the past couple weeks, both GigaOm and Valleywag whacked Jobster pretty hard.

In terms of the blogosphere's significance today, I think it's highly situational. My business is selling to recruiters, and I have a reasonably-regarded blog, and yet, I can count on one hand the percentage of customers who I can reliably say were influenced to buy by my blog, and two or three hands is probably sufficient to account for the portion who pay regular attention to blogs. Most of the clients I speak to are only barely aware of ERE. To the extent that these are the people Jobster is going after, it makes me strongly doubt that the imbloglio had much impact in and of itself.

[Colin Kingsbury]

Oh, and to the wider point, maybe my original post was not entirely clear. I'm not saying that the blogosphere shouldn't be taken seriously, rather that a lot of people still don't.

And even among those who do recognize the power of the blogosphere to influence the discussion, it's broadly seen as more of a wild animal to be baited, trapped, caged, and moved away from populated areas, or shot in plain sight, than as a collection of knowledgeable individuals or institution to be respected.

A great example of this was the Dan Rather National Guard Memo scandal during the 2004 elections. You had CBS dismissing the whole thing as a fabrication of a bunch of loonies, while on the bloggers' side you had typewriter repairmen, National Guard officials from that period in time, typographers, and IT experts all discussing the forensic details of the purported memo in greater detail than any newspaper story ever would have. In the end they did get Rather's scalp but it's not clear the attitude has fundamentally shifted much.

[Richard Becker]

Hey Colin, many great points. I agree that many see social media as a "wild animal to be baited, trapped, caged, and moved away from populated areas," but they are incorrect, sort of. Surely, there are two sides to social media and I think that while it will never be tamed, it can be reasonably managed like any communication.

Remember when I mentioned months ago that the communication industry would scramble to catch up fast; well, they are scrambling in a panic. Unfortunately, the motivation for most is driven by social media's ability to cause crisis (instead of nurturing the positive elements of this tool) and not much else (yet).

In terms of the blogosphere's significance today, it can be situational as you said. But I think there is a tendency for people to market blogs exclusively on the Internet, which means they are best able to capture active blog-interested consumers on the Internet. This misses the greater market potential because blogs are better than Web sites alone (which are marketed off the Internet).

If most are not aware of ERE, then that might be a marketing miss on their part (I don't know enough to say). Likewise, I know you have a great blog and have penned a few of my favorite posts, but I don't know enough about it to address why it might not be able to change consumer behavior.

I do know, however, that many bloggers get caught up in writing great blogs as if it is a strategy unto itself. In reality, blogs that influence consumer behavior have to more narrowly focused on the business strategy to begin with. I think we'll see big changes in the years ahead, especially after "any device" communication technology becomes more pervasive.

All my best, Rich