CareerBank.com's Robert Epstein

Finding his niche

December 28, 2000
Web posted at: 3:13 p.m. EST (2013 GMT)

In this story:

Niche for your life

By association

When search engines search

Keeping company

RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Porter Anderson
CNN.com/career Editor

(CNN) -- "The site launched November 15. And my baby was born November 24. It was a busy month."

That was November 1999. And in addition to the kid, Robert Epstein was launching CareerBank.com in Vienna, Virginia, outside Washington. His company is a job site for careerists in accounting and finance. To hear him tell it now, he ended up with two successful ventures, happy kid and growing company.

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"The response to the site has been much greater than I'd expected. We've got more than 1,700 companies signed up for the site. We've done very little marketing or advertising. It's mostly word-of-mouth."

Now, this guy is talking from the heart of the same sector that has given us widespread layoffs and many total wipe-outs.

• eToys has been brought to its knees -- and not to play with cars and trucks -- by shareholders furious with its lower-than-expected fourth-quarter results warnings.

• Priceline.com, despite its boldly going Shatner-triumphant "see you in 2001" commercials, has watched its stock dive this year from more than $100 per share in March to under $2.

• And Pets.com is just gone -- and its little sock puppet, too -- bought up by PetsMart.com.

In fact, more than 20 percent of dot-com outfits that were with us at the start of the year aren't coming along for the real start of the millennium.

And yet this 13-person, privately owned outfit that went to the Net a little over a year ago with just $50,000 is now talking about breaking even. Epstein says he expects CareerBank.com to do that around the second quarter of 2001.

He says this, mind you, as Challenger, Gray & Christmas' now dreaded monthly report on dot-com layoffs delivers another body blow to the sector. In Wednesday's announcement, Challenger said Internet firms made 10,459 job cuts, a 19-percent increase over November's 8,789-cut record. From July to December, dot-com layoffs came to 36,177, six times the number cut in the first half of the year.

So why is Robert Epstein smiling?

Niche for your life

"There are over 40,000 job boards out there," Epstein says. "We asked ourselves how we could distinguish ourselves."

The answer, he says "is that we felt the market was going toward niche sites. Ours is focused on accounting and finance. You have these big general sites like Monster.com or Headhunter.net. We didn't feel those were addressing what individual professions needed.

"We figured, 'Do what you know.' My background is from Arthur Andersen, I'm a CPA by training, audit tax and also consulting -- and for the last 12 years I've been in the recruiting world. So accounting and finance seemed to be what I knew."

"There are over 256 distinct population centers in the U.S. Each has 20 or so professions and 20 or so industries. That makes some 75,000 viable markets for job boards. And each market should have about $1 million in sales. So that's a potential of $75 billion."

Seemed, indeed. Epstein, 36, is a member of the American Institute of CPAs and took his BS in accounting, cum laude, from the University of Maryland. He and his family live in Potomac.

"And we just really pounded away at that market," he's saying, "targeting accountants and finance people. That's how we've been able to generate the interest we have."

By association

Part of "pounding away" involves Epstein's experience with accounting associations. He's a member not only of the national organization but also of the Maryland, Greater Washington and Virginia societies. And CareerBank.com's original business plan included an effort to provide "non-dues revenues for partner associations and benefits and discounts for their members."

In the name of trying to "strengthen and support the accounting and finance community," as company literature puts it, CareerBank has gone about basically working itself into the accounting-community woodwork, establishing what it terms "a vertical portal on the Internet for the accounting industry."

CareerBank.com members find industry news on the site, articles on accounting and recruiting and an extensive link with state CPA societies. "We intend to keep really getting entrenched in this niche space we have nationally -- and getting more entrenched in the local spaces around the country."

Listen up: Here's what qualifies as nice numbers to an accountant's ears: "There are over 256 distinct population centers in the U.S. Each has 20 or so professions and 20 or so industries. That makes some 75,000 viable markets for job boards. And each market should have about $1 million in sales. So that's a potential of $75 billion."

"We did find early on that accountants and other finance people are hesitant to put their resumés online. They're scared of losing their position, or a breach of confidentiality. So we created a feature called 'anonymous resumés.' You can post without your name and other information attached. That has allowed us to attract many more candidates than we might have been able to draw."

So far, CareerBank has alliances with state associations in New Jersey, South Carolina and other local societies. The company has registered many domain names in hopes of rolling out more of these local sites over time. Each locality gets a customized online "career center" for workers in accounting and other financial careers.

"Until now, employment in print (want ads, classifieds) has held almost a monopoly. Now, this is a huge market. Internet sites like ours are starting to penetrate that market. We think there's huge potential here."

When search engines search

One of the nicest compliments a company like Epstein's gets, is also one of the most subtle. Look at some of the companies registered with CareerBank.com to advertise their open positions.

One is HireStrategy.com -- an online job-search outfit. And when HotJobs.com, one of those larger general-careers sites Epstein speaks of, wants an accounting or finance employee for its own staff -- it comes to CareerBank.com.

The comparative mega-site HotJobs, famous for gassing huge amounts of money onto the airwaves in Super Bowl commercials, has a listing on CareerBank.com for a collections representative with up to a year of experience and ready to work for $25,000 to $30,000.

The print industry seems a lot less friendly to CareerBank and the wider online job-search world. "There are some newspapers," Epstein says, "that won't let us advertise our positions with them because of competition. The print employment ads have had a lock on the industry until now. Here you have this new medium, the Internet, with its costs artificially low right now.

"Our costs" among Internet services "are artificially low, and the print version is artificially high. We think we'll see a happy medium. Ours will rise and print -- by the word or line -- will come down one day."

To the degree his niche approach seems to be making its inroads, Epstein says he shares credit with company co-founder Kelly Brown.

"We felt the market was going toward niche sites. Ours is focused on accounting and finance. You have these big general sites like Monster.com or Headhunter.net. We didn't feel those were addressing what individual professions needed. We figured, 'Do what you know.'"

"What I did was partner with Kelly, a Web guru. He's our chief technology officer. And in building the site, we brought in David Keener," a Web architect, to help structure the site.

The three are still with the company and devised a format of anonymity for job-seekers. Instructions on the site read, "If you do not want your name to appear with your resumé information when employers view it, then check the 'Anonymous' box."

As with most online job-search programs, there's no cost to job-hunters for posting a resumé. "We did find early on," Epstein says, "that accountants and other finance people are hesitant to put their resumés online. They're scared of losing their position, or a breach of confidentiality.

"So we created a feature called 'anonymous resumés.' You can post without your name and other information attached. That has allowed us to attract many more candidates than we might have been able to draw."

A company that likes a resumé will then get in touch with the posting hopeful directly by e-mail. The job-seeker has the option to answer an inquiry or ignore it.

"Surveys show that the real savvy job-seekers keep their resumés online -- but without their names and other (identifying) information about them," Epstein says. And when the inquiries roll in, then, the job seeker can consider them without pressure.

Keeping company

Companies that subscribe to CareerBank.com get preferential positioning for their job postings and access to a stock of resumés that Epstein says is growing by as many as 100 per day.

Premium services offered to job-posting employers include a job-broadcast feature that sends posts to more than 100 other sites; job "sweepers" (software that will collect new postings from the employer automatically, so no special effort is needed to place with CareerBank); and a resumé-matching program that pre-screens what's coming in.

An employer pays $99 for a single-job, 90-day posting; $299 gets the employer 20 active priority job postings in a month. And $399 supplies unlimited postings for a month, allowing the company to move and change ads when one job is filled and another position opens. Unlimited access to the resumé database goes for $1,999 per year.

Member companies also get some nice visibility pops on the site -- a "Job Showcase" box on the CareerBank.com home page lists a few major corporations, Johnson & Johnson, Arthur Andersen and Hersey & Associates among them.

"Today in Accounting" lists such cautionary news stories as "Massachusetts Tax Preparer Convicted for Preparing False Income Tax Returns." And speaking of that annual hurdle for financial careerists, there's a special "Tax Season Help" feature online ahead of the frosty approach of the February-to-April fray.

Epstein, meanwhile, has finished his company's first year the way he started it -- by having a baby. His son's new sister arrived November 19.

"The beauty of the Internet," Epstein says," is that I go home, spend time with the kids, then can e-mail people at 1 or 2 in the morning. I dedicate one day each week to just family -- usually Saturday. Otherwise, I can work from home on Sunday, depending what football game is on.

"It's a new age," Epstein says, sounding like a man who has truly found his niche: "'Creativity' is the word in balancing your personal and work life."