From Dow Jones Newswire:
Financial Web Sites Find Employees In Own Back Yard
By JOHANNA BENNETT
Dow Jones Newswires
NEW YORK -- When Bob Zumbrunnen walked into headquarters of Silicon Investor in Overland Park, Kan., last year, no one at the fledgling financial Web site was looking to hire anyone to help run things.
By the end of the year, however, the then 37-year-old free-lance Web consultant found himself working for the same Web site that he had used just a few months earlier to help make investment decisions.
"It's one of those jobs that you run into that you would gladly do for free," Zumbrunnen said.
The story isn't all that unusual among the Internet's growing population of investment Web sites and message boards.
The most popular sites often cull employees from the ranks of their own members, choosing the best and the brightest to fill jobs as free-lance writers, columnists, site administrators and message-board monitors.
The trend is easy to understand, considering that a successful Web site can have tens of thousands of members who not only follow the stock market but are technology savvy and experts at using Internet bulletin boards.
"It's definitely a talent pool," said Bill Martin, president of Raging Bull Inc., the publishers of the Raging Bull Web site.
"There are certain users who are on the message boards 24 hours a day. Sure, they can be a bit nutty. But they know the boards. They know how the boards work. They know what they are talking about."
The ready supply of job candidates helps Web sites avoid the cost of a time-consuming job search - a definite benefit, especially for a new publication.
"If you've got someone who is constantly on the site, is a fan of what a company is doing, and has a great writing style and fits the bill, why place an ad in the paper?" said Chris Hill, spokesman for the Motley Fool.
The Silicon Investor's Zumbrunnen was initially hired as a consultant. After the site was purchased by Go2Net Inc. (GNET) earlier this year, he was hired full-time as a site administrator and assigned the chore of handling member complaints.
Elsewhere, the Raging Bull, founded a year ago by a trio of college students, often posts help-wanted ads on its Web site, encouraging its members to submit resumes. The site recently hired David Jennings, a popular poster on several Web sites under the alias "Monksdream," to write free-lance articles and host a daily message board.
And the staff at the Motley Fool includes about 15 employees culled from the membership ranks over the last four years to fill positions as writers, Web-page production staffers and chat-room monitors.
Jeff Fischer, a former Chicago investment banker, was hired full time by the Fool in 1996 to manage two of its stock portfolios. He started using the well-known financial site on America Online Inc. (AOL) in 1994, spending two or three hours a day posting messages before he was invited to "volunteer" as the host of a weekly chat-room session.
Back then, the Motley Fool attracted relatively few users. And now that the site is among the more well-established investment sites on the Internet, company officials have started looking to Wall Street and advertising in the help-wanted section of the Washington Post to fill vacant job titles.
With tens of thousands of users accessing the site every day, it has become more difficult to cull potential employees out of Internet message boards, Fischer said. The sheer number of postings means there is more competition for the public's attention. It also means that there is more irrelevant chatter floating around the thousands of message boards now being published online.
"It was something we did mainly when the industry was young. The pool was so small that it was easy and most efficient and very logical to hire people from within your community," Fischer said. "We are always looking. But there is more noise out there now. It is more difficult now."
- Johanna Bennett; 201-938-5670 |
