CareerBuilder Premium Branding

Context

In 2007 the online recruitment market ran on plain text job postings. Enterprise employers competing for the same candidates had no way to look or sound different from anyone else on the page.

Challenge

Static job postings gave enterprise employers no differentiation, no storytelling, and no measurable candidate engagement.

Mandate

Director of Interactive Design and Strategic Account Executive. Invent the product, then build the division and the delivery systems to sell and fulfill it at enterprise scale.

Constraints

• The product had to be sold into an established posting business without disrupting it.
• Fortune 500 campaigns needed to be custom on the surface but repeatable underneath, or the unit economics would not work.

System built

Repeatable branded recruitment experiences with the sales collateral, production workflows, and campaign packages to sell and fulfill at scale.

• Conceived the product: branded, media-rich recruitment experiences where the industry standard was plain text listings.
• Built and led CB Media past 50 employees into CareerBuilder’s highest-margin division.
• Designed and delivered 1,000+ custom interactive projects for Fortune 500 accounts, sustained through a seven-year production partnership with the LimeCoral™ agency.
• Established the creative, production, sales-enablement, and delivery systems required to execute at enterprise scale.

Execution

• Took the offering from pilot to a standing product line with its own sales collateral, production workflow, and campaign packages.
• Built and led CB Media past 50 employees, into the company's highest-margin division.
• Delivered 1,000+ custom interactive projects for Fortune 500 accounts, sustained through a seven-year production partnership with the LimeCoral™ agency.
• Doubled as strategic account executive, selling into the accounts the product served.

Outcomes

Evidence

• Campaign portfolio and product overview documents from the period.

From the work

Operating lesson

An invented product only becomes a business when the delivery system is invented with it. The $80M came from the production and sales machinery as much as from the idea.