Helping Moms Juggle: Juggling Mother Sara Sutton Fell, CEO of Flexjobs (Part 5)

SM: How successful was your business model?

SS: HR people are very difficult to get ahold of, and it requires a lot of relationship building. Our price point was too low to support a high-touch customer recruiting model. We felt our niche was with small to medium sized companies that did not want to go to Monster and pay $5,000 per posting for one virtual employee.

We actually soft launched and built the job seeker database and tested that model for two quarters. It just did not work. We were also having the problem that job seekers were coming to our site and applying to every job out there, regardless of whether they were qualified or interested. They were using a lot of partial resumes, and it was really a big clutter. There was not a whole lot of value for anyone. We were not creating what we had set out to create. We re-evaluated and decided we would flip-flop the model and charge job seekers.

We moved to a model which charged job seekers a subscription fee for either a month or a year. Doing that has definitely gotten us on the path towards our goal. We are able to provide a much better service for the job seekers. The ones that sign up with us are much more serious and interested.

SM: How many job seekers are signed up with you? What are their demographics?

SS: About 10,000, of which 78% are women. When we launched the audience we had in mind were stay-at-home moms. They were the biggest, underutilized, well-educated workforce in the States. It was a big audience, but we also had secondary audiences of baby boomers who were retiring and wanted something to allow them to continue working. Students comprised another audience who wanted flexible work for obvious reasons.

SM: What kind of qualifications does your primary audience have?

SS: It is a wide variety. We made a conscious choice not to pursue a singular industry. We have over 50 different job categories. What I really wanted to present, what I really felt was missing, was a job board you could go to for a professional job similar to a Monster or a HotJobs with the prequalification that the jobs would have an element of telecommuting or flexibility with them. It is almost like a vertical niche, but it is actually horizontal across vertical niches. Accordingly, the candidates are all different types, from entry-level to executive-level individuals.

SM: What do you charge people to register themselves?

SS: It is $14.95 a month or $49.95 for a year. We have not done too much price testing, but we are probably going to do a little bit more. We have really been focusing on our service for the job seekers. We have absolutely no ads on our service and we have focused on developing a clean, professional user interface. That is different than anything else in our job niche.

SM: What kind of employers are working with you?

SS: We work with employers like DealBase, which hires virtual researchers. There is a company called ChaCha which is a mobile device question answering service that utilizes virtual workers. We find most of these companies by doing a lot of research. We have a staff that hand- screens the job opportunities out there. We dig and dig to find the good opportunities, confirm it is a good company, and have the staff do a write-up of the job.

SM: Job advertisers are not paying. You are funneling and searching for jobs and consolidating them to a central database. Is that correct?

SS: Yes. That is about 90% of our jobs database right now. We do have an employer component built, and it is available for employers to come and post for free if we approve them. It is our job to keep the scams out. In the future we will look back towards monetizing the employer side.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Helping Moms Juggle: Juggling Mother Sara Sutton Fell, CEO of Flexjobs
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