|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
  |
 On "Hot Jobs": Dimitri Boylan '83 Notes from Fox Leadership Series Talk, February 7, 2002 Dimitri Boylan Subtitle
Dimitri Boylan's career is perhaps a study in the inherent risks and rewards of a life worth living. To the casual observer, it has clearly been an interesting ride: By 1990, Boylan thought he would be a millionaire. Instead, he was essentially bankrupt at 30. Today, he is the President, CEO and Chief Operating Officer of HotJobs.com, which is rated the #1 job board and the 42nd most visited web property, according to independent research conducted by Media Metrix. As such, he sits at the helm of a company that recently ranked #14 in Bloomberg Personal Finance magazine's coveted "Tech 100" list and is on the threshold of being acquired in a $436 mil. deal with Yahoo. The Penn Years At Penn, Boylan was a member of Penn's Gymnastic Team. (School of Arts and Science's Dean Sam Preston jokes that "The Gymnastic team at Penn has never been the same since [Boylan] left." The Men's Gymnastic team folded shortly thereafter.) Boylan started at Penn as a pre-med student as he could only think of "three things to be--a doctor, a lawyer, and an engineer." He subsequently decided he liked science, but didn't want to go into medicine. He decided to major in Biophysics. Today, Boylan finds that he's spent he last twenty years answering the question, "Why biophysics?" He thought initially that he'd get a PhD in the subject, enrolling in a program at the University of Illinois. Once there, he decided "somewhere in the course" of time on campus, that he didn't want to be an academic scientist for his career. He left Illinois with a Master's Degree and headed back to New York to "make money." Back on familiar ground, Boylan took a position in construction. He started a subcontracting company with construction workers. He also started doing real estate speculation. When he began in 1985, the real estate marketing was booming. He looked ahead, and projected that he would be a millionaire by 1990. But the real estate market collapsed, and he found himself bankrupt at 30. Recouping his losses, Boylan decided to work in recruiting because he liked the idea of working for commission instead of for a "fixed salary." He accepted a position at OTEC, Inc. (one of New York's largest technical search firms) for a base salary of $400 week. While it was a gamble to accept the position, Boylan says he assumed that spending two to three months in the position would enable to him to tell how much he would earn and whether or not he would be successful at it. Fortunately, the job proved to be well suited for him, and he worked his way up at OTEC, ultimately serving as their Managing Director of recruiting. He spent his days "calling people on the phone" and "serving as a middle man, putting people in touch one with one another." In 1995, the Internet became a part of the lexicon in the U.S., and Boylan saw an opportunity to extend the medium of his work into a new dimension: He worked with OTEC colleagues to create an internal software application that could "put employers and applicants" in touch with one another, and began to see the latent business potential in this type of technology in the market at large. Boylan decided to make a leap of faith: He stopped making money and started building HotJobs. Foraging into a Market Unknown: Creating HotJobs As Boylan and his colleagues began to work on HotJobs, they didn't understand that they were entering into a $10 billion dollar market--$8 billion of which was already being made by three major competitors. They also didn't have a "game plan." Boylan readily acknowledged that the success of HotJobs demonstrates that, "Foolish or random decisions sometime lead to success." However, he was careful to distinguish the philosophy that helped him achieve success. "There was always a methodology to the decisions I made, and that methodology has gotten better and better." Boylan's Methodology Part 1: Explore What Interests You In part, Boylan attributed the evolution of his methodology to his work with clients. In recruiting, he "ended up talking to a lot of people about their careers" and, ultimately, developed a "methodology for myself after talking to others." While some of his interaction with clients taught him that he had "foolishly avoided the decision making process in terms of what he wanted to do," he also found that he had made some good decisions--particularly with regard to his decision to study topics that interested him at Penn. At Penn, Boylan said he found himself being concerned about not wanting to feel "boxed in" to a particular (career) path. "Biophysics was good because no one understood what it was: The (employers) couldn't box you in... I also took Physics, Computer Science classes and engineering. I wanted to make sure that I knew a lot of things." In observing the decision making processes that his clients used in deciding upon employment paths, Boylan said that he watched individuals make "really bad flawed decisions" because of money. More specifically, he expressed frustration with circumstances in which "candidates accept positions which will result in zero growth for their skill set on the basis of a salary increase in an industry in which they are already unhappy." The bottom line: "take risks, study what interests you." Methodology Part II: When Working For You = Working for Your Employer To understand the second phase of Boylan's methodology, it is necessary to understand Boylan's unconventional approach to near certainty. An excellent example of this is provided by recent events surrounding the acquisition of HotJobs. During Boylan's speech on February 7, 2002, HotJobs was an "acquisition in progress," as a $436 million deal with Yahoo was within a month of completion. In some sense, this is truly an "acquisition that almost wasn't": in June 2001, TMP Worldwide (the owner of the U.S.'s largest online recruiting site, Monster.com) offered to buy HotJobs for $498 million in stock. The deal, which would have brought the nation's "top two" on-line career sites together, was a 95% early certainty. This didn't happen. The market fell, the value of TMP stock dropped to about $341 million, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, looked askance at the deal because of anti-trust concerns. The merger was a bust. Based on conventional wisdom, one might have expected to find the six months after TMP's initial offer to be a "waiting game" as employees quietly waited for the deal to go through. Instead, it was quite the opposite: During the six month period when the merger was "in progress," virtually no employees left, job performance increased and several new products were rolled out." All of this left Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo asking Boylan, "How did you do it?" "We got lucky but luck wouldn't have happened if we hadn't kept going." Boylan feels that the success can be attributed to his methodology and the fact that this methodology was communicated company wide. As Boylan explains it, [I] had fundamentally "positioned the company to be about the individuals within the company. People in the company knew that they were working for the 5% [chance that the merger wouldn't go through] because they were working for themselves to have options." Within this context, he portrayed his role as CEO as a landscaper: "A CEO paints landscapes and shows individuals how they can navigate within this landscape during this time in which we are in this together." With the merger, he said that his employees were working in such a way that they hope that their post-merger efforts will allow them to land in a company situation that will more greatly use their talents. Everyone learned and moved to opportunities to use their knowledge. As the CEO, Boylan feels like his own work is an illustration of this. When he started at HotJobs he was a "co-founder" and "chief bottle washer." Now that he's CEO, he feels that "everything he needs for the job, he's been learning for 20 years." He encourages students to remember, "Everything that you're learning everyday, teaches you skills you'll need to apply in the future." On Finding a Career Path
If you do these things, it's hard not to be successful. There is a lot of room at the top.
Resume
"If you were an English major, for example, and I ask you about [books]...and you don't show opinions or passions--this is not good." Boylan also noted that this works both ways: "If I'm not passionate about what we're doing, than I can't expect other people to be there either." "You are going to see a movie with five of your friends when indecision erupts. You all have different tastes: one friend is interested in seeing an art film, another an action flick, another a romance and another a comedy. What do you do?" Boylan says responses to this question frequently fall into one of two categories:
On Employee Motivation How do you get people to work? How did you accomplish that level of trust when you were working towards the 5% chance that the TMP merger would not go through? "This wasn't accomplished in one conversation. I wasn't putting the concept out for the first time. The methodology had been shared with employees for a long time, this was part of our company culture: You're not working for me; you're working for you." "The Army has figured this out. They've spent a lot of time and money on their new concept 'the army of one.' It's the same concept. The reason you come to work everyday is for 'YOU'--for the things that make you better." What strategies did you use to manage employee morale? "...We worked to keep people focused by also looking at the work of our rivals." "During the boom, the challenge was to keep people focused. For the first three months [on the job], employees would be marginal in terms of their job performance. They thought that they needed to know everything about the internet. That wasn't true." "When the [dot.com industry] imploded, [I found that] people in a company know more about how the company is doing before anyone else does. A vote of no confidence is the resume out. ...[Ultimately, you] can't be doing [a] job for too many reasons other than what's good for you." "One thing which I find is that you 'don't leave anyone in their comfort zone' for very long as it leads to a steady decline in the level of productivity." The 'art of management' is how you far you push people out of the comfort zone and [figuring out] how soon and when you pull them back in." On thinking about where to work "You have the decision to stay or go. [While you are in a position], learn what you need to know for all the time that you are there." "In working, people have a decision to make: Are you going to affect things or are you working to get by?" "Think 'Am I going to walk out each day giving myself an A, B, C, or D? What I am grading myself on?' " [In choosing employers], seek out companies where individuals are "helping build themselves to be better." Companies are, ultimately "the beneficiary of these efforts." How important are technical skills? "As an internet company, technical skills are very important [at HotJobs]. The nice thing about technology is that it is very logical: the platforms change, the hardware changes, but the logic stays the same. It is for this reason that Microsoft used to ask interviewees questions about linguistics rather than syntax. In general I look for:
|
© Career Services, University of Pennsylvania. Not to be copied or distributed without permission.
Career Services • University of Pennsylvania
Suite 20, McNeil Building • 3718 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6209