Jeff Taylor

Entrepreneur

• Born: October 4, 1962
• Place of Birth: place unknown

Primary Company/Organization: Monster.com

Introduction

Internet entrepreneur Jeff Taylor is primarily known for founding the hugely successful job-seeking website Monster.com. The site helped revolutionize the job search process for the internet age, overtaking traditional classified ads. Taylor also founded the social networking site Eons.com and the online obituary site Tributes.com, often drawing on his extensive marketing experience with baby boomers and their changing needs as they grow older.

Early Life

Jeffrey C. Taylor initially grew up in Peoria, Illinois. His family later moved to the Boston, Massachusetts, area, where he attended Needham High School. He started his first business while still a student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, selling "freshman survival kits." He would credit his later business success to the numerous extracurricular activities he became involved in during his college years, work opportunities that afforded him both practical knowledge and experience. However, he dropped out of school in 1984 and started working as a disc jockey (DJ) in several nightclubs in Boston. (He would later return to UMass Amherst and earn a degree through the University Without Walls program).

In his first professional business job, Taylor worked as a contingency recruiter—a headhunter. In 1989 he founded his first company, a recruitment advertising agency called Adion, Inc., which specialized in human resource communication.

Life's Work

In December 1993, Taylor conceived the idea for Monster.com after realizing that for centuries people had been looking for jobs in newspaper classified ads, an activity that he thought outdated but adaptable and well suited to the technologies becoming available online. His job search site, which was officially launched in April 1994, was registered as just the 454th dot-com company on the internet. The name "Monster" was chosen to signify Taylor's huge idea—a monstrous, gigantic job database, an employment site with thousands of résumés. The business model was designed to attract job seekers: employers and recruiting agencies were required to pay for the service to search and contact posted online résumés. In the process of attracting his first customers, Taylor approached two hundred potential clients, hoping to convince them to advertise on his new job search site. However, only forty of them acquiesced.

Taylor subsequently found, to his surprise, that the majority of the visitors to his site were not coming from the Boston area, where most of the jobs were located, but from overseas. This proved frustrating for many of his clients. The ensuing struggle to attract clients and investors finally convinced him to put the company up for sale. In 1995, he sold Monster.com to TMP Worldwide for $900,000. The company then went public and was renamed Monster Worldwide. Taylor stayed with the company until August 2005, holding numerous management positions and eventually becoming chief executive officer (CEO). Over that time the company grew significantly. As a result of a famous Super Bowl ad in 1999, Monster became the indisputable market leader; by 2005, Monster was in thirty-four countries and had become a well-known brand around the world.

Monster revolutionized the ways in which résumés were written and stored. In the company's online model, applicants' job histories and their availability were made evident over a long period, rendering a job search, a résumé, and an application easily reusable. Monster also used a localization strategy of linking the job site to local environments and needs. While many companies struggle in times of economic crisis and unemployment, Monster actually benefited from economic downturns, as the numbers of job seekers inevitably grows during recessions.

As Taylor had sold Monster to TMP Worldwide just two years after it started, many analysts suggested that he had made a mistake and that by selling later he could have made much more money. However, when later asked about the sale, he stated that he never regretted selling at that time and for that price. Without the resources and infrastructure of TMP, Taylor suggested, Monster would never have become as successful as it did. Moreover, the mentoring he received from TMP's chairman, Andy McElvey, proved of immense value to him.

After leaving Monster in 2005, Taylor focused his energy on his next start-up, Eons.com, a social network site aimed at people in the baby boomer generation. The idea for this enterprise was based on his thoughts about what the average baby boomer would be doing around retirement age. Eons offered various interest groups and facilities for baby boomers, including a message board. It raised $32 million in funding, but around 2008 Eons laid off approximately one-third of its workforce. Taylor explained this move as the transition of Eons from a portal site to a social networking site with which baby boomers could become more engaged. At the beginning of 2011, Eons was sold for an undisclosed sum.

Subsequently, Taylor founded Tributes.com, a website that published online obituaries. Taylor's focus was mainly on baby boomers, an age group rapidly reaching retirement age, and it seemed clear as deaths in this age group would increase over the coming years and decades. Therefore, according to Taylor, "Death is a growing business." He reasoned that, with social networks becoming more popular and people being able to communicate with one mouse-click with huge numbers of people, there would be many who would want to communicate regarding not only their lives but also their legacies, as well as their contemporaries' lives. Tributes was designed to give families and friends the opportunity to review a departed loved one's life in the public sphere: to memorialize them, grieve for them, and keep them alive in their memories and in their social network profiles.

Another of Taylor's companies—a spin-off from Eons.com—was Meetcha, a social dating site for forty-plus individuals interested in meeting others. Taylor founded the company in 2009 not only to bring people together but also to enable people who share the same interests to meet in group settings. Recognizing that dating can become more challenging as people grow older, he thought that it might be easier for people in the older age group to make new contacts when out with others. Moreover, as members of this age group tend to have more established interests, the Meetcha search engine includes specific categories of interest that can match people more effectively.

In 2011, Taylor started another new venture, Buffalo.dj. The business idea behind this company was to record, represent, and promote disc jockeys who write their own songs and are interested in participating in music festivals.

In 2020, Taylor became the general manager and chief customer officer at Principles, a software development company. Part of Taylor's job was the cultivate the company's culture, which involves meaningful work + meaningful relationships.

Personal Life

Taylor worked as a DJ for many decades under the name Jefr Tale. He focused on dance music, electro, and house and has performed on Sirius satellite radio, at the Ultra Music Festival, and in clubs in Massachusetts, among other venues. He served as an organizer of the Root Society "party dome," at the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada. Taylor sat on the board of Sonicbids, a start-up company in Boston that connects musicians with employers. He also served on the board of directors of Boston's Citi Center for the Performing Arts and the board of advisers for the Berklee College of Music. He earned owner/president management (OPM) and executive education certificates from Harvard Business School and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Bentley College.

Taylor had three children—Ryan, Brooke, and Cole—with his first wife. In 2009 he married for a second time, and the couple had a child together.

Bibliography

Afshar, Vala. "A Culture of Idea Meritocracy Begins with Principles." ZDNet, 20 July 2021, www.zdnet.com/article/a-culture-of-idea-meritocracy-begins-with-principles/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Buss, Dale. How to Think Like the World's Greatest New Media Moguls: Business Lessons from Geraldine Laybourne (Oxygen.com), Jeff Taylor (Monster.com), Steve Case (AOL.com), and Other New Media Sensations. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Print.

Kronstadt, Sylvia. "Monster.com Founder Has a Monstrous New Scheme." 9 Aug. 2012. The Motley Fool. Web. 14 Aug. 2012.

Taylor, Jeff, and Doug Hardy. Monster Careers: How to Land the Job of Your Life. London: Penguin, 2004. Print.

Taylor, Jeff, and Doug Hardy. Monster Careers: Interviewing; Master the Moment That Gets You the Job. London: Penguin, 2005. Print.

Taylor, Jeff, and Doug Hardy. Monster Careers: Networking. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Taylor, Jeffrey C. "The Making of Monster.com (by a DJ Entrepreneur)." Interview by Andrew Warner. 15 Dec. 2010. Mixergy.com. Web. 14 Aug. 2012.