Page 23 - Forbes - Asia (March 2020)

The company’s $100 million in revenue last year
came from 2,000 companies including Amazon,
Pizza Hut and FedEx, according to Goff. They pay
from $199 for a single job posting to as much as
$5,000 for a hiring event organized by Jobcase.
Jobcase has already signed up 115 million of
the 197 million Americans it’s targeting, and
Goff plans to take the site global in the next 18
months. In the G20 countries, 84% of people
don’t have college degrees. Tapping that market,
he says, will put his company on a fast track to a
billion members and a $1 billion valuation.
Goff, 52, relates to the challenges his mem-
bers face. His father, a former marine, worked as
a transmission repairman at a Chrysler plant in
Toledo, before becoming a life insurance sales-
man. Goff earned a master’s at Carnegie Mel-
lon, but he graduated into the 1990 recession
and spent four months washing dishes in To-
MAR CH 2020
ledo. He worked a stint as an options trader in
New York before earning a second master’s, in
technology management, at MIT. He endured
another recession and took a job he didn’t re-
ally want as CIO at an Oklahoma City energy
company before landing at a Cambridge hedge
fund, Percipio Capital Management, as CEO. Af- 21
ter the company went under in the 2008 finan-
cial crisis, he persuaded his partners to back him
in newly formed Percipio Media, a firm that cre-
ated no-frills job boards that aggregated listings
from other sites.
The company did well, but in 2014, at an HR ENTREPRENEURS
conference in Las Vegas, he realized the people
searching his job boards needed support. Linke-
dIn, with its polished, résumé-like profiles, of-
fered nothing for his buddies back in Toledo toil-
ing away at Kinko’s. Goff moved Percipio’s job
boards into a subsidiary, reorganized his team
and launched Jobcase. He says his priority was
to build a “community.” Its core is the stream of
posts that gave Sasha Contreras emotional sup-
port during her five-month job search.
How many members find work through the
site? Of the 31 interviewed for this story (Forbes
contacted all but two independently), only two
landed jobs through Jobcase. But all said they
liked the community. “It’s been a really good fo-
rum to rant,” says Rhonda Yates, 52, a member
who found work through another site as a pro-
duction scheduler at a packaging supplier in
Lexington, Kentucky.
Most members don’t report when they land
jobs, but Goff estimates 1 million, or 1%, found
work through Jobcase last year. That tiny ratio
doesn’t discourage employers. At a time of re-
cord-low unemployment, companies don’t ex-
pect listings will lead directly to applications,
says JR Keller, a professor of human resource
studies at Cornell. “Companies are just so des-
perate to find really good people that if you have
a community of 100 million people, they’re go-
ing to post a job there because they don’t want to
miss out,” he says.
Jobcase was profitable from the get-go, says
Goff, but since early 2018 he has been plow-
ing money into recruiting members. In June
he sponsored the Chicago Urban League’s city-
wide job fair and walked away with 8,000 new
members.
Goff dreams of a world where Jobcase has so
much visibility that workers will be able to use
the platform to advocate for better conditions at
work. “We want to support capitalism by putting
not just shareholder value but worker value at the
top,” he says. “It starts with the members.”
F ORBES A SIA