hotjobs.com was founded by Richard Johnson and was based at 24 West 40th Street, 12th floor in New York City,.....

hotjobs.com was founded by Richard Johnson and was based at 24 West 40th Street, 12th floor in New York City, just across from Bryant Park. Johnson had previously founded the RBL Agency with Ben Carroccio, a boutique employment agency for technologists. The initial website was launched in early 1996 as RBL Agency which evolved in to the Online Technical Employment Center (OTEC) in 1999, and only featured technical jobs. Founding employees Christopher G. Stach II, Earle Ady, and Allen Murabayashi designed and coded the first iterations of the site on Silicon Graphics Indy workstations for C application development, Apple Macs for content creation, and the site ran on Sun and SGI hardware.

The company's first advertising effort was as a Yahoo! site of the week, which at the time could be purchased for $1000.

hotjobs participated in one of Jupiter Communications' first conferences at the New York Sheraton in February 1996. It was here that Johnson spotted Ginna Basinger, who was working for the Sheraton at the time, and offered her a position as the first hotjobs sales person. The product was given away to the first 100+ clients to gain employment content to attract job seekers.

Thomas Chin joined the organization in October 1996 while attending Columbia University, and eventually became the organization's chief scientist.

In the summer of 1997, Johnson decided to expand the operations, and brought a number of recruiters over from the RBL Agency to join the salesforce. Dimitri Boylan joined at this time heading up the sales and marketing effort. Over Labor Day weekend in 1997, the first remote sales office was opened in Burlingame, CA by Earle, Kelly Michaelian & Michael Tjoa. This was a joint venture between hotjobs & otec. Ginna Basinger moved from New York to California to manage the office, hiring the company's first non-New York employee, Michael Johnson, in August 1997 as an Account Executive. Quickly outgrowing the space, the Burlingame office was moved to downtown San Francisco in the Summer of 1999 where it remained through the disposition of the company in 2002.

hotjobs developed "softshoe" a private label job board and applicant tracking system in 1997. Lucent Technologies was the first client of this product.

In September 1997, hotjobs shed the technology-only focus by adding job categories for "Finance/Accounting" and "Sales/Marketing." The first hotjobs newsletter followed in October 1997. During this time the name was also officially changed from "HotJobs, Inc." to "HotJobs.com, Ltd" on the suggestion of Peter Connors, who had been hired as the first marketing manager.

The company startled the advertising world in 1999 when it bought a $1.6 million commercial during Super Bowl XXXIII, considering that its total revenues were approximately $2.5 million. McCann-Erickson Detroit was hired for the production. It proved to be a very savvy investment, as "over $25 million" in publicity was generated as a consequence. Immediately following the playing of the commercial, hotjobs' servers were overwhelmed with requests, and this incident later served as the basis for a commercial for IBM.[citation needed] The company went public in late 1999.

In 2000, the company had grown to $100 million dollars in revenue and moved its headquarters to 406 West 31st Street. The company expanded into the enterprise market by purchasing the distressed resume processing company Resumix, Inc. of Sunnyvale, Ca. As part of this effort, the company hired Tim Villanueva, formerly a leading developer at Intuit, as its Chief Technology Officer, and Chuck Price, formerly Chief Architect at Broadvision, as its Senior VP of Engineering. Allen and Thomas left shortly after this leadership expansion to pursue new interests.

In March 2001, Richard Johnson resigned as Chief Executive Officer and President. The board appointed COO Dimitri Boylan to fill those positions. In 2001 the company became profitable and cash flow positive.

Yahoo! purchased the company through an unsolicited bid in 2002, for 433MM, undercutting efforts by Monster.com to acquire the company