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This article was prepared for the January 23, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Fitting the Internet into a Job Search

Some eight years ago, Mark Mehler had an idea. He and his friend, Gerry Crispin, central New Jersey HR executives both, "saw the Internet coming," and decided to catalog and evaluate career and job hunting resources on the then-infant research resource.

In 1994 they found 300 sites. Talking about their search results at a conference in 1996, they were told "`if you have a book, we'll promote it.'"

"A light bulb went off," says Mehler. He and Crispin, by then partners in the site-hunting enterprise, found a little publisher in Trenton to print CareerXroads: the Directory to Job, Resume, and Career Management Sites on the Web." With the book published by the now-defunct Trenton publisher, the pair went to a publishers conference in Chicago.

Six publishers were interested. "Two took limos out to New Jersey," says Mehler, a South Brunswick resident. But they could have saved themselves the trip. "We told them, if you bring the standard contract, don't bother," Mehler recalls. A typical book contract, he says, pays the author 80 cents for every book sold. Since the average book published in the U.S. sells 3,000 copies, that was not the pay-off he and his partner were looking for.

A standard contract was indeed what Mehler and Crispin were offered, so, after researching the publishing industry, they decided to go their own way, self-publishing and handling their own promotion and distribution contracts. The book, they decided, would be a springboard to a business. And that is how it has worked out.

In addition to selling tens of thousands of copies of CareerXroads -- through book stores like Barnes & Noble and on their website (www.careerxroads.com) -- the two men consult on Internet recruiting to corporations, write on the subject, and make about 100 speeches a year.

Mehler gives one of those talks, "The Internet for Jobseeksers," on Tuesday, February 5, at 6:30 p.m. at the Princeton Public Library. For more information on the free event, call 609-924-9529.

Before starting CareerXroads, Mehler worked in human resources for Webcraft in North Brunswick. During his tenure there, he worked for six presidents. "As I hit 40, I decided I didn't want to break in the seventh," he says. He left to start consulting, but was particular about his clients. They had to have high-speed Internet, a rarity back in the early-'90s. He worked as an independent contractor for Johnson & Johnson, a division of General Electric, and Martin Marietta, working out deals where he did their work during the day, and came back at night to work on CareerXroads over their fast connections.

Four years ago, Mehler made CareerXroads his full-time job. Crispin, formerly a vice president at Shaker Advertising in East Brunswick, came onboard full time two-and-a-half years ago.

Early on Mehler, a computer neophyte, turned to his older daughter, Lauren, for instruction. Lauren, 12-years-old at the time, is now a sophomore at Rutgers, where she is deciding whether to major in journalism, political science -- or maybe both. She also contributes a column to Dow Jones CareerJournal. Mehler's younger daughter, Dara, logs a lot of computer time too, but, also interested in athletics, she doesn't let the Internet dominate her days.

Despite all the job hunting resources on the Internet, Mehler says job seekers would do well to emulate Dara's relative detachment from the computer.