Over the course of the last four months during my conversations with Brad and the other partners at Local Eye Site about potentially joining them as a full time partner, I became increasingly skeptical. Not about the business model, not about the strength and experience of the leadership team, and not about the impressive rate of growth the business had enjoyed in its brief lifetime. I just wasn’t buying this “sense of community” Brad was passionately telling me he was building.
I mean, seriously Brad? Wink, wink. You mean a job board, right? Aren’t you saying that the term “Community” is the marketing jargon you’re using? Knowing the job board business, my interpretation of an online community is similar to a flea market. People come to buy stuff (find candidates) and people come to sell stuff (get a job). When the transaction is complete, that’s it. If hanging around the flea market before and after the buying and selling takes place is your idea of a “community,” well…I wasn’t so sure.
I was still all ears though because while I was employed at one of the major job boards, the one item I was sure about was the consistent erosion of market share in the US we saw as a result of niche job boards entering the fray; that a major issue had become the recruiters’ bandwidth as they sifted through hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of unqualified resumes to find the qualified. According to compete.com, Careerbuilder had 15 million unique visitors in October and Monster had 41 million! And that’s just their core US sites - not including the multitude of network sites they own and to which they push postings. That traffic may be super for Wal-Mart or Home Depot, but think about maelstrom that creates for the office administrator of an eye care practice with twenty employees needing to hire two Ophthalmic Techs and a Contact Lens Tech.
So back to community. You can see I bought into the business model, but the community idea? Fortunate to have family in the Ophthalmology field, I sought their counsel. “Different” “Needed” “Eileen is hilarious” and “It’s about time” were some of the responses I received. Brad then turned me on to the idea exchange, the search-for-candidates functionality, the community contributors featured in LES blogs and newsletters as well as the survey results on cataract surgery and post-op kits published on the site. Here’s a question we received on the site just this morning: “Can you tell me the parameters for re-sterilizing phaco tips and knives?” And in speaking with the administrator of a Pennsylvania practice just yesterday, we were reminded just how expensive and limiting the local newspapers and their online outlets are as practices pipeline candidates in advance of the expected increase in turnover seen every January, not to mention the labor shortage of allied healthcare workers.
So, with all that said, I have drunk the Kool-Aid. So much so, that I’ve had new business cards printed for our Founder, Brad McCorkle, with his new title: Community Organizer.
Bill Valdespino, Partner
Local Eye Site, LLC
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