Back in the late 1990s, when Silicon Graphics was axing a number of the designers and marketing people that contractor Sue Connelly worked with, she thought it would be helpful to create an e-mail list so everyone could keep in touch as they scattered to the winds.
It was a time before LinkedIn or Facebook, and the mail list was a way to keep up with successes and setbacks, a way to schedule monthly get-togethers at the Mountain View Chevy’s.
“We had real magic working together,” Connelly says. “I just didn’t want to lose touch with these very special people.”
Connelly’s list started with about 50 addresses. It quickly became a way to trade tips on job openings. The thing grew like crazy and well beyond SGIers as Connelly moved it to eGroups then Yahoo Groups. Today the list, which Connelly calls the KIT List (for Keep In Touch), has nearly 68,000 members and it’s become a prime example of an accidental business that no one, certainly not Connelly, saw coming.
“I didn’t have a master plan,” she says. “Because of the way the list started, I never saw it as a business.”
And to be honest, it’s not a lucrative business. But it does provide something else: A link to a time before social networking was a buzz phrase, when keeping in touch took a little more effort but often paid off in more tangible ways. Think of the KIT List as a boutique for job shopping in a time of big-box online job boards.
The list’s growth has surprised Connelly almost from the beginning. She didn’t market it. Instead, friends told friends.
“There was always a friend,” Connelly says. “It just kept getting bigger and bigger.”
The valley was sizzling in the late ’90s as the dot-com boom started its dizzying ascent. SGI alums who’d landed at worker-starved startups sent Connelly tips. Recruiters e-mailed her. Connelly, a Menlo Park marketing consultant, ran her consultancy during the day. At night she worked on the list, cutting and pasting job openings into e-mail that she then sent to the list.
Connelly couldn’t keep up. She moved the list to eGroups, where prospective employers could post their own openings. Like a small town growing into a big city, ne’er-do-wells arrived. Unscrupulous recruiters posted jobs that didn’t exist in order to collect résumés for their databases. Weirdos posted off-color and off-topic messages.
Connelly decided she needed to moderate the list to keep out miscreants. She was buried. List members and friends volunteered to help. The volume grew. In 2003, Connelly started charging those who wanted to post openings, so she could pay her moderators. (She now charges $39 for one post, $149 for 10.)
In the era of social networking and big job boards, the KIT List seems clunky at first look. But those who have landed jobs say the list’s organic origin is part of its magic. There is often a very human element involved in referrals, like when a friend forwards an opening from the list to a friend who had never heard of the list.
Patricia Taylor, who’s found several jobs through the KIT List in the past 10 years, says she knows that those who post jobs through the list are serious about hiring someone. Sometimes she wonders whether the same is true of openings listed on the big job boards.
“The response time, if any, is weeks,” Taylor, of Mountain View, says of the big boards. “With KIT List, it was someone calling me live. And it was the hiring manager or the hiring manager’s assistant.”
Taylor most recently found a sales job through the KIT List. And she says she built some strong relationships even with people who didn’t hire her.
“I got some really good interviews and have met some good contacts just networking,” she says. “I still keep in touch.”
Which, of course, was the whole point of the KIT List in the first place.
Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.
