PATRICKWELSHFOR^ FORBESNOVEMBER 30, 20 19CONTRARIANENTREPRENEURScompany went under in the 2008 fi nancial crisis,
he persuaded his partners to back him in new-
ly formed Percipio Media, a fi rm that created
no-frills job boards that aggregated listings from
other sites.
The company did well, but in 2014, at an HR
conference in Las Vegas, he realized the peo-
ple searching his job boards needed support.
LinkedIn, with its polished, résumé-like profi les,
off ered nothing for his buddies back in Toledo
toiling 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 fi ve-month job search.
How many members fi nd work through the
site? Of the 31 interviewed for this story (Forbes
contacted all but 2 independently), only 2 land-
ed jobs through Jobcase. But all said they liked
the community. “It’s been a really good forum
to rant,” says Rhonda Yates, 51, a member who
found work through another site as a production
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 ra-
tio doesn’t discourage employers. At a time of re-
cord-low unemployment, companies don’t expect
listings will lead directly to applications, says JR
Keller, a professor of human resource studies at
Cornell. “Companies are just so desperate to fi nd
really good people that if you have a community
of 100 million people, they’re going to post a job
there because they don’t want to miss out,” he says.
Jobcase was profi table 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.”erick Goff , Jobcase’s founder and CEO, after
hearing Contreras’ story. When he founded the
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company in
2015, he set out to do what LinkedIn hasn’t been
able to accomplish—create a site where the 80%
of working-age Americans without a four-year
college degree can network, fi nd jobs and man-
age their careers. (A LinkedIn spokesperson says
its mission has always been to support the entire
workforce.)
Goff has raised $118.5 million at a valuation
for Jobcase that Pitchbook has at $445 million.
Revenue, which Goff pegs at $100 million over
the past year, comes from 2,000 companies in-
cluding Amazon, Pizza Hut and FedEx. 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 110 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 mem-
bers 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 Tole-
do. He worked a stint as an options trader in New
York before earning a second master’s, in tech-
nology management, at MIT. He endured an-
other recession and took a job he didn’t really
want as CIO at an Oklahoma City energy com-
pany before landing at a Cambridge hedge fund,
Percipio Capital Management, as CEO. After the48
Jobcase Cont.HOW TO PLAY IT
by Jon D.
Markman
Helping people
become employ-
able and dis-
cover opportuni-
ties can improve
society and the
economy. One
way to play
this trend is
ManpowerGroup,
a staffi ng com-
pany that grew
from a single
Milwaukee offi ce
in 1948. Today the
company puts
millions of people
to work through a
network of 2,600
offi ces in 80
countries. Units
provide work-
force consulting,
professional out-
sourcing, training
and career
management.
The business
generated $22
billion in sales in
2018 and profi ts
of $796.7 million.
Shares are up
39% in 2019, yet
there is plenty of
growth ahead as
companies seek
fl exibility amid an
intense demand
for skilled labor.
Jon D. Markman
is president of
Markman Capital
Insight and author
of Fast Forward
Investing.FORBES.COMFINAL THOUGHT
“IT IS HARDLY POSSIBLE TO
BUILD ANYTHING IF FRUSTRATION,
BITTERNESS AND A MOOD OF
HELPLESSNESS PREVAIL.”
—Lech WalesaThe VaultPOWER USERS
At fi rst LinkedIn also strug-
gled to make money, trying
to charge consumers a few
bucks to use the site. Then it
discovered the sweet spot. From 2012:
Rather than try to wring 20 bucks here and there from
individual users, [CEO Jeff Weiner] refocused the
company on selling a vastly more powerful service to
corporate talent scouts, priced per user at as much
as $8,200 a year. Today thousands of companies use
LinkedIn’s fl agship Recruiter product to hunt for skilled
achievers. In human resources departments, having
your own Recruiter account is like being a bond trader
with a Bloomberg terminal—it’s the expensive, must-
have tool that denotes you’re a player.F