The Kforce Story: 50 Plus Years of Great People Delivering Great Results

People Network featured candidates seeking to market their skills to employers; and the Career Guarantee Network, a customized career development service for consultants. There were other services offered on the site. SkillMercial ™ was a multimedia online video clip that informed potential hiring managers about a candidate’s skills. On the other side of the equation, RIS—Remote Interview System—made it possible for candidates to put videos of themselves online, a technology that is just now coming into common use. Emerging Technologies launched the E-Business KnowledgeCenter for conducting Internet and market research to assist companies looking to integrate e-commerce in their overall marketing strategies. The Knowledge Cybrary was created to serve as an online information resource featuring a line-up of specialists in the field who contributed more than five hundred audio recordings, videos, and articles on all issues related to career development and human resources. The site recorded 900,000 visitors in the fourth quarter of 1999.

Cementing their decision to establish themselves as a leader in the new web-based environment, Romac also decided to change the company’s name to kforce.com followed by the phrase “powered by Romac” to draw on the firm’s reputation. In a move that Dave Dunkel was quoted as saying, “embodies the focus and future of our company,” the change of the company’s name to kforce.com was announced November 17, 1999. It was a bold and risky move that had a side benefit which was the impact it had on the culture, which had not fully coalesced following the merger. Jackie Finestone, who was with Source Services at the time of the merger, recalled that when it was first announced, “We were told we’d keep the Source name for a long time,” she said. When the decision was made to drop the Source Services name, people had difficulty dealing with the loss of their corporate identity, but yet another name change helped everyone bridge the gap. “People were very proud of their legacies,” Joe Liberatore explained. “Changing the name to kforce.com allowed us to unite everybody under one brand so it was no longer divisive.” While all of this was going on at Romac International and now kforce.com, people around the globe were anxiously awaiting the potential disaster inherent in the rollover from the year 1999 to 2000, dubbed Y2K or the Millennium Bug. While businesses were spending millions of dollars protecting themselves against calamities involving date-sensitive transactions, Romac consciously limited its Y2K staffing footprint. In the end, the calendar rolled around to the year 2000 and as future Kforce president, Bill Sanders, remarked in hindsight, “The Y2K scare came and went without a whimper.”

The technology behind kforce.com’s Remote Interview System, or RIS, was years ahead of its time.

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