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

The bigger splash came on January 30 during the 2000 Super Bowl game. As part of their aggressive marketing campaign, kforce.com decided to go for it, spending more than $2 million on the commercial and an estimated $3.7 million in air-time costs for four thirty-second showings. A month before the Super Bowl, kforce.com recorded over $3 million in web-related revenue in the previous quarter, a substantial portion of which came from twelve new markets where they didn’t have a physical presence. The commercial featured a sharply dressed young man on a New York City street saying, “We’ve got cool jobs, we’ve got hot jobs, we’ve even got monster jobs,” playing off the now-familiar Internet job boards. Following the Super Bowl, their site had 434,000 visitors and recorded 70,000 candidate registrations. It was a success, but it didn’t come easy. Don Sloan, Kforce’s chief information officer, started with the firm just weeks before the change to kforce.com to oversee the dot-com operations. On his first day, absent a computer or even a chair, the only thing on his desk was a six-inch-thick binder bearing the requirements for the website’s development. “I asked how far along we were in the testing cycle,” Don said. “The response was, ‘Testing? We just started development this week.’ That’s when I knew I was in for a roller coaster ride.” The week leading up to the Super Bowl, Don only went home twice logging more than 110 hours and his team was still “pushing code out to the different data centers” on game day. “The advertisement came on, lasted thirty seconds and went off,” Don recalled. “About twenty seconds later I got a phone call from my lead developer, Keith Fulmer, telling me the site was down.” The hosting company was supposed to set the website up to distribute the load across all three of kforce.com’s data centers. “But they had configured it incorrectly,” Don explained, “so that if someone just typed in kforce.com instead of www.kforce.com it only went to one data center, and the advertisement said kforce.com. So everybody typed in kforce.com and that data center…it was a very emotional time.”

When Don Sloan, Kforce’s chief information officer, joined the firm in December 1999, he was greeted by this six-inch-thick binder of requirements for their website development.

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