Andrew J. McKelvey, 74, Builder of Monster.com, Dies

from yesterday's New York Times

By STEVE LOHR

Andrew J. McKelvey, a serial entrepreneur who in his early 60s jumped into Internet commerce as the executive who built Monster.com into the leading job recruitment Web site, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 74.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter Christine McKelvey said.

Before his work with Monster.com, Mr. McKelvey created a company called Telephone Marketing Programs, which became the nation’s largest Yellow Pages advertising agency. Begun in 1967 in borrowed office space and with one part-time assistant, TMP Worldwide, as it was later named, grew to employ thousands of workers and handle nearly a third of the American Yellow Pages ad business.

Mr. McKelvey combined hard work, persistence and deft timing. He explained his philosophy in an interview with The New York Times four years ago. “What you do in business is, you follow your nose,” Mr. McKelvey said. “The secret of success is being in the right place at the right time.”

Mr. McKelvey followed that dictum repeatedly over the years. After graduating from Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa., where he also found time to run a movie theater, and serving a stint in the Army, Mr. McKelvey headed to Australia.

In the mid-1950s, Mr. McKelvey figured that Australia was a decade or so behind the United States in adopting social and consumer trends. “So my father decided to go to Australia, start a business and gain what people would now call a first-mover advantage,” his son, Stuart McKelvey, said in an interview Friday.

In Australia, Mr. McKelvey began a music jukebox business that became one of the largest such concerns in the country.

But by the early 1960s, Mr. McKelvey decided that advertising was a promising growth industry of the future, and that New York was the place to be. In 1963, he got a job as an account manager at a Madison Avenue ad agency, handling consumer products like Vaseline Hair Tonic.

Later, Mr. McKelvey moved to another agency and took over the account of a company that advertised not on television, the hot new medium of its day, but only in the Yellow Pages. He became intrigued, saw an opportunity, and started the Yellow Pages ad agency, TMP, which he built up with a steady stream of corporate acquisitions.

It was Mr. McKelvey’s foray beyond Yellow Pages into help-wanted agencies in the 1990s that introduced him to Internet commerce. Mr. McKelvey wanted to buy Adion, a Boston-area recruitment ad agency run by Jeffrey Taylor. When they met, Mr. Taylor was most excited by a little sideline, a fledgling Web site, the Monster Board.

Mr. McKelvey was skeptical at first that the Web was going to be the future of job searches, said George R. Eisele, a former board member of Monster Worldwide, the parent company, and a longtime business associate of Mr. McKelvey. But he eventually became convinced, bought Adion in 1995, and pursued the Internet strategy with a vengeance. He quickly bought Online Career Center, Monster’s larger rival at the time.

Mr. McKelvey invested heavily over the next few years, including buying Super Bowl ads that helped make Monster.com the popular first choice for online job searching.

“Once he perceived its importance, he was relentless,” Mr. Eisele recalled in an interview on Friday. “That’s why Andy McKelvey was so successful on the Internet, even though he wasn’t a technological visionary.”

In the last few years, Mr. McKelvey’s business reputation was tarnished by a stock-options investigation at Monster Worldwide. He left the company in 2006 amid questions about his role in backdating employee stock options. In a settlement earlier this year, Mr. McKelvey agreed to pay the company $8 million and give up most of his voting shares. In a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he also paid about $276,000. Mr. McKelvey, the commission noted, did not receive any backdated options himself.

Mr. McKelvey, who was married six times, is survived by two sons, Geoffrey McKelvey of Stuart, Fla., and Stuart McKelvey of Mamaroneck, N.Y.; two daughters, Christine and Amanda McKelvey, both of Manhattan; and six grandchildren.

Mr. McKelvey’s personal wealth enabled him to become an active philanthropist, setting up the McKelvey Foundation in 2000 to provide college scholarships to young men and women who show an entrepreneurial flair in high school.

Mr. McKelvey’s foundation, it seems, is intended to provide financial help to teenagers in his own image. His first entrepreneurial venture was as a 14-year-old, buying eggs from a farmer in Southern New Jersey and selling them to neighbors for a profit of 10 cents a dozen.

Mr. McKelvey’s eclectic charitable efforts mirror his personal interests and enthusiasms. For example, Mr. McKelvey, who had a lung-scarring ailment, supported the research of the physician who successfully treated him and donated $25 million to set up the Andrew J. McKelvey Lung Transplant Center at Emory University.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. McKelvey played a central role in organizing the Families of Freedom fund for college scholarships for the children of the victims. The program, which raised more than $100 million, was headed by former president Bill Clinton and former senator Bob Dole.
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Employer focus: Dunkin' Donuts

Forget about elitist Starbucks, with their store closings, plummeting stock evaluations and $4 triple-vente-macchi-whatevers (is English REALLY such a passé language?). Double-Dee is for me!

In 1946, William Rosenberg founded Industrial Luncheon Services, a company that delivered meals and snacks to workers in the Boston area. The success of Industrial Lucheon Services convinced Rosenberg to start the Open Kettle, a doughnut shop in Quincy, Massachusetts. Two years later, Open Kettle changed its name to Dunkin’ Donuts.

Today, Dunkin’ Donuts serves a variety of doughnuts, muffins, bagels, coffees and fruit drinks at its locations in more than 40 countries. U.S. franchises went from 4,076 in 2004 to 5,451 last year.

Opportunities are brewing in your neighborhood Dunkin'. Or go one step further and run your own DD.
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An open letter to recruiters

Dear Independent Recruiter, Human Resources Rep Or Talent Acquirer:

I know your job's not easy. I know the economy's in tatters. I know hundreds of applications cross your desk every week. And I know it's a buyer's market, and you have to put the needs of YOUR employer first. Regardless:

1) If you post a recruitment notice, either in a newspaper or online, PLEASE take it down when the job's filled. And specify if it's a real, immediate opportunity or just a resume-gathering exercise.

2) Most job-hunting sites (Monster, CareerBuilder) offer auto-response email features. An acknowledgment directly from your company (even if it's a form letter), is a nicer touch.

3) If you tell an applicant that you'll keep his/her resume on file to pair against future openings...please do so.

4) If an applicant follows up with an e- or voicemail, please have some sort of system in place to offer timely feedback. Especially if the job-hunter is furnishing information (references, work samples) that you've requested.

5) Lastly, please bear in mind what it was like to be on the opposite side of the desk. You have a unique and valued position in your firm...you're its first impression, initial contact and public face. You are a vital extension and ambassador of its marketing and PR efforts. And with unemployment at an all-time high, you hold the key to the front door, with the power to alter a candidate's fortunes and career path for the better. Assume your role as professionally as you expect your talent pool to present itself.

THANK YOU! And good luck!
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My first job

Stop and Shop, North Haven, Connecticut. Summers of 1982 and 83. My grampa knew the store manager, Carmen Gaetano (God knows why I remember that name). I got my orange smock, and set to work collecting carriages and bagging groceries. Those summers were HOT...one week I had to help the Produce team by shoveling rotting garbage into a dumpster...EW. I also manned the bottle-and can-return counter, just as the state's recycling program was getting off the ground. Recyclables were supposed to be washed out; I remember arguing with shoppers and refusing returns caked with food, cigarettes, and assorted filth.

I was slightly-built in high school; some of the bigger stock boys would pick on me...one of them gave me the nickname "Muscles" lol. But all in all, it was an OK part-time gig. Sometimes I'd get a buck tip for carrying groceries to some lady's car. There was a Carvel's at the end of the parking lot, where I'd get chocolate ice cream in waffle cones on my breaks. To this day, I'm an awesome grocery bagger, and get REALLY annoyed when I'm standing in a long line and a shopper waits for the cashier to bag everything, arms folded. Even worse, barking instructions as to what items go in which bags. Lazy.
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