About RecTech Media

Our mission is to advise, empower and inform the recruiting technology ecosystem. We do that through a podcast, videos, interviews and research written and curated by our founder and other industry practitioners.

Founder

We are led by Managing Director and Lead Consultant, Chris Russell, whom Joe Stubblebine (CRO at Lensa) describes as “the mad scientist of online recruiting" our firm was founded in 2015. The mad scientist badge is one Chris wears with pride due to his continuous experimentation in the online recruiting space. From new job boards to recruiting apps to popular podcasts, the art of bringing together employer and job seeker is a constant thought inside his head.

Career Path

Chris's unique career has taken him through all aspects of the recruiting industry...vendor, candidate, practitioner, thought leader and consultant. This range of experiences has been immensely helpful to those seeking to understand the challenges and pitfalls of job hunting, talent attraction and the tools that bind them.

His story begins in 1999 during the dot com boom. After getting an M.I.S. degree in Information Systems from PACE University in New York, Chris set out to put his new diploma to work. Having always been interested in how the job market works, he read an article in Business 2.0 about how big job boards like Monster and Techies.com were creating local versions that targeted various cities. Since he had just gone through his own job search he recalls being frustrated with the lack of local options in his home state of Connecticut.

After landing a job at a small web design agency, one of his first projects was building and launching a staffing firm website with a simple jobs database. He completed the project, and with the article still fresh in his head, he came up with the idea for his first local job board, FairfieldCountyJobs.com.

Spending many summer nights after work, he cobbled together the first version which launched in September of 1999. By tapping friends in HR across the area to post jobs, they quickly jumped at the chance to recruit local candidates. Within the first year traffic took off and a business was born.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

He quickly expanded by adding more regions and began forming a network that included sites for Westchester, New Haven and Hartford counties. By late 2000 he had left his full-time job as a Information Architect and incorporated the company under the AllCountyJobs umbrella. For the next 13 years Chris ran the sites with the help of a small part-time staff. Eventually he outsourced the backend to Jobtarget and by 2008 the network had more than 20 local sites serving the Northeast and reached more than 100,000 monthly visitors.

Along the way, Chris began launching other types of recruiting technology such as tools like Jobs in Pods, which featured audio interviews with employers and their star employees. It had some claim to fame in the late 2000's with clients such as Intel, Walgreens, & Sodexo. He also launched many niche job boards during this period.

Onward

Eventually Chris decided to sell the job board network and move on to bigger projects. The company was sold in 2012 and shortly afterward Chris founded CareerCloud, a popular career content company which he also eventually sold. After that stint he also spent time 'in the trenches' via corporate recruiting roles as Talent Acquisition Manager for a software firm and most recently as Director of Digital Recruiting for a small cruise line.

Much has changed since those early days of online job searching/recruiting and Chris has seen it ALL. Few in the industry have his domain expertise. Whether you need help with your digital recruiting initiatives or new HR tech startup, Chris & team are here to help.

"Chris Russell is one of those guys that I make sure to keep an eye on in the Recruitment space. I coined his nickname, the “Mad Scientist of Recruiting”, because he’s always whipping up new formulas for ideas, concepts, and is a strong, out-of-the-box thinker who’s always 2-3 years ahead of everyone else. And, to top it off, he’s just really a nice guy, too."

— Joe Stubblebine - Chief Revenue Officer at Lensa