This October, DirectEmployers celebrates 25 years as an Association. It’s a milestone worth pausing on, and there’s nowhere more fitting to reflect on it than right here in Indianapolis. As former Managing Director, Tom Eckhart put it, “Internet recruiting didn’t start on the East Coast or in Silicon Valley. It started on the west side of Indianapolis.” If you’re familiar with the roots of online recruiting, they all lead back to the Circle City, and to our founder, the late Bill Warren, widely recognized as the “Father of Online Recruiting.”
1992: A Basement, a Database, and a Better Way
The idea came to Bill Warren over a restless Thanksgiving. He’d spent years recruiting executives for large companies and had grown convinced they were paying far too much for it. What if resumes lived in a database instead, and companies paid a fair fee to access them? That question became the Online Career Center—OCC for short—which Bill and his wife, Susan Warren, launched out of their basement in the early 1990s.
Late 1990s: From OCC to Monster.com
By the late 1990s, OCC had caught the attention of TMP Worldwide, which also owned a young competitor called The Monster Board. TMP merged the two companies’ technology—OCC’s platform under Monster’s brand—to create Monster.com, and Bill became its first president. But a power struggle occurred following the merger, and by 2000, Bill had left the company he helped build.
Building WOW Employers & Winning a Lawsuit
Bill didn’t slow down. He started a new company, deliberately built as an applicant tracking system rather than a job board, careful not to violate his non-compete. He named it WOW Employers, a nod to his own initials, William O. Warren. When Bill hired more than a dozen former Monster employees, Monster sued, alleging stolen code and trade secrets. After time, the case went nowhere: depositions turned up nothing, and WOW Employers won. As a memento, Bill’s team framed a dollar bill from the settlement with the note, “Here’s one for the good guys.”
2001: A Group of Employers Says “Enough”
While all this played out, Monster’s prices were climbing fast, and employers who’d paid a few thousand dollars a year for OCC access were suddenly quoted tens of thousands, with no new technology to show for it. A group of frustrated employers, including Cingular Wireless and Sprint (competitors willing to team up for a shared cause), came to Bill with a proposition: build something owned and operated by employers, not a vendor. Roughly 14 companies put up $60,000 to get it off the ground.
The organization was structured deliberately as a nonprofit, member-owned HR trade association. As for the name: the founding board initially wanted “Employers Direct,” but the domain was already taken. Flipping the words to “Direct Employers” solved the problem, and the name stuck.
The Lean Years
The early days were far from glamorous. Staff went months without pay to keep the lights on. The original office was a single floor in a building near the Indianapolis pyramids, and growth came one member at a time. Some months brought in only a handful of new companies. It took roughly five years to reach 100 Members.
2006–2009: The Turning Point
Everything changed when the federal government declined to renew funding for America’s Job Bank in 2006.
DirectEmployers had already built the technology to aggregate jobs directly from employers’ applicant tracking systems, and seeing the opportunity ahead, the Association partnered with the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) to launch the National Labor Exchange (NLx) in March 2007, stepping in without a gap in coverage the moment America’s Job Bank went dark.
DirectEmployers Executive Director Bill Warren and NASWA President Karen Lee sign the 2010 extension of the National Labor Exchange partnership, joined by staff from both organizations.
The results were immediate. DirectEmployers grew from 100 to 400 Members in just six months, and by 2009, membership had topped 600 and was still climbing. Helping federal contractors meet OFCCP, VEVRAA, and Section 503 obligations became as central to the mission as job distribution itself, and initiatives like VetCentral—the technology designed and developed to deliver federal contractor jobs for compliance and act as a resource of current jobs to state veteran representatives throughout the country—extended that mission even further.
2026: 25 Years Later
Bill Warren passed away in 2019, but colleagues describe him less as a household name than as a quietly relentless builder—the kind of person who, as one former staffer put it, was “One of those ordinary men doing extraordinary things,” without ever needing credit for it. What started as a database in a basement has grown into a nonprofit, member-owned Association now serving more than 1,100 global companies, still headquartered in Indianapolis, and still guided by many of the same principles.
Twenty-five years in, we’re proud to still call Indianapolis home, and even prouder of everything our Members, staff, and this industry have built together since that first basement database in the early ’90s.
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