The company was founded by Richard Johnson and was based at 24 West 40th Street, 12th floor in New York City, across from Bryant Park.

Founding employees Christopher G. Stach II, Earle Ady, and Allen Murabayashi designed and coded the first iterations of the site on Silicon Graphics Indy workstations for C application development, Apple Macs for content creation, and the site ran on Sun and SGI hardware.

Thomas Chin joined the organization in October 1996 while attending Columbia University, and eventually became the company's chief scientist.

In the summer of 1997, Johnson decided to expand the operations, and brought Dave Carvajal over from the RBL Agency to build the salesforce and eventually recruit, hire and scale the organization with 8 offices.

In June 2001 George Nassef resigned as EVP engineering and chief information officer to pursue other startup ideas.

[8] The ad was well received, with MSU's Department of Advertising faculty experts ranking it 4th in their "Top Ten Touchdowns" list, awarding it 96 out of 111 possible points.

[12] After the acquisition, HotJobs began to offer users a chance to migrate their job postings and information to a Monster.com account.

Yahoo HotJobs' services were free to job seeking users and included posting up to ten versions of a resume.

Various tools within the site allowed users to calculate ideal salaries, research plans and employee stock options as well as have a "Job Tip of the Day" emailed to them.

The Career Tools tab listed other items they offered, like resume building, interviewing advice and an education center.

Employers were given access to a variety of communication devices, including letter templates and notes, as well as the ability to track their postings.

The system's built-in intelligence recognized the contextual meaning of words within a resume by extracting relevant information, with a high degree of accuracy.