Why Was Boxwood Technology Called “Boxwood Technology”?

It’s the year 2000: Colored sunglasses are in, the last Peanuts comic strip runs in newspapers, and the first crew arrives at the International Space Station.

It’s also the year that DirectJobs, founded by John Bell, was looking for a more unique company name. DirectJobs hosted job boards for companies that wanted to advertise their position openings to the public. Commercial job boards like Monster weren’t popular yet. DirectJobs provided the tech and did the work of helping companies advertise their open jobs online.

But the company was receiving more requests from organizations that wanted to license DirectJobs’ software for their private use and manage their job boards themselves. So DirectJobs shifted its business model to the selling of job board software full time, and started batting around ideas for a new company name that would better encapsulate its focus on the tech behind posting and seeking jobs online.

At the time, Bell lived in an old house lined with boxwoods. He was an avid gardener and would talk about his prized shrubs at work, especially after some of them contracted blight and died. When the company couldn’t decide on any other name for itself, the team went with Boxwood Technology because they had listened to Bell talk about taking care of his boxwoods so much.

For a while, every new client received a real, potted desktop boxwood plant when they signed a contract with Boxwood.

Top boxwoods require years of nurturing and care before they mature into healthy, established shrubs. Our job board software has received similar nurturing attention since its introduction in 2000, and we are proud to offer this robust product that is foundational to many associations’ career resource portfolio.