About Harrison

A. Harrison Barnes is the founder and CEO of CareerMission.com, the parent company of more than 100 job search websites, employment services, recruiting firms, online employment news magazines and student loan companies. CareerMission.com employs several hundred employees in the United States, Asia, and Europe.

Harrison began his career as an asphalt contractor in Detroit and later became a litigation attorney, after attending the University of Virginia Law School where he was an editor of the Virginia Law Review and the Managing Editor of the Journal of Law and Politics. Harrison is also an honors graduate of the University of Chicago, where he received his bachelor’s in public policy studies. Harrison has worked for the United States Department of Justice, a federal district judge for a one year clerkship, and as an attorney for the law firms Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, and Dewey Ballantine (now Dewey Lebouef).

In 2001, Harrison started the legal recruiting firm BCG Attorney Search.

In 2003, Harrison started LawCrossing.com, a job board that aimed to consolidate every legal job that exists. Since being launched, LawCrossing has experienced great success and has been on the Inc. 500 twice.

Following the success of LawCrossing, the company soon broadened its range to include the 100+ EmploymentCrossing.com websites, each of which is specific to a particular industry or field of interest. These websites started with the launch of SellingCrossing in 2007.

In addition to the running all many job search websites, one of Harrison’s umbrella companies, CareerMission.com, branched into legal staffing with the temporary staffing firm Law Firm Staff in 2002. In 2005 the CareerMission branched into student loans with the success of EdFed, Law School Loans, Graduate School Loans, Medical School Loans and Dental School Loans. In the 2006 calendar year, EdFed became a federally recognized student loan lender and was among the top 15 student loan companies in the United States based on its volume of student loan consolidations.

CareerMission also offers résumé development and distribution services through the companies EmploymentAuthority.com, Attorney Résumé and Preferred Résumés. Harrison also started Southlake Properties to manage the company’s expanding property holdings in 2005.

Among Harrison’s most recent companies is Hound.com. Using technology that took over 120 programmers on his staff two years to develop, Hound.com is able to pull job listings from tens of thousands of company sites throughout the world, giving its subscribing members the best opportunities to find and apply for jobs that are generally not advertised to the public market. This company has received numerous awards and has been ranked among the top 20 job sites in the world by PC Magazine; it has also received numerous other significant media mentions.

More recently, CareerMission has started several online news magazines including JD Journal, Employment Spectator, Advertisement Journal, Human Resources Journal and EmploymentCrossroads. For the past several years the company has also successfully operated two community forum sites for the legal profession, Judged and JD2B.

Harrison recently started Short Task. Short Task allows businesses of all sizes and individuals to post short tasks that anyone in any part of the world can accomplish online. These tasks range from paying a few cents to a few dollars and they are available to all. Short Task has put the promise of work within the hands of anyone with an Internet connection and a few hours to spare. Tens of thousands of otherwise unemployed people from North America, Africa, Europe, Asia and other parts of the world now make the site a daily destination for work. Short Task was recently named one of Trend Watching’s 50+ New Business Ideas that Defy Doom and Gloom.

Harrison also writes daily articles to inspire and motivate job seekers that he publishes and emails out to individual subscribers each week, HarrisonBarnes.com.

Harrison resides in Malibu, California.

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