ABOUT US

In 1997, Rick Miller founded CareerCast, Inc., which later became ADICIO, Inc. With a team of developers, he built one of the early Internet private-label SaaS platforms for recruitment, serving major media, newspaper, corporate, and association websites. The custom-developed platform was built on a LAMP stack—Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP—and incorporated Thunderstone search technology to deliver advanced search capabilities. The platform’s technical innovation ultimately attracted investment from Dow Jones & Co., Inc. and The Wall Street Journal.

The platform helped reshape online recruitment by integrating a fully automated job data acquisition system, often referred to as job scraping or job wrapping. It pulled, parsed, normalized, and automatically distributed job listings from thousands of corporate career websites and newspaper classifieds into hundreds of client media and employment websites.

In 2006, CareerCast launched its Jobs Rated Report, which went on to become one of the company’s most recognized editorial and research products. The report ranked jobs in America by analyzing a wide range of professions using factors such as income, work environment, stress, hiring outlook, and physical demands. It became widely known for identifying high-growth, high-quality careers, such as actuary and data scientist, among the best jobs, while occupations with high stress, physical difficulty, or declining demand were often ranked among the worst. The report drew on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and became a widely cited career resource. Jobs Rated also received recognition from the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE) Award.

At its peak, the SaaS platform powered nearly 1,000 websites, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the San Diego Union-Tribune, The Seattle Times, professional associations, trade publishers, and major corporate employers such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. 

In the early 1990s, Rick also consulted on efforts to modernize Northrop Grumman’s HRIS operations, helping support the migration of paper resumes and CVs into digital records and searchable databases. He advocated for systems designed to reduce cost-per-hire and recruitment advertising expenses while improving search efficiency and recruiter productivity.

Rick also consulted for Lockheed Martin, where he proposed and implemented a centralized database platform that consolidated job listings previously spread across more than 50 separate websites. Through a unified database and search interface deployed across those sites, the system helped increase traffic to local job postings and improve internal job mobility for existing employees.

Earlier in his career, Rick owned a technical staffing and consulting firm that supported major aerospace and defense clients, including Northrop Grumman. His firm helped place engineers and scientists associated with what was then referred to only as Advanced Bomber Concepts, a program later revealed as the B-2 Stealth Bomber.

Among Rick’s most memorable career moments was receiving a personal call from Ben Rich, the legendary head of Lockheed Skunk Works. Their conversation focused on the intense competition between companies such as Lockheed and Northrop for highly skilled technical talent supporting classified programs, and the broader implications for national defense.