Jobster Launches App On Facebook

Jobster’s Facebook application connects Facebook members with hiring teams at companies where they want to work.

"Jobster is all about connecting employers with valuable audiences," said Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg.

"This application was created with user feedback at its core. We spent the last six months learning from Facebook users about how we can best help them further their careers and have now coupled that understanding with our Talent Network capabilities for employers."

To use the Jobster application, Facebook members sign up for employer Talent Networks. Facebook users information is then provided to the hiring teams using Jobster’s Employer Sourcing Tools. Jobster then helps with the communication between employers and Facebook users in their Talent Network about job openings.

The application also allows Facebook users to find friends who work at a specific company and ask them for career advice.

“We spent the last twelve months designing the new Jobster to meet the needs and expectations of the digital generation," said Jobster CEO, Jason Goldberg.

"The digital generation has widely embraced social networking, user generated content, and video; Jobster is bringing these technologies to career development and humanizing the job search process. The digital generation has demanded more efficient business models and Jobster is committed to bringing innovations to the employment category"

New Web 2.0 additions to the site include digital profiles and resumes, "Superstar Tags" that allow job seekers to better highlight skills and attributes, the ability to upload video profiles, the ability for users "fave" each other as a recommendation tool, and jobseeker profile URLs that can be sent to prospective employers.

“We believe that people hire people not resumes, and that people go to work for people not for job descriptions," said Goldberg. "That is why we are embracing digital career profiles which utilize user generated content, tag-based data and navigation models, and video, to help bring the real person behind the resume and the job description to life.”

The new ad-supported platform has been compared to how PlentyOfFish brings potential lovers together without charging couples to connect. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington thinks Jobster’s move is a direct assault on established job sites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder, both of which charge employers nearly $500 per listing:

Given that Jobster already has a large footprint in the job listing space, this is more than an experiment. It’s a full frontal assault on Monster’s business model. This can also hit LinkedIn indirectly if people start focusing on Jobster as a more interesting place to keep their resumes and contacts. Monster will probably be keeping an alert eye on how Jobster is doing, and this may also force them to update their aging platform and pricing models to more modern standards. For employers and job seekers, this is nothing but good news.

But equally intriguing is Jobster’s arrangement with Facebook, will begin this spring. Facebook is a favorite with the job-seeking college crowds, and an exclusive relationship with "the other Myspace" is only a boon for Jobster’s ambition.

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Web 1.0 = Get it Online

Web 2.0 = Make it Work

According to Jason, Web 2.0 goes beyond being onlineit solves business problems. He asks, “How many people have gone to the public library in the last month?” A smattering of hands raised.”how many people have searched Google?”. Everyone raised their hands. People turn to the web first.

Many technologies are having an impact beyond the tech savvy225 million users.74% adults are online.

Kids are finding friends and interacting in a whole new way (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, etc.)it’s the new socialization of young people.dramatic shift in consumer behavior. Advertisers have turned to the Internet as a primary means to reach consumers, especially the younger demographic.

“The new Internet is created for the people, by the people, every single daythe new Internet is being created in a very active way [and he points to YouTube, Digg, and other sites based around participation].”

Jason believes there are better business models, better user experience, and more disruptive technologieswhich differentiates the new web from the goldrush that occurred back in 1999.

There was a disparate experience in 1999community, commerce, content, and advertising were not connected [he shows four separated puzzle pieces]now, they are.

Content is much more specificcreating new expertise from the bottom-up.That ties into what Jason does for a living – running Jobster. Blogs, for example, can be a goldmine for finding great talent.

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Ken Yarmosh is a consultant who helps organizations get the most out of their technology investments. He works with technology users and creators across various industries, focusing on technology education and strategy. With over 7 years IT experience, Ken has worked with small businesses, non-profits, federal agencies, and multi-million dollar companies.

His online efforts include acting as the Editor for the Corante Technology Hub and authoring the TECHNOSIGHT blog.

The other half of Jobster’s investment came from a trio of venture capital firms that have been early investors in the company, Classified Intelligence reported in a client email today.

Jobster has been careful with its cash, CI writer John Zappe noted in the report. A previous funding round of $19.5 million has mostly stayed in the bank, according to Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg.

They have spent some of their cash, though. Jobster bought Recruiting.com in May of this year, and picked up WorkZoo in July 2005 for its vertical search engine.

Zappe detailed some of Jobster’s changes, which saw it evolve from an employee referral service to what it is today:

Reed Elsevier gets a boost to its recruitment efforts, Zappe wrote, while Jobster becomes the job search technology of choice throughout Reed Elsevier’s international network of websites.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The step up for Jobster comes from their recent acquisition of the job search engine WorkZoo. It’s providing the foundation of the new search engine.

The new Jobster Search collects job listings from lots of locations, including major sites, like CareerBuilder, and niche job boards. Then it links jobseekers to the job listings, regardless of source, that fits their criteria.

The other point of job searches they claim to add is networking and referrals. They quoted a statistic that 60% of employers rank referrals and networking as the two most effective sources for professional hires.

They expect to be able to build relationships between employers and prospective candidates. It will be interesting to see whether or not they can make the networking thing work over the Internet. It seems a bit tough to do that without face-to-face communication.

“Jobster Search marks an important step in our plans to make it easier to connect great companies with qualified candidates,” says Jobster CEO, Jason Goldberg.

“For the first time, jobseekers are able to search for jobs and request referrals into leading employers in a meaningful and manageable way. Jobster will continue to innovate and introduce solutions which help match great people to great opportunities.”

Highlights of the Jobster Search:

How Jobster Works for Jobseekers

— Manage relationships with candidates: Jobster enables employers to efficiently rank, qualify and keep in touch with top prospects and sources of talent. With this feature, employers can build a Talent Network to have ready pools of pre-qualified candidates for hiring on demand.

As most people are in the job market at one time or another, this should provide a useful tool for job hunters. The only question that comes up is how they will establish networking between employers and job hunters.

There are number of jobs search engines out there but this one appears to be the first one to raid other search board and add it to their listings.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

(Bonus for reading: Dave McClure of Simply Hired weighs in with a comment.)

It still looks like early days for job search. The vertical players are innovating like crazy, and it will take years before user behavior shifts to take advantage of all that is out there.

In the meantime there is also the question of the “rise and fall” of certain online career- development-related fads, such as the Free Agent Nation sites that arose when everyone and his brother was “going solo,” seemingly for the first time in history. We’ll see a revival of some of the online communities that rose and fell.

Li makes the excellent point that there needs to be some reassurance for job seekers that the results they’re seeing are viable job ads that might generate a response, and for this reason, praises the potential for formally marrying social networking with job seeking, as with a relatively unknown startup called Jobster.

But on that front — gaining user adoption of social networking — there is a snag, too. There are probably five or six leading social networking sites, and there is really only enough mindshare to support two or three. If your experience is like mine, you’ve tried a few (Ryze, Soflow, LinkedIn, Orkut, etc. — am I missing any? maybe another dozen or so? ), but one of them seems to have all the momentum: LinkedIn. Indeed, after combing through a bevy of LinkedIn profiles last night, it struck me that the sole reason for many folks being part of LinkedIn is to expand their professional networks for ongoing career improvment. The most common situation for heavy networkers appears to be those with solid credentials who are currently underemployed or taking a semi-sabbatical to focus on child-rearing between successful gigs.

(All of which reminds me of a story. A project manager at a niche interactive agency contacted me several times in my role as search marketer par excellence to learn a little bit about how we manage search campaigns, so they could have us partner with them on some client projects. Nothing out of the ordinary. And I am not naive enough to be oblivious to the fact that sometimes, the process of sharing that info gives the other agency the idea that they can handle the project themselves. Unbeknownst to me, though, she wasn’t really seeking services to improve the bottom line for the clients of the company she was working (part-time) at: she was in the middle of interviews for jobs related to search marketing, about which she knew nothing! Several weeks after our last talk, I was included in a bulk email to all of her friends inviting us out for drinks to celebrate (a) her birthday and (b) her great new job heading up search marketing for a well known company! The moral of the story? Maybe there isn’t one. Or maybe it’s that there is karma in social networks, and if you “use” your “network” solely for the purposes of self-advancement, without returning the favor, the celebration might not last long. If you believe in karma and stuff coming back to bite you in the ass, that is.)

So this is the wild card in the new world of job searching: not a discrete event where you start to search through listings from scratch, but a combination of search and a pre-existing social network that can help you not only in your search for what’s available, but which might help you get a word-of-mouth referral to get an interview. For those fairly well-established in careers, who have some consulting or advising gigs to keep them going, the networking method is a more natural way of initiating research towards that comfortable fit. Even the names of two of the three major job boards sound creepy and impersonal to me — “monster” job board? “hot” jobs?

There are only going to be so many online social networks that people use for this type of networking. From here, it looks like LinkedIn is gaining momentum, which makes Simply Hired’s decision to partner with them seem all the more sensible. It would make sense if that partnership were strengthened.

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Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.

In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.