The New Jobster

One of the companies we keep an eye on is Jobster.

They've spent about two years building what they call "the online recruiting service that simplifies the difficult process of finding the right candidates. We help you proactively target and manage relationships with the talent you can’t reach today." Jobster has sold this product to over 325 companies, so they're doing pretty well on the sales front (the results and renewal front remains to be seen).

Today they released their first real consumer facing website which, as CEO Jason Goldberg explains, "the new site also includes more relevant search results. all this is designed to help go beyond today's "job search" to a more meaningful "job find" -- how do i find the right job for me as well as increase my chances of getting hired for it."

Armed with that exciting news, I surfed on over to Jobster to see what it had in store for me, a mythical jobseeker (editor's note: I'm not actually looking for a job, just evaluating other sites with a slightly jaded eye). What did I find?

Well, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the searches for the keyword "Boo" are rocketing up the charts to the tune of a 4715% increase. Now, I have friend we call "Boo", but I can't imagine a job (or an acronym) I'd be looking for that's related to Boo.

So far, I'm not seeing "more relevant search results".

To be fair, I logged in to LinkedIn because they like to show me what jobs "People in my network are hiring".

Now, I'm good at a lot of things. But GTK/Gnome Programming and MySQL database engineering are not among them.

Relevancy is a fleeting concept apparently.

Lastly, the Wall Street Journal article about the new Jobster says:

The new Jobster site, which so far has been tested on about 2,000 people, allows users to answer questions about their workplace. Their answers can give prospective hires more information about the employer and company culture, says Jobster Chief Executive Officer Jason Goldberg. The questions on the test version of the Web site range from what employees are reading to what the interview process is like.

Back in 2000, I interned at Vault.com, one of the pioneers of online employment/career information (they are still around). Their most popular feature was their message boards, where people could, yep, you guessed it, post and answer questions and comments are their current employer. The only difference is that Vault doesn't call their message board "social networking" and message boards are so Web 1.0 as to not deserve a mention in this article.

Everything old is new again.