In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the Jobster team rolled out Joster 2.0, and with it two significant new features– Jobster Search and Jobster Rank. You can try out Jobster Search at www.jobster.com.

I’m writing to give you an advance look at some of the features you’re hear about in the official press release this Wednesday, and on Thursday when Jobster CEO Goldberg unveil Jobster 2.0 at the Electronic Recruiting Exchange Conference in Boston with a live “webcast”:http://www.jobster.com/corp/erewebcast.jsp.

Jobster search lets you find jobs anywhere on the web. Jobster Rank is to people as PageRank is to pages– it’s a patent pending way to rank the “relevance” of professionals for a job based on the strength and quality of their links with a company that uses Jobster.

Here’s how it works. When you search for jobs, Jobster searches both company web sites and job boards to find the best matches.

This icon indicates jobs that you can get referred to. Jobster helps professionals find a qualified referral and get noticed through a short chain of trusted connections to the company.

Obtaining a referral from someone the company trusts is one of the ways a professional can increase his or her Jobster Rank.

A high Jobster Rank increases the automatic “star rating” of prospects as seen by the recruiters, and causes them to sort to the top of the list. The most worthy prospects get noticed first, while resume spam is filtered away.

(Implementing Jobster Rank efficiently was an interesting technical challenge, because it considers all of the connections and interactions between an individual and a company out to several degrees. Jobster Rank is incrementally updated through a set of Oracle triggers in conjunction with nightly jobs for the really complex calculations that do not need to be real time.)

The recruiting departments and hiring managers of a number of “leading companies”:http://www.jobster.com/search/companies.html are using Jobster. If you are part of a company that is interested in using Jobster to build a talent network, instructions are on the Jobster web site.