As Jobster welcomes Jobby to the fold, I thought it was worth sharing some of the ideas that we think make Jobby special.

Jobby applies folksonomies to career skills, to make the process of creating and searching profiles faster, more entertaining, and more relevant.

1.  When you create a profile, you can quickly click on relevant skills in a tag cloud for your speciality (say web geek).  AJAX means instant responses as you add skills.   Instead of hardcoding the set of skills in the system, Jobby relies on the community to create and weight the different skills, ensuring that they stay up to date and relevant. 

2.  If you have a skill that’s not in the system, you can add your own tag. Jobby will search for similar tags already in the system to avoid duplication.

3.  The AJAX search interface allows users to quickly rapidly filter down the set of users by clicking on tags.

These ideas become even more compelling when integrated with other social search features we have in development for professionals and recruiters.

Jobster is delighted to welcome Brian and Tony from Jobby to our product team, as chronicled by Jason and Alan and reported in Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch.  

The Jobby team has a good blog post describing their experiences meetingJobster the team. I’ve never seen two people click right off the bat so well as Brian and Tony. They were smart yet modest, and passionate about exactly the same things we were– using technology and innovative user experiences to make meaningful career matches.

We have a great roadmap of shared ideas about how to combine the two sites, as Jason notes in his subtle wink.

Here’s how Ajaxian describes Jobby:

Ever wondered when the online job searching sites would get out of the “old web” and into a more Web 2.0 kind of attitude? Well, a new site, Jobby, is looking to change that image.

Jobby is a new way to think about resumes that lets you show off your
qualifications and make it easy for hiring mangers to find you.  Instead of digging through job postings and submitting resumes to countless companies and recruiters, Jobby lets users make their qualifications available in an easily to search format.

Jobby uses a tag cloud-based qualification entry interface, and AJAX powered search filters based on category, name, level, location, and more. The search page also lets you subscribe to customized search filters via RSS in case you don’t find the person you’re looking for right away.

The site combines a solid combination of interface and functionality to create an easy to use kind of user experience. As as hiring manager, you can search on a term and get the results. The real fun starts when you apply filters to the data dynamically. Your list is fine tuned down to a few candidates as you narrow the field in different categories like Location, Business, and Availability.

They’re also working up a system that would allow developers to add a “drop in” script to the page, linking directly to their information on Jobby. You can keep track of this and other advancements they’re making on their blog.