Most forms of online advertising have grown increasingly sophisticated in terms of the ability to target desired audiences precisely and to track and tune campaigns for effectiveness.

With our latest release of Jobster employer, we come one step closer to bringing this level of sophistication to online job advertising.

Direct Post is a simple but valuable job distribution system that will be especially interesting to smaller businesses. With a single click, employers can advertise their jobs both to their own talent networks and to Craigslist, Googlebase, and America’s Job Bank.

Direct Post is tightly integrated with the rest of the Jobster sourcing platform, so companies can easily manage incoming prospects in a unified “inbox” and measure the effectiveness of different source of talent in real time.

Direct Post is job distribution “for the rest of us”. Job distribution tools have traditionally been sold as add-ons to applicant tracking systems and targeted at enterprises. Even at the enterprise level, only about 50% of companies use job distribution tools; the usage rate is even lower for smaller companies. We’re working to create a single end-to-end solution that is instantly accessible and valuable to any company.

Our experience thus far shows a number of companies seeing quick results. (At the moment, Craigslist handily trounces the Googlebase and AJB in terms of effectiveness, though as Google increasingly promotes Google Base content on Google itself we might see some shifts in those trend.)

Naturally, the average quality level of prospects who come in without a referral is not going to be as high as those who do, which is why the system allows employers to track the source of each prospect, as well as helping prospects to get connected to the company and obtain a referral.

In terms of technology, Scott and Morgan have carefully designed the architecture of the system so that we can very easily plug in new destinations and scale to very large numbers of postings.

In later releases, we will continue to layer on new venues for targeting advertising that will offer unique value in terms of ROI and the ability to target passive professionals, as well as increase the ability of the system to automatically choose the right portfolio of advertising investments.

Jason writes:

i was out on john connors’ boat in lake washington tonight and an errant move found me overboard…prada shirt, prada shoes, blackberry and all.

the blackberry going down, of course, was the absolute worst part.

ceo loses his crack for a few minutes and is just in pain.

My coworker Ariel Stallings writes about a movie shoot that took place in the Jobster offices in Pioneer square:

My former movies.com colleague Mike Standish is making a short romantic comedy called Fortune Hunters. One of the scenes called for a “hip dot com office” set … so where’d they come to film? JOBSTER!

It has been gratifying to see the attention and usage that our recent updates to the Jobster site have been receiving. As usage increases, we’re working set the right tone and standards so that the community will be valuable to everyone who participates.

Recently, the new site was covered in the Wall Sttreet Journal, CNN (streaming video), the front page of Digg, and the Washington Post.

People are discovering innovative ways to express what’s unique about their company culture, whether it’s Eric talking about what’s unique about an established leader like Bose, or Joe talking about the up-and-coming startup Snapvine. In comparison,, using HR boilerplate to talk about a company comes off looking stale and uncompelling.

We’re working to develop and document a set of community standards that encourages authentic answers about companies while discouraging unverifiable hearsay, prepackaged corporate advertisements, and personal attacks. We draw some metaphorical inspiration from the standards of communities such as the Wikipedia.

For example, although it wouldn’t make sense to go as far as Wikipedia’s standard of verifiability, we encourage answers that include a factual component that can be verified in addition to personal opinions.

These facts are often neither “good” nor “bad” in and of themselves, the real measure is in the eye of the reader. (Consider private offices vs. open plan, city vs. suburban, big company vs. small, or flat vs. hierarchical organization.) Answers that capture the unique details of each company really are more useful and more likely to sell the company to the right people than unsubstantiated emotions or advertisments.

Not all verifiable facts will be positive for all readers, of course. It might come out in an answer that a company does not provide child care, for instance, and for some prospective employees this could be a deal breaker. Revealing this fact in a forum such as Jobster is not inappropriate or unfair, since these facts end up being uncovered in the interview process anyway.

On the balance, we believe that a balanced and informed look at companies benefits both companies and jobseekers through better career matches.

Joe describes the newly updated Jobster Community blog:

Part of our launch yesterday was a revamp of the Jobster Community Blog. It’s a shared blog for the product team to write about new features, highlight interesting community content, and (when I have time write a post) share a nerdy glimpse into our development process.

We’re lucky to have arielmeadow as our main author, she writes nonstop, and she puts up with me when I substitute a hypen for an mdash.

The blog includes excerpts from the community content the main Jobster site, like an inside look at the new startup Snapvine, which is hiring.

What’s unique about working at Snapvine?
We throw awesome parties!

What’s the best team you worked with at Snapvine?
There is only one team at Snapvine… We are in this together.

What are the three best things about working at Snapvine?
The team we have, the opportunity we are going after, the service we are building
[read more]

Last night, we shipped some significant new features for professionals on the Jobster.com site, as well a more streamlined user experience. These new features allow a jobseeker to not only find jobs from anywhere on the web, but also to get an inside look at what it’s like to work at different companies.

The Jobster site update is covered in a Wall Street Journal article Getting the Inside Scoop on a Future Boss.

In the latest expansion of the Web phenomenon of social networking, more sites are launching features that make it easier for job seekers to connect with the employees of prospective hirers…

Jobster Inc. is scheduled to launch a revamped job-search Web site today that includes people’s posts on what it’s like to work for their employers. Job hunters can link to these employees and ask to contact them.

Robert Wilson reviews the new features favorably:

With the new Jobster, job search feels like sitting down with friends to find the best opportunity for my future … it’s about MY Life, and fitting in, and having fun! Sure I have to work, and I want to leverage my skills, and I want to get the highest return on my human capital; BUT that’s just the ‘work’ side of the equation. What I live for is to make a difference, embark on new challenges, support my coconspirators, and wake up happy each morning (even Mondays) at the prospect of another day.

Below are screenshots of some of the key features. In combination, these create a web of content that allows users to easily navigate between search results, user profiles, and authentic experiences at companies. (Exploring jobs and people ought to be at least as easy and interesting as finding books on Amazon!)

1. The home page allows you to search millions of jobs from across the web. It also features recent profiles, tags, companies, and trends in search behavior.

2. Search results include links to what employees and former employers are saying about the companies.

3. Company pages allow you to explore related jobs, experiences, images, and profiles:

4. Individual profiles include past and current experiences and relationships.

These features are just a start of course, and we have a long roadmap of improvements to the site we’re working on now. (We’ve built the new site using Ruby on Rails which allows us to iterate rapidly on top of a firm architectural foundation.)

[Speaking of an authentic look inside companies: the team that builds the Jobster.com site has its own collaborative blog; worth checking out. If you’re a developer, SDET, or program manager, and would to join a high quality, fast moving team that works on problems like these, please get in touch with me.]

As I mentioned earlier, we’re delighted to welcome Tony Wright (profile, blog) and Brian Fioca (profile, blog) to the Jobster product development team. Tony and Brian have now moved out to Seattle and they’re both making an impact already.

You’ll see their blogs as a part of aggregagation of all Jobster development blogs at labs.jobster.com. Check out Tony’s recent post Jobs space is sexy) and Tony’s recent post on Digg’s PHP scalability and performance in OReilly’s OnLAMP blog.

Congrats to Jobster’s CEO Jason Goldberg, who has been nominated for the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. The awards ceremony for the Pacific Northwest will be this Friday.

Jason has done an incredible job creating and leading Jobster, and all of us here will be cheering him on to advance to the next stage.

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.