Many online job boards are frequented by unemployed and underemployed workers. But Jobster Inc. is aimed at helping employers such as Google, Boeing and Boston Scientific target potential candidates who don"t actively view job boards by combining referral networks, targeted job advertising and candidate relationship management into a single Web-based system.
On Tuesday, the Seattle-based online job advertising service announced that it had received US$19.5 million in second-round financing. Computerworld"s Thomas Hoffman spoke yesterday with Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg about how the company plans to invest the funds and why the service appeals to IT workers.
How do you plan to use the new round of funding? We raised this amount of money for a couple of reasons. One [area of investment] is for product development. The first Jobster service that we launched over a year ago was an alpha product for employers to e-mail prospective job candidates. Since then, we"ve gone from just e-mailing about jobs to a "publish and subscribe" model. Over 100 employers participated in the design phase. We now have more than 400 recruiters providing feedback.
The second piece is not just to build the product but to expand the market. Our market development plans have us going from hundreds of customers to thousands of customers and to expand our U.S. base to a more international base. We already have customers in Australia in Europe, and we"re planning to expand our international sales staff.
What are some new features under development? We"re launching a new jobs search product in the next 60 days. We bought a company called WorkZoo [a vertical job search engine], and we"ll be launching a service that"s unique in the industry. Right now, Jobster offers employers an employers" system to do candidate relationship management. We"ll be offering the first job search engine to search for jobs across the Web from various job boards and Web sites and to connect with employers.
What"s unique about Jobster.com versus other job search engines? From the employer"s side, Jobster is the only jobs service that combines referral, targeting and relationship management from a single engine. What companies want are better referrals, ways to target candidates and candidate relationship management to break through the clutter and hire the best.
What"s most appealing about Jobster.com for IT professionals? I think there"s a couple of things. One thing that Jobster allows people to do is to look beyond the most active candidates. Chances are you"re not searching Monster or your company"s job site -- you"re busy doing your job. This touches people through proactive search networks and by reaching them through the content of the Web sites they visit every day, whether it"s through a blog or another site they frequently visit. What we enable the job seekers to do is to subscribe to job-seeker alerts, which allows busy professionals to receive notice about jobs that they would have interest in.