Jobster, the Seattle job search engine, armed with $50 million in financing and aiming to be profitable this year, announces two big moves tomorrow (Thursday).
First, it jettisons its comfy neutrality with other sites. Until now, it has remained a search engine, listing excerpts from job postings at Monster and CareerBuilder, and sending users to those sites to view the full postings. Going forward, Jobster will still do that. But it will also let employers post jobs at its site • and for free. It now becomes a direct competitor to Monster and CareerBuilder, but cheaper.
Second, it has signed a deal with Facebook to exclusively host the popular networking site’s career center. That’s huge, given Facebooks’ popularity among college students. If students start their careers with Jobster, the site can presumably win customer relationships for life.
Jobster’s move to free postings makes Jobster resemble Craigslist. Jobster has far less traffic than Craisglist. But it is more modern. Jobster offers users a way to tag themselves according to the jobs they’re seeking, upload resumes, photos and videos features, and create their own profile pages. Similarly, Jobster gives employers better ways to portray the candidates they’re looking for. If an employer posts a job with certain tag descriptions, the system pulls up the employees who have chosen same tags (see screenshot below). These profiles are separate Web pages, so they can be searched with an engine.
As reported, the three-year old company recently gutted its sales and marketing team, and instead has focused more on its online features.
It makes money by serving large companies with job-filling services, and plans to boost that business with traffic forwarded from the more robust Web site.
Chief executive Jason Goldberg told VentureBeat the site had a million unique users in January.
2 Comments
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John said:
You might want to take a reality check on this supposed Jobster/Facebook “partnership.â€
Who is calling it a partnership? Jobster. To my knowledge, Facebook has issued no press release on this supposed “partnership†(http://www.facebook.com/press.php). Facebook seems to be very happy doing what they’re doing, thank you. Jobster is just a flea on a big dog.
Here’s all it is:
Facebook has an API that anyone can use FOR FREE. Once you’ve written your app, it appears on their list (http://developers.facebook.com/products.php?&desktop=&sort=2). It doesn’t even look to me as though Facebook polices the apps very much; I would hope they know a lot about Jobster, but who knows? You can also define yourself as a Facebook group. It’s not like you’re a first-class module in Facebook; you’re just another service plugged into it. To get a feel for which of these plugins interest Facebook, the one they are calling their “Featured Product†is MoochSpot, which is for tracking expenses.
Good luck to Jobster. Maybe someday they’ll be the featured product.
It is bizarre to me that investment professionals would accept Jobster BS (oops, I mean, PR) at face value. A partnership is a two-way street. To be sure, perhaps Facebook will be gratified by the bazillions of hits that come their way from Jobster (possible? Doubtful). Or maybe there will be a universal shout from the kids that the Jobster CareerCenter is a great feature. But right now, the 2nd most popular app (after one written by Facebook) is “Your Hottest Friend,†which should give you an idea of what the student mind values (http://developers.facebook.com/products.php?&desktop=&sort=2).
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