Collegefeed is a social network along the lines of LinkedIn, but it’s geared toward students and recent graduates. The online career marketplace helps them find desirable opportunities and companies use the network to search for candidates without having to go from campus-to-campus.

Founder Sanjeev Agrawal used to be Google’s head of products. He observed college students struggling to enter the workforce and saddled by record amounts of debt. At the same time, companies like Google were struggling to fill open positions and willing to spend thousands of dollars to find the right candidate. LinkedIn and Monster.com are often not effective for students who don’t have the professional network or work experience to stand out, and on-the-ground recruiting is a time-consuming and expensive process for employers.

This is the problem Collegefeed is trying to solve.

“It is no easier to get a good start in life today than it was 20 years ago preweb, presocial, premobile,” Agrawal said in a Q&A. “Starting this week, 1-plus million new college graduates will struggle to enter the workforce. Almost 50 percent of them will fail, according to most recent research, but more and more companies understand that their future is somewhere in college right now. Think of Collegefeed as a social career platform that brings together students, employers, alums, industry insiders and college career services in one place.”

Students create short profiles with their work experience, skill sets, and interests and the system will search for matching jobs and internships. They can also enter the names of companies they like and a recommendation engine will suggest similar companies and jobs, “like Netflix does for movies.” Agrawal said this will help them discover new opportunities with companies they may not have heard of or considered before. Students can browse through custom news feeds with updates on their preferred employers. It also has networking and educational opportunities, and students can share experiences with each other.

Employers on Collegefeed benefit from access to a wider network of potential hires at a lower cost. They can push content to news feeds, sponsor contests, and get a newsfeed of their own with recommended students.

Collegefeed launched in private beta in March with Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie Melon. Agrawal said students have already secured interviews, jobs, internships, and financial awards with companies including YouTube, eBay, Facebook, Morgan Stanley, and Microsoft. Today, Collegefeed is open nationwide to any students and employer.

Agrawal said that over the past few years, multiple companies have popped up using social media to address challenges in recruiting and hiring, but “no-one has created a new social network that combines everything together in one place for both students and employers.” Competitors include LinkedIn, Readyforce, and AfterCollege. However, Collegefeed makes use of “push” technology and the popularity of news feeds to curate, aggregate, and present the information in digestible form to both students and employers.

The founding team of six has 10 college degrees between them and is based in Mountain View, Calif. It’s a bootstrapped company.

It was only a matter of time before Silicon Valley’s most sought-after programmers would begin referring you to their agent.

A San Francisco-based agency called 10x Management is among the first to bring a Hollywood agency model to the tech industry. The agency carefully vets its engineers and designers, and it connects them with high-paying, short-term opportunities at The White House as well as companies like Google and Mozilla.

Cofounder Altay Guvench [left] is a Harvard-educated programmer who joined up with Rishon Blumberg [center ]and Michael Solomon [right], music managers who formerly represented John Mayer.

Guvench was inspired to start the agency after finding that his lifestyle dramatically improved when he began working as a freelance software engineer, only agreeing to the most challenging projects that suited his schedule. The agency is designed for others like him; the “talent” can avoid dealing with mountains of paperwork and making deals.

Working for 10X gave Randy Lubin the flexibility to pursue his own startup ideas.

“I did not have to deal with the back-and-forth — and could just get on with the work,” said Randy Lubin, a Stanford MBA graduate with U.X. skills, who was formerly represented by 10X.

“It was also a status symbol to have an agent,” he explained. Lubin worked on 10x projects for less than a week per month and earned enough to cover his living expenses. This gave him the flexibility to hash out independent startup ideas and seize the next big opportunity. He later joined a Y Combinator-backed startup Meetings.io as its first employee, and he now works at Jive Software.

The story of the agency’s roots was recently chronicled in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. I caught up with Guvench for an interview in the weeks after the story hit.

VentureBeat: How do you vet talent?

Guvench: People appreciate that I am a programmer. We do the interviews, reference checks, code reviews, and provide ongoing feedback. We also screen for communication abilities and other soft skills.

VentureBeat: What skill sets are the most sought after and command the highest hourly rates?

Guvench: Right now, mobile app development and data-science skills are the most sought after. Companies will pay a few hundred dollars an hour. The most highly paid gig is a data scientist. Our cut always remains the same: We take 15 percent.

VentureBeat: You have about 30 programmers now. With the recent press attention, do you expect rapid growth?

Guvench: We’re starting to get more interest and just signed a deal with Nordstrom. We have been at it for a year already and are deliberately growing slowly. But we are hoping to have hundreds of programmers before the end of the year.

VentureBeat: How do you find the best gigs? 

Guvench: Sometimes [our clients] send us a list of companies they would like to work for, and we try to make it happen. It’s about maximizing happiness. But the deal flow isn’t always stable; some months you’ll have five offers, and others, it’ll be zero.

VentureBeat: The name “10x” — does it refer to going above and beyond the call of duty? 

Guvench: Yes. I was surprised by how crazy productive our programmers are. We have one engineer who barely sleeps and works 30 or 40 hours a week in a research lab. I don’t understand how they do it!

VentureBeat: Aside from the fact that you represent a different sort of talent, what are the key differences between 10x and a typical Hollywood acting agency?

Guvench: I don’t think there are huge differences. But one of the big ones is that people talk about “rock star” programmers. But we don’t dress like stars, and there isn’t the same ego. Believe me, I’m no Jerry Maguire!

Top image via 10X Management 

Mobile recruitment startup Assured Labor has just raised $5.5 million to help spread its message of employment opportunities via cell phone communication throughout the world.

The startup, which got its start at MIT’s MediaLab, focuses on helping people find jobs (and helping recruiters fill vacancies) in emerging markets through the power of simple mobile interfaces. The platform is optimized for low-grade hardware, shoddy networks, slow mobile browsers, and other conditions impacting mobile communications in these areas.

Currently, the company claims 400,000 job-seekers — around two thirds of whom lack a home Internet connection — and 12,000 employers around the world.

Today’s funding was led by Capital Indigo with participation from existing investors Great Oaks Venture Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Kima Ventures, Enzyme Venture Capital, and others.

Capital Indigo is based in Mexico City; this partnership makes sense, given Assured Labor’s focus on Latin American communities.

Assured Labor raised a $1 million round from angel and seed investors back in 2010. Today’s announced cash infusion is the startup’s first institutional round.

Image credit: 1000 Words/Shutterstock

This is a guest post by contributor Angela Swartz

Indeed, Monster.com, Craigslist, Simply Hired and Careerbuilder. What do they all have in common? These job search sites cater to a broad range of career seekers looking for internships, part-time and full-time work. Palo Alto startup JobArrive.com hopes to break this model, offering up a part-time employment specific site, starting in San Francisco Bay Area cites.

Launched in beta this month, JobArrive’s founder and CEO Tomoe Ishizumi, 31, worked for Google until this past December. She got the idea for the website four months prior to departing her job as a senior strategist working on Google Shopping. This isn’t her first business venture though, she founded the Toyko, Japan startup incubator Salop&Co. and participated in a variety of Japanese non-profits.

For now, JobArrive features retail and office type jobs, primarily in San Francisco, San Jose and Palo Alto, geared toward those looking for one to 34 hours of work per week. Ishizumi just began to seek out funding for their first seed round to raise as much as they need to expand operations to acquire employers, expand geography and open a Palo Alto office.

She said the website stems from witnessing her New York-based opera singer mother struggle to find a part-time singing gig. This, along with her own half year of unemployment after graduating from Harvard Business School in 2010, inspired her to want to help others find part-time work more efficiently.

Ishizumi said the company’s business model is one of the ways they are differentiated from similar existing job listing sites. JobArrive pays customers $10 if they get a job, while businesses pay for advertising only after they hire people from the site. This is a $50 fee, which she said would make her potential market size billion of dollars if the number of part-time jobs matches up to the number of part-time job seekers.

According to U.S. Department of Labor statistics, as of February 2013, there were about 26 million Americans looking for part-time jobs a year, which could double when turnover is taken into consideration.

“I knew from my experience that it takes time and a lot of iterations to hire great people, so I wanted to build a product that addresses employer’s needs and concerns,” she said. The site will give a full refund to employers if the hired person leaves soon after they are hired.

“Part-time jobs can help people who are in transition, trying to pursue their dreams or just need something to support themselves,” she continued.

The primary competitors are job-search sites specialized in hourly jobs in certain industries, like Snagajob and Shiftgig. She said a big problem with other job sites is that they redirect users to third party sites to apply for work, whereas one can apply for jobs on the JobArrive site and save their data there.

“The biggest difference is our focus on part-time jobs, business model and design. We don’t charge upfront fees to employers,” Ishizumi said.

She is running the production bootstrapped with only interns. Post-funding, she will be seeking software engineers and salespeople who know the small business space.

Ishizumi said the biggest challenge will be growing the content and keeping the quality of applicants at a certain level. She wants to maintain the close relationship with both employers and applicants, which she sees as the key to success and what differentiates her job-search site.

Angela Swartz is a former city news editor for The California Aggie at UC Davis. She has written for several branches of the hyperlocalized online local news source Patch.com as a freelancer and sometimes guest editor. Her work has also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle’s business section.

Follow her on Twitter @angelaswartz 

Top image / Angela Swartz

This post is written by VentureBeat contributor Jon Soberg 

I recently wrote a post entitled “Hiring B players will kill your startup” and I got some great feedback, ranging from supportive to visceral. I would expect nothing less from a topic so important.  A few of the comments addressed a related topic — the growth and development of B players to become A players — so I decided to write a follow-up piece.

Let me start with a simple statement: B players will not become A players.

Why not? 

I make this statement because moving up is difficult, and it rarely happens.  B players in an organization either don’t have the right skills, the right drive, the right fit, or a combination of all these.

Does this mean if someone is an average employee, they can’t be a great person?  Of course not.  One of my favorite comments I received involved deciding on a brain surgeon. Would you opt for the best (the A player), or the average (C player) surgeon with better bedside manner?  I think nearly everyone would opt for the best surgeon.

If you need a specific set of skills, attributes and attitudes, and a person doesn’t have them, you will be hard-pressed to discover them hidden somewhere.

The best managers can’t optimize everyone’s performance 

Before the comments flow about how this is not black and white, let me delve into context.  I am fully aware that I am not talking about inanimate objects, and that these are not absolutes.  I’m also not going to try to argue with anyone about exceptions.  Of course there are exceptions.  The world doesn’t fit nicely into a bell curve.

That said, the world grades on a curve.  Valedictorian status is given to the best student, not to everyone for giving their best effort.  This isn’t Lake Wobegon — all employees are NOT above average.

Leadership, culture, and many factors contribute to each person’s performance, both in absolute terms, and on a daily basis.  There is no question that environment plays a big role.  There is a full nature versus nurture argument, but organizational culture rarely adapts and even the best managers are hard-pressed to optimize everyone’s individual performance. Many people believe that a great manager can make everyone perform at their best.  I totally agree, but the A players working for that manager will outperform the B players. The best teachers in the world still have some A students, some B’s and some C’s and below.

B players won’t become A players:

1. Within the same organization;
2. Within their role.

Suffice it to say here that taking someone who is coasting in one role and shifting them to another rarely turns them into your best employee.  How many great managers reading this post can relate to having one or two “go-to” people on the team who always rise to the challenge?

A Players versus B Players

The difference between B players and A players is not measured by intelligence, education or raw skill.  It isn’t about who went to Harvard, and who didn’t.  A players possess the rare combination of drive, intelligence and pride in their work that is above and beyond the norm.  They don’t associate their names with anything short of excellence.  The best of the best are those with the lethal combination of natural talent coupled with drive.

At the top of the spectrum, A players are dynamic leaders and visionaries — they take on huge challenges that would seem insurmountable by others. But A players can be great at any level, and in different roles.  We have all had the experience when we spoke to a great customer service person who went above and beyond.  A players tend to transcend roles; they excel, wherever they are.

As soon as I mention the term “A Player” most people have images of Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, or Steve Jobs. These people are obviously A players, but the key to their success is only partially their innate abilities.  Renowned for their extreme drive, work ethic, and attention to detail, none of them wanted a flaw in their game or their products. A Players don’t have to be selfish, prima donnas, or arrogant.  Plenty are, but that isn’t what makes an A Player.  Some of the most accomplished people I know are humble team-players.

Some will argue that coaching and leadership can make B players into A players.  In some circumstances, that is true, but in most business cases, it just doesn’t happen.  Work ethic is tough to change.  Initiative doesn’t simply appear.  Attention to detail is not simple to coach.  Not saying these areas can’t improve, but you don’t normally see quantum leaps.

Bottom Line

Everyone cannot be an A player.  This is the harsh reality.  In the US we idolize people like Jack Welch, who famously advocates cutting the bottom 10 percent of an organization every year.  It gets more difficult when the worst people are already gone, but at the end of the day, even when it gets difficult, some people perform better than others.  In our competitive world, only a small percentage of people are truly A players, and moving into that echelon from below doesn’t happen often.

Jon Soberg is a Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, where he invests in early stage companies, specializing in FinTech, SaaS, and eCommerce. Prior to joining Blumberg Capital, Jon has been a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in multiple companies including Ditech, Broadband Digital Group and Adforce, which had a highly successful IPO.  

A CFA Charterholder and adjunct faculty in the Wharton Marketing Department, Jon earned a B.S in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, an M.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University, and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from the Wharton School, where he is a Palmer Scholar.

Top image via wavebreakmedia // Shutterstock

Top image via Shutterstock

Nicholas Holland is founder of Populr. The following post is a rebuttal to Jon Soberg’s guest post “Why hiring B employees will kill your startup.”

Regardless of their level of experience or expertise, most entrepreneurs can agree that unicorns are majestic, magical creatures that absolutely do not exist — never have and never will.

So, it seems a little ridiculous when I hear people talk about stacking their startup’s roster with only unicorns — aka A Players — while completely dismissing anyone for employment that’s considered a ‘B player.’ Those people need a reality check when it comes to hiring.

I’m a three-time entrepreneur and I’ve hired over a hundred people — often under duress because my small company was light on work one day and overloaded the next. Moreover, I usually find myself looking for tech talent that is hotly pursued by companies much larger than mine. I don’t think this an uncommon practice for startup founders.

It’s also common to hear advice like “only hire the BEST!” and “seek only A Players” when looking for new employees — something that always makes me laugh. I wonder which entrepreneurs these sage advice-givers think they’re saving from failure. Is there someone out there who purposely chooses a sub-par team-mate? (The short answer is no.)

Worst, the cliché of ‘hiring A Players’ creates an atmosphere that lets the business always blame the employee if they don’t work out. “Ah snap! Jody didn’t work out… Guess she wasn’t an A Player”. This lets the entrepreneur off the hook and often keeps them from self-reflection.

Truth be told, it’s incredibly simplistic to define someone as “The BEST!” or as an “A Player.” I’ve had employees that are absolutely brilliant in one area, and terrible in another. What does that make them … a C? Or what about employees that do exactly what you say, but don’t take any initiative. Are they A Players for the leader that leads them, but F players for the entrepreneur who depends on ‘self starting’ as a crutch for their lack of management skills? What about A Players that are loaded up with B Player work and never get a chance to shine? Do they get downgraded?

Before you start looking for your sparkly horned beauties, consider some of these points:

The downsides to searching for the Unicorn employee:

• It greatly extends the search process, and in the meantime, the work is piling up. Consider finding someone who meets the minimum expectations and then get back to work. You’d be surprise how much more productive your startup will be if you aren’t waiting around for someone who matches your dedication and work ethic.

• Even the most skilled hiring techniques can’t guarantee you’ll hire a Unicorn, so be careful about analysis paralysis that leads to even more delays in your growth.

• If you have problems with someone after you’ve hired, writing them off as B-Players means you get all the joys of firing, losing money with turnover, and decreased team morale (which is terrible for your business). Instead, own the responsibility of helping that employee be successful. Forge them into “only the BEST!” or A Players.

• Last, avoid the trap of assuming that A Players are always leaders. Some of your best people will crave your leadership and will follow you to the ends of the earth. But, they won’t be leaders. And that’s OK.

Always seek the best employees you can get, but be mindful that you have limitations to balance. It makes people uncomfortable to accept a “good enough” version of anything, but that is often what you’ll get when you’re faced with other business factors. Plus, there are a million factors that go into making an employee successful — more than I can share in this post.

So take some personal responsibility and check yourself before you whip out the trusty “B Player” card when things don’t work out with one of your employees.

Top unicorn image via Sari ONeal/Shutterstock; Batmanicorn art via Unicorns Rock

Nicholas Holland is the founder of CentreSource interactive agency, mentor for Nashville, Tenn.-based startup incubator JumpStart Foundry and a seasoned entrepreneur. His latest startup Populr, a service that enables customers to easily create and publish POPs (published one pagers), recently made its public launch. Follow him on twitter @nicholasholland.

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In keeping this week’s trend of high-profile tech “AMAs,“ Facebook took to Reddit to tell the social network’s members what it looks for in potential employees.

Facebook engineer recruiter Will Barnett led the Ask Me Anything thread, which touched on subjects like corporate culture, benefits, and that awful GPA you graduated with.

The Facebook culture

This should be obvious, but before you apply for a job at a company, you should first know its corporate culture. Facebook’s is all about one word: building.

“We’re a culture of builders … of hackers. We don’t just expect our engineers to move fast and ship stuff, but everyone [is also] focused on building product and services that create a more open and connected world,” Barnett said.

“The parts I like best are the mutual trust, internal transparency, celebration of each other’s success, appetite for risk, and hair-trigger sensitivity to our values,” a Facebook engineering director added.

What does Facebook look for?

From Barnett’s comments, it’s clear that Facebook looks for candidates who will fit well into its corporate culture — regardless of what country they come from. Facebook hires heavily from places outside the U.S., including Russia, India, and Eastern Europe.

And for you humanities kids out there, the AMA has good news, too: While Facebook is obviously very much an engineering-focused company, no company runs thanks to engineers alone.

“Much of our campus hiring focuses on engineering, but we have hired new grads into marketing communications, user operations, payments and risk, monetization, business operations — the list goes on,” Barnett said, pointing to Facebook’s career page.

GPA isn’t everything, nor is a college degree

For candidates with less-than-stellar grades, Facebook’s solution is actually pretty straightforward: Have some good side projects.

“People who can display their actual skills by building real things beyond class projects are very frequently the stronger candidates. Ultimately, we want to hire people that [sic] build amazing things and push technologies to new heights,” Barnett said.

Basically, it helps to have some Github commits under your belt.

As far as the education question goes, you don’t need to look beyond Facebook’s own Mark Zuckerberg to know that a college degree isn’t everything — and Facebook’s recruiters agree.

“It would we weird for us to require a college degree (see Zuck). If you can build awesome stuff and have big impact, that’s all we’re really looking for,” Barnett said.

Facebook recruitment is serious about applicant privacy

Considering that Facebook is sitting on a trove of user data, an obvious question is whether the company puts that information to use when it’s considering applicants. Fortunately, the answer is “no.”

“We take privacy very seriously at Facebook and no applicants profile is accessed beyond what any other user would be able to publicly view,” Barnett said.

The Perks

Unsurprisingly, the benefits to working at Facebook are pretty lengthy. “Our perks approach is to provide the benefits that most allow people to focus on their work and have impact. Things like food, transportation, small teams, laundry, health care, flexible hours, IT resources/equipment, and connectivity are a priority for us,” Barnett said.

“Oh, god, the food. It’s … really good,” Facebook developer relations lead Chris Blizzard added.

Photos: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat, Dan Fletcher

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This is a guest post by investor Jon Soberg.

B players and C players are far worse than D’s and F’s. In fact, in my experience, B players are the worst hires you can make.

Before getting into the details, it may be useful to level-set and explain what I mean by these employee stereotypes (although there have been some differences of opinion over the years.)

A player: Fully self-sufficient and takes initiative that positively impacts the company.
B player: Does some things well, but not fully self-sufficient, and not consistently strong.
C player: Just average, and does not excel in any area.
D player: Poor performer, and shouldn’t last long if you are a half-capable manager.
F player: Should be out…like yesterday.

Good Enough is the Enemy of Great

When you have someone on your team that you think is doing well enough, you will likely trust them with mission-critical tasks like hiring or pushing code. This will impact the entire evolution of your company. If you entrust important decisions to someone who is just “good enough,” you will watch the opportunities pass.

This is why hiring B players will kill your company. The work will be good, but not great. They will deliver on time most of the time, and hustle sometimes, but not always.

Let’s say you are in a startup, and you have a B player as your vice president of sales. The person will close a good account, but won’t consistently beat targets. If they go head-to-head against a competitor with better salespeople, this person (and potentially the whole startup) will lose. If you’re an early-stage startup, you are walking dead. Raising the next round will be like selling against a stronger competitor — you won’t ultimately win.

I have built multiple engineering teams from the ground up, and I always started with an anchor rock star.  The engineer that everyone wanted to work with, and whose work was so solid that he or she made everyone else more efficient and effective.  I’ve been asked before how many engineers it would take to replace someone like that, and the correct answer is that there is no way to replace a person like this.  Even if I could hire 10 B player engineers for the same price, I would never do it.  The product quality would suffer and the time-to-market would slow; you simply can’t replace skill with numbers.

Lessons learned

My opinions on hiring and people haven’t come by accident. I’ve got scars from my career (and I’ve seen it from many angles — founder, executive, consultant, investor). I’ve made some pretty bad hires along the way. The really bad hires are the easy ones — it is obvious when someone fails or is clearly the wrong fit. You wonder what you were thinking, but at the end of the day, you can reverse these mistakes quickly and efficiently.

I have needed to fire a fair number of people as well, and I will say this is one learning from my experience — I have never felt that I fired someone too soon.

At one of my startups, I fired my entire QA department and made the engineers do all their own QA. The result: better quality product, released faster. The QA department had become a bottleneck, and they weren’t doing quality work. The engineers weren’t happy, the product management team wasn’t happy, and the product suffered. I saw the release cycles slowing down, and saw some of the tension between the QA and Engineering departments. As I dug in, my conclusion was one I had not originally wanted to see — I had a B player at the top of the QA department, and the rest of the department was B and below. It was killing us. My biggest mistake was not recognizing it sooner.

When I was a little boy, my uncle used to tell me “he who hesitates is lost.” Those are words to live by.

I have plenty of individual examples as well, and the toughest ones are always the ones who are doing fine. Managers often blame themselves. Is the job not well-defined? Does the person have enough support? Maybe they just need more time, and they will improve. It isn’t easy to find great people, so why let the decent person go hoping to find someone better?

There is an opportunity cost to keeping someone when you could do better. At a startup, that opportunity cost may be the difference between success and failure. Do you give less than full effort to make your enterprise a success? As an entrepreneur, you sweat blood to succeed. Shouldn’t you have a team that performs like you do?

Every person you hire who is not a top player is like having a leak in the hull. Eventually you will sink.

Jon Soberg is a Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, where he invests in early stage companies, specializing in FinTech, SaaS, and eCommerce. Prior to joining Blumberg Capital, Jon has been a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in multiple companies including Ditech, Broadband Digital Group and Adforce, which had a highly successful IPO.  

A CFA Charterholder and adjunct faculty in the Wharton Marketing Department, Jon earned a B.S in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, an M.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University, and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from the Wharton School, where he is a Palmer Scholar.

Top image via wavebreakmedia // Shutterstock

Six months after the departure of cofounder John Simon, General Catalyst Partners has scooped up Adam Valkin from Accel Partners, where he has worked since April 2010.

Valkin will dedicate his time to sourcing early-stage investment opportunities, and will work with the firm’s existing portfolio companies, which include HubSpot, Airbnb, GoodData and Taleo. Valkin, who previously worked out of Accel’s London office, is relocating to Boston to assume his new role.

In an interview, he said the primary driver was personal as his family lives in Boston. “This was a friendly move,” he said, adding that General Catalyst was a “natural choice” as the firms have often worked together in the past.

At Accel, Valkin focused broadly on Internet and mobile services, gaming and payments. With roots in London, Valkin had a front row seat to some of the most promising Israeli startups — he made investments in MyHeritage and mobile gaming startup DragonPlay. His investment portfolio also includes Spotify, SeekingAlpha, and $5 tasks marketplace Fiverr.

Prior to joining Accel, Valkin worked as the Global Head of Digital Media and New Business at Endemol, the European television production company. He was also a co-founder, investor and briefly interim CEO of LOVEFiLM, which sold to Amazon.com in 2011. Previously, he worked for Barnes & Noble and Firefly Network, later acquired by Microsoft.

General Catalyst is a long-time partner with Accel; the firms have frequently joined up in funding hot startups like Brightcove over the years. General Catalyst has been slowly creeping into the media spotlight with recent investments in buzzy startups, such as CouchSurfing and TuneIn. It has proven to be one of the most progressive of the traditional firms with its interest in data-driven investing.

Top image credit: LeWeb / Flickr

Atlanta-based WebMD, the largest source of medical information on the Web according to Comscore, will cut 250 jobs in the coming month as part of an ongoing effort to save $45 million per year.

The company will lay off 14 percent of its total workforce across all offices, a direct result of a disappointing third-quarter. As the Atlanta Business Journal originally reported, about half the employees at the company’s headquarters may be affected. It is unclear which departments will experience the worst layoffs, but early reports suggest it will be sales, video production, information technology, and editorial. The cuts come at a short-term cost increase: They’ll cost the company approximately $8 million in its first fiscal quarter of 2013.

In an official statement to the press, the company revealed that it will also put into effect other “cost-saving actions” during the first months of 2013. We have reached out to a spokesperson from WebMD for comment.

The company is seeing a decline in advertising from large pharmaceuticals, its bread and butter. In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration has tightened regulations on how big pharma can advertise. In addition, WebMD is facing competition for these ad dollars from a host of startups that offer consumer-friendly health information. Competitors include HealthTap, which provides patients with an online link to thousands of physicians, and Everyday Health, which provides medical news and information.

In November, the company announced that revenue had declined from $135 million during the year-ago period to $117 million. Despite the fact that traffic continues to grow (reaching an average of 107.2 million unique users per month and 2.56 billion page views in Q3), advertising and sponsorship income took a downward turn. CEO Cavan M. Redmond admitted that the company would need to adapt in an increasingly “challenging and changing” marketplace.

“Becoming leaner and more nimble will enable the company to extend our leadership in this highly dynamic and increasingly demanding marketplace,” said Redmond, in a statement. “In addition, anticipated changes in U.S. healthcare will provide meaningful new opportunities to link the needs of patients, consumers, and healthcare professionals to enable them to navigate their care. We are moving swiftly to implement these operational changes and new market initiatives.”

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Job transitions can feel like a frustrating, dizzying progression of prospects that do not go anywhere.

Glassdoor has locked up $20 million in new financing to make the job-hunting process more transparent. This career and jobs community provides a range of services such as job search, personalized job listings, company reviews, interview advice, and salary comparisons. Glassdoor strives to distinguish itself by offering “employee generated content,” which can give users insider insight into what it could be like to work at a particular company.

The platform contains information on more than 220,000 companies in 190 countries. With 14 million registered users and more than 13 million monthly unique visitors, the site’s traffic has exploded in the past year, with 40% of the traffic coming from abroad. The company claims that a new user is added every two seconds.

This growth is partly attributable to the release of Inside Connections earlier this year, a tool that lets users leverage their Facebook network into a source for career development. The JobScope technology provides job seekers with a comprehensive look at each listing and the company behind it. Glassdoor can also be used by businesses to recruit, market, and manage their brands.

Competitors include Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder, and SimplyHired.

This round was led by DAG Ventures, with participation from Benchmark Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Battery Ventures. This brings the total investment in Glassdoor to $42.2 million. The company is based in Sausalito, Calif. Read more on VentureBeat.

In some ways, the CouchSurfing headquarters in San Francisco is exactly what you’d expect. It’s got an engineer rocking a “don’t shave” T-shirt, a twentysomething community manager who likes to put his feet up, and a CEO who plays a round of table tennis to take the edge off a Friday afternoon.

You’ll also find the signs of a cash-flush startup: the in-house chef, the fully stocked fridge, and the enviable perks. Since the traveler network and website transitioned into a B Corp., it has attracted some heavy-duty interest from investors. As we reported last month, the company that connects travelers with strangers willing to spare their couch pulled in $15 million in a General Catalyst-led funding round.

To compete with tech companies like Google and Facebook, CouchSurfing is one of many that offers great benefits and perks to attract talent and ensure its employees stick around. During a visit to CouchSurfing’s office in San Francisco’s Design District (just west of the Mission Bay neighborhood), I got a feel for the vibe, and new chief executive Tony Espinoza gave me a sense for what it’s really like to work at his company.

Best perks?

• Travel: Employees can take off two weeks per year (expenses paid) to stay on a stranger’s couch anywhere in the world. According to CouchSurfing, how else could you learn about the company’s value if you haven’t experienced it yourself?
• Snacks: CouchSurfing stocks the fridge with soda and coffee, and a personal chef rings the gong whenever a healthy snack is ready. CouchSurfing has plenty of vegan and gluten-free employees, so these folk always have plenty of options. During my visit, I enjoyed mouthwatering figs wrapped in goat cheese.
• Benefits: Employees can expect the usual benefits package, with health, vision, and dental coverage with support for spouses and dependents.
• The “work from the couch” mentality: More often than not, staff meetings take place on one of the half-dozen comfy couches.

What’s the culture like?

• Decor: Everywhere you look, you see postcards and pictures of CouchSurfers traveling the globe. It gives the office an exotic vibe, and you genuinely feel like you could hop a jet to Paris at a moment’s notice.
• Comfy: A swing is in the middle of the office, as is a Ping-Pong table that isn’t gathering dust in the corner somewhere. Many of the employees walk into the office, take off their shoes, and settle in for a day of customer support, programming, or designing. And no, it doesn’t reek of smelly feet!
• Quiet with natural light: The office is full of sunlight, and it’s large and spread over multiple floors. Employees can take frequent “work from home” days and travel during the summer, so it was less bustling than I expected for a Friday afternoon. You’ll hear talking and laughing from the couches where employees gather for impromptu meetings. But in the engineering corner, you’ll only hear tap-tap of keyboards. Esponiza told me that the offices can get much busier, but it depends on the season and time of day.
• A light corporate touch: While CouchSurfing has conference rooms, it’s hard to imagine them being used much with the exception of the monthly board meeting. Employees are often working from home, and they have a great deal of flexibility as long as they get their work done.

Hiring?

• You betcha! CouchSurfing has openings for engineers at a variety of levels, trust and safety officers (CouchSurfing has a full team dedicated to ensuring that you won’t be sleeping on the couch of an axe murderer), product managers, and more. Check out the full list of openings here.

UPDATE 10/5/2012: We have revised this article to more accurately define the company’s vacation policies.

“Startup culture” is a new series that highlights what it’s really like to work at a Bay Area startup. We’ll be profiling a startup every two weeks. Please send your suggestions for the most rockin’ office spaces, startup happy hours, or company perks via email (christina@venturebeat.com) or Twitter (@chrissyfarr). 

Sit down with execs from any tech company in America and ask them about their biggest obstacle to growth. 99 times out of a 100, they’ll tell you about their ongoing struggle to find technical talent.

Software engineers are more elusive than girls at a Silicon Valley tech conference. Similarly to finding a date, in a bid to attract the most sought-after engineers, recruiters typically turn to the Internet.

Entelo, a startup that is announcing its public beta today, has developed an algorithm that connects tech recruiters with likely candidates based on their online activity. It has indexed over 300 million social profiles — the “big data” technology can determine where tech savvy types like to go online and can pickup on their interests and expertise.

Most software engineers will exchange ideas and their most sophisticated code on sites like Github or Stackoverflow. They might also answer show off their knowledge on a Q&A site for Silicon Valley types like Quora. Meanwhile, designers can show off their skills on Dribbble (invitation-only show and tell for creatives) or online portfolio site, Behance.

When they are unfulfilled in a current job, chances are they’ll share content on these sites with a renewed vigor.

Founder Jon Bischke told me that the idea for the company originated during coffee meetings with fellow entrepreneurs. Most of them complained about the lack of engineering and sales candidates in their pipeline. The former entrepreneur in residence (EIR) at Battery Ventures said it was enough to convince him to start a company. Since then, Entelo has grown to 10 employees, and has raised an undisclosed sum in first round funding from Battery Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

Bischke is one of the few founders I have spoken with who has no problem recruiting engineers.

Entelo’s first customers have used the site to find talent in places you wouldn’t expect. For instance, if a college senior in Kansas posts some impressive code on Github, they might receive a call from one of Entelo’s customers the following week. Bischke told me that Github is a fan of Entelo as it encourages job-seekers to share their code in return for landing a dream job.

The algorithm prioritizes engineers at companies that are experiencing a rocky quarter, a low stock price, or lay-offs. This month, Zynga’s hot-shot mobile designer might appear at the top of the list. That very same designer would be pushed up further still in the rankings if they had recently posted some code or updated their status or location.

The company competes with “talent search engines” like TalentBin and Gild, as well as traditional online job boards. Its customers (primarily small and medium sized tech companies) pay $500 per month to use Entelo, which is a darn sight cheaper than the cost of hiring a recruiting agency. In future, Entelo may expand its offering to integrate with education startups like Coursera or Udacity, so tech companies can connect with the budding coders and designers who excelled at an online class.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bright.com, the recently launched startup with a scientific method to match you with a dream job, has found something cool to do with its backlog of employment data.

Bright doesn’t just want to find you a job, it wants to find you the job. With that goal in mind, it has developed a machine-learning algorithm that examines thousands of data points and crawls its jobs database to recommend a position for you. The user experience emphasizes personalized recommendations and discovery; it’s like Pandora for the job market.

Today, the startup has launched Bright Labs, a set of infographics and tools that shed light on the current employment landscape.

It’s early days still, but the company has already surfaced some interesting findings. In an interview with VentureBeat, Jacob Bollinger, Bright.com’s data scientist, told me anecdotally that most people job hunt on Friday afternoons, and over 50 percent of dental hygienists have CPR skills.

In addition, the company has done some research on the cities that experienced a bump in jobs in August. The results indicate that California is the place for jobs! Of the Top 10 U.S. Cities:

● San Diego, CA (104.77%)
● San Francisco, CA (28.88%)
● San Antonio, TX (19.05%)
● San Jose, CA (13.34%)

Anyone can use Bright Labs as a resource at any time during a job search, but the company will also release a bi-weekly report with its findings. Steve Goodman, the company’s CEO, told me he hopes people will use the site to mash up raw data to create their own graphs, charts, and reports. You can fill them with content from Bright Labs’ library of white papers and academic publications.

For Bright, the two major initial focuses are technology and politics. Tech is a hot job market, and Bright Labs will release data on the top tech cities for jobs, the tech companies with the most open positions, and the skills you’ll likely need to land a dream job at a startup. It will also investigate how the political elections will impact the job market, and whether the leading candidates are staying true to promises made on the campaign trail.

Bright Labs is comprised of five sections, which include information on jobs trends through the lens of pop culture and current events, positive trends within the slowly recovering or otherwise bleak market, and the wider employment landscape.

According to Goodman, the company has more data than any of its more established competitors in the online job search space, including Indeed.com and Monster. “We have millions of active listings,” he told me. “We realized we could do something special with all of this employment data.”

This isn’t the first time that Bright.com has leveraged its data. For over a year, the company has been building an algorithm they call the “the Bright Score.” According to them, it will generate the straightest, shortest path between two points: an open position and the perfect candidate.

With its focus on data science, the startup is a popular destination for hot-shot researchers and academics, and I’m told that the company even has a nuclear physicist on staff. Bright has raised $6 million in investment and is based in San Francisco.

Top Image via Shutterstock

There’s good news for some and bad news for others.

In the bad news category, almost a third of tech workers in the West are worried about layoffs. That’s probably largely due to HP’s announcement in May that the company plans to lay off 27,000 people.

Source: Glassdoor

This are looking up(ish)

And, of the companies that made changes to compensation or benefits, 86 percent of them made negative changes: reducing pay or perks.

Employee confidence, which this survey measures, is an indicator both of what employers might do in terms of increasing or decreasing payrolls, and of consumer confidence.

Workers who are afraid of potential layoffs tend to spend less, depressing the economy.

In the good news side of the ledger, however, 90 percent of employees nationwide expect their company outlook to either improve or stay the same. Only 10 percent expect it to get worse, and the number of people concerned about potential layoffs decreased somewhat.

Another stat on the positive side? More jobseekers are confident about finding work — 42 percent this quarter, up from 36 percent last quarter.

Even more telling: It’s 17 percent higher than a year ago, when only 25 percent of jobseekers were fairly sure they’d find work.

One downside for those who are currently employed is that expectations of raises are low: 60 percent of workers are not expecting a raise in the coming quarter.

Source: Glassdoor

Salary: most are not expecting raises

The somewhat positive but definitely mixed results echo the recent Simply Hired jobs survey, which showed that job openings are up but that there’s still plenty of gloom in the market.

Given the economic and financial upheaval of the past few years, however, we may be able to count the absence of too many negatives as a positive.

Image credit: Kosta Kostov/ShutterStock

Yes, you heard me right. Baltimore, Detroit, or Pittsburgh.

Simply Hired just released its July 2012 employment outlook. And some of the results are more than a little surprising.

Nationally, job openings were up 9.2% from May. The ratio of job-seekers to jobs, however, stayed even at 3:1. Jobs were up in all major metro areas, and competition for jobs decreased in 12 of them, including New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Denver, and Las Vegas.

The surprises came when VentureBeat asked Simply Hired what the best and worst locations for tech jobs were.

It turns out that based on absolute numbers of tech jobs, Washington DC, New York, and the Silicon Valley area are growing the most. But when you look at percentage increase, Houston, Oakland, and Charlotte are leading.

Slicing the data a different way, Simply Hired’s Nathan Beers told VentureBeat that when you compare the number of available jobs and the number of currently employed technology workers, the best places in the U.S to be looking for a job are Baltimore, Detroit, Charlotte, and Portland. By this measuring stick, the Silicon Valley area ranks only eighth.

And by that same measure, Newark, Birmingham, Riverside/San Bernardino, and Little Rock, Arkansas, are the worst places in the U.S. to be hunting for that new software developer position.

Source: © 2012 Simply Hired, Inc.

Top companies hiring in Silicon Valley

The top hiring companies are in the health care industry, but technology firms come in a close second. That includes companies such as Amazon, Accenture, and Intel.

Simply Hired knows a few things about the job market. The company, which bills itself as the world’s largest job search engine, currently has over eight million job listings. 30 million users check the service monthly from 24 countries, and Simply Hired powers the job search functionality on sites like LinkedIn and The Washington Post.

Here are all the details on the best and worst markets for technology workers, according to Simply Hired:

Best markets to be looking for a tech job

1. Baltimore-Towson, MD
2. Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, MI
3. Charlotte-Gastonia-Rock Hill, NC-SC
4. Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA
5. Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA
6. Pittsburgh, PA
7. Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI
8. Richmond, VA
9. Raleigh-Cary, NC
10. New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ

Worst markets to be looking for a tech job:

1. Newark-Union, NJ-PA
2. Birmingham-Hoover, AL
3. Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA
4. Little Rock-North Little Rock-Conway, AR
5. Honolulu, HI
6. Boulder, CO
7. Huntsville, AL
8. Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville, CA
9. Indianapolis-Carmel, IN
10. Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL

Absolute job openings in major metropolitan areas

Source: © 2012 Simply Hired, Inc.

Job openings in the US by city

Image credit: ShutterStock

Imagine you’re a recruiter or a hiring manager in a growing company. Every morning you get a daily deal email…but it’s not for a half-price massage or $5 off a $10 purchase at your local cafe. And there’s none of sort-of-almost-witty commentary either.

Instead, the email contains five qualified job seekers in your area. And if you like any of their profiles, you can instantly view their video introduction, resume, and letters of recommendation.

Sounds pretty good?

That’s exactly what GetHired is doing, starting today in New York and expanding to other major cities across the U.S. by the end of the year. VentureBeat interviewed Allison VanNest of GetHired yesterday.

“Job seekers are discouraged because they feel that their resumes are falling into a ‘black hole’ and they are not getting any feedback from hiring managers,” VanNest said. “Hiring managers, on the other hand, are being inundated with resumes; they are looking for a way to pinpoint top talent quickly and cost-effectively.”

The new daily deal approach will help top talent stand out, according to GetHired. And says CEO Suki Shah, “employers are able to find the best candidates in a fraction of the time.”

There’s an incredible amount of innovation and investment happening in the recruiting space this year — in the past months I have featured Quixey, a company that gamifies recruiting; Wowzer, which uses video in innovative ways to help companies manage candidates; and enRecruit, which also uses video to help companies find the best talent.

GetHired is, at the very minimum, taking a new tack.

The company made Entrepreneur’s 2012 list of “brilliant companies” and was a finalist in the human resources–focused HRO Today’s iTalent Competition.

GetHired is based in Palo Alto and has raised $1.75 million in initial investments from a variety of angel investors, including John Suh, CEO of LegalZoom.com; Ralph Mack of Mack Capital, and Jeffrey Leonard, chief executive at the Global Environment Fund.

It has 14 employees and was founded January 30.

Image credit: deal bag/ShutterStock

The new job posting and job listings portions of the site allow employers and web pros find each another for full-time and freelance collaboration.

“I’ve hired three people (two full-time and one freelance) from Forrst myself,” said Forrst founder, Kyle Bragger, in an email exchange with VentureBeat earlier this week. “I believe in it that much.”

Employment (or rather, unemployment) has been a hot-button issue this fall, and the web sector certainly isn’t exempt. In fact, just this morning, Facebook announced it was partnering with the Department of Labor to help unemployed Americans get back to work using the social web.

Of course, there are tons of job-finding resources out there for web work already. But Bragger says Forrst’s service is different in a few ways. Foremost, employers should know that Forrst jobs are only visible to members, and getting a Forrst account currently requires members to have active GitHub accounts or invitations to join. In other words, posting a job here isn’t your average spec work cattle call.

“We can use our reputation engine to selectively display jobs, surface better talent, etc.,” Bragger said. “In that vein, jobs are visible only to Forrst users, so we always have some data on respondents, versus [a site] where anyone can come and apply.”

Bragger says Forrst’s jobs listings also feature “a different set of questions and fields we ask for when posting jobs … definitely more to fill out than just ‘Job Description,’ but I feel really strongly about being able to tell a compelling story with a job post and really pitch the vision.”

While any person or company can post a job listing, Bragger says, “We have an approval flow to make sure they’re quality listings that are going to be respectful of our users’ time and talents.”

But don’t get cutesy with your listing, employers; the cheeky founder said, “Also, I won’t approve anything with rockstar, ninja, guru, etc. in the post.”

Posting a job on Forrst will cost employers $159 for a 30-day listing. Responding to classifieds is free for members.

“What we are launching is just scratching the surface of the types of things I think we can do with the community and platform we’ve got,” Bragger said.

Here are some sample listings already up on the site:

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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