Standout Jobs

A couple weeks ago Trip Adler, co-founder at Scribd (and also a client of ours) came to us and suggested that we use their new technology, iPaper, to allow our customers to view resumes & applications directly in the browser. We took a look at the technology and their API and agreed with Trip — iPaper makes a lot of sense for Standout Jobs.

So today, we’re announcing a partnership with Scribd to integrate iPaper into the applicant tracking system part of our Reception product.

What is iPaper?

Here’s how Scribd describes it: “iPaper is a document format built for the Internet. Like a YouTube video, iPaper documents are Flash widgets which you embed in your existing web pages. PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and many other document formats can all be displayed on the web using iPaper.”

So what does iPaper integration look like in Reception? Here’s a screenshot:

Three reasons why this is so great:

1. You can view resumes inside the browser. So you don’t have to download or open up the resumes to look at them.
2. You can print directly from iPaper. In the toolbar at the top of the document you click the iPaper link and you have the option to print right from there.
3. You can search through a resume. In the toolbar there’s a search link so you can very quickly search through resumes for relevant keywords, etc.

I think customers will find the iPaper integration saves them time and makes the applicant tracking system easier and more effective, because it makes it so much easier to view resumes. And, if you upload any other attachments, or if candidates send you attachments through the messaging system, iPaper works with those as well, as long as their PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint and text files. All you need to do is click the “View” icon that appears next to a file and it will load the iPaper version of the resume in the browser.

Plus, it’s just plain cool.

To show people how this all works, we’ve produced a very short video tutorial on iPaper integration into Reception. Take a look:

View the video tutorial on iPaper and Reception >>

Reception is currently free. You can sign-up and get started immediately.

According to a recent survey by eQuest, most job seekers are hunting for a job on Tuesday and Wednesday, and fewer people look for work on the weekend. The overall data makes it clear that people are looking for work while at work, and not on their time off.

You might think this is a bit strange, but we’ve seen the same trend at Standout Jobs. Our traffic and the applications our customers receive definitely drop over the weekends. eQuest thinks the data is useful because it will help them consult with customers on when to post jobs. And they recommend posting jobs on “…Sunday evening or early mornings on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.”

We haven’t analyzed our data yet - in terms of exactly which days and times are see the most applications - but it wouldn’t surprise me if our data concurred with this survey.

People are looking for work while at work.

People are researching companies, scoping the scene out and keeping up-to-date on trends in their industry (which is basically a form of job seeker, whether you’d like to believe it or not!) while at work.

At home, they’re taking a break…

More and more companies are launching career websites with us, and we couldn’t be happier! And it’s nice to highlight some of those new customers from time to time and draw people’s attention to them. After all, that’s what we’re all about — helping companies market themselves and their jobs as best as possible.

• AideRSS: An extremely popular startup in Waterloo, Ontario Canada, AideRSS is hiring for a whole bunch of positions including UX / UI Designer, Community Manager / Social Media Relations and Senior Software Engineer.
• ElevatorUp: These guys are based in Zeeland, Michigan (that name isn’t a typo either!) They’re a great hosting and web development company looking for a UX Web Designer. They have a very slick video of their offices, which you’ll see when you check out their career site.
• blist: They participated with us at DEMO 08 and a lot of people were wowed by their technology. Blist recently raised a nice round of financing, and they’re gaining very quick traction. So if you’re a Product Manager, Systems Engineer or Software Engineer in the Seattle area, you should check them out.
• Dextrus Prosoft: A Calgary-based technology and consulting company, specializing in open source solutions, Dextrus Prosoft is hiring Territory Sales Managers and UX Consultants.

William Tincup of Starr Tincup gets it. He recently wrote a review of Standout Jobs that hits on many of the value points we believe strongly in: employment branding, passive candidate attraction and most importantly, strong and active communication with prospective candidates and existing applicants.

A couple highlights from his review:

In a nutshell, they make your “careers” section better. Now, I know that sounds simple but trust me when I say that most corporate websites suck when it comes to this extremely important section of their website.

They believe in web 2.0 - all aspects - the more interactive the better. IMO, they are going to change the game. Careers sections will never be the same. Good riddins.

Standout Jobs is making clients more attractive to a younger audience. Think about how important that is. The “Facebook” generation isn’t going to use normal job boards and they are going to flat out bail on normal “careers” sections. When I say bail, I’m talking about your employment brand directly linked to the users experience via your careers section. If it sucks - then you suck – or at least that’s what they will think. Finally a firm is caring about the user experience. Nice.

So I’ve almost quoted the whole article, but it’s worth it because William emphasizes some of the key points that I do think make Standout Jobs unique and compelling to so many companies, big and small.

Over the weekend, we released a number of major upgrades to our applicant tracking functionality in Reception.

• Status Tracking. You can now track the status of a candidate through the hiring process. We’ve implemented basic workflow to handle this. When a candidate applies (or is sourced) they’re flagged as “New” and you can then move them to “Active” or any other status you’d like.

  
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• Conversation Tracking. We’ve embedded the conversations you have with candidates through our messaging system into their profile and the commenting that team members are leaving on them. This will make it much easier to track the entire conversation and discussion surrounding candidates in a complete timeline.
• Reply to Candidates. It’s now much easier to reply to candidates directly from their profiles and applications. We’re trying to encourage companies to communicate more effectively, and this is one step towards that.
• Candidate Source. Where available, we’re tracking the candidate source. We don’t ask candidates to supply this, because we know they tend to get it wrong or forget, so we try and do it automatically for as many sources as possible.
• Filter Candidates by Position. You can now filter candidates by position, making it easier to manage them and manage multiple jobs simultaneously.

  
  (click image for full screen view)

• Vote Resetting. You can now reset votes when you change a candidate’s status - so as they move through the hiring process you can redo the votes at each stage.
• Sorting by Column. You can now sort candidates by column, giving you more flexibility in managing the data.
• Major UI Upgrades. We’ve done a significant upgrade on the UI - making it easier than ever to use.

We still have some more work to do on applicant tracking - with some very cool features coming in a couple weeks - but these additions make Reception an even more useful, powerful and effective applicant tracking system. We hope you’ll check it out and let us know what you think!

The latest report from Forrester Research is being talked about in a number of places, which is no surprise because it plainly states that most corporate career web sites are failing pretty badly.

Barbara Safani explains things in a nutshell:

…none of the company career sites recently surveyed are making the grade for usability and performance testing. Common problems on the sites include missing content and functions, poor navigation, difficult to read text, and flawed privacy and security policies. All these hiccups lead to a bad experience for the job seeker.

I’m sure that some of the best talent quickly leave the career portals of some of the top companies because it’s just too much trouble to apply. So what does that say about the people who stay?

This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. More and more companies are paying attention to their corporate career sites, but not enough. And remember, Forrester only evaluated big name companies - they don’t talk about smaller companies whatsoever where access to technology, budget, manpower is even less. But smaller companies have as many challenges (if not more) than bigger companies because of the lack of resources and the lack of existing brand.

Of course, this is precisely where Standout Jobs fits in. Some of our customers have setup career web sites in less than a day. It’s easy, straightforward and free. You don’t need to go through a 6-month design and development process. You don’t need to plan out a 2-year online recruitment strategy before signing-up. Just give it a try.

Our very own, Marc-Andre Cournoyer (first employee at Standout Jobs!), is speaking at MeshU at the end of May where he’ll be giving a workshop on using Rack and Thin to solve performance issues and have some fun.

MeshU is a 1-day tech affair covering design, development and management on May 20th, coinciding with the Mesh Conference.

Other speakers at MeshU include: Leah Culver (Pownce), Daniel Burka (Digg), John Resig (Mozilla), Avi Bryant (DabbleDB) and more.

If you’re interested in hearing Marc-Andre (and you should be!) and others talk about technology, design, etc. check out MeshU…

I never got around to writing a proper review of ERE Expo, where I spoke and presented Standout Jobs and met a ton of great people. I enjoyed the event a great deal, and thought the presentation went well. Kudos to the entire ERE team for putting on a great show, and I look forward to the next one in the Fall.

Reading Charlie O’Donnell’s thoughts on ERE did give me pause to think and comment. He was equally impressed with the event, but commented:

One thing I was sort of surprised about… It seems like so much of the technology in this industry is built around an initial assumption of failure. It’s as if everyone assumes that you have to post a job opening and you’re bound to get a firehose of junk from that, and so there seem to be about 400 companies in the applicant tracking space–all focused on herding the resumes, marking them, managing responses, etc. Very few companies seemed to be focused on the idea of actually helping you get a more relevant candidate flow or at least being able to filter them.

I would guess that some Applicant Tracking System vendors would argue with that…but I don’t entirely disagree with Charlie’s assessment. The deluge of ATS products is a result of the fact that major job boards (which were the first “innovation” in the online job market space) will send you hundreds of unqualified applications. Job boards kept sending resumes (which to a degree was fulfilling their value proposition at the time) and created a new problem. So ATS vendors rushed to the rescue.

Of course, since ATS products came to solve the problem of too many resumes they tackled it with a very process-heavy hand. In some ways that makes sense; they attempted to bring order to the chaos. Having spent many years in the project management software world, I know exactly what that’s all about. But ATS vendors created (or exacerbated) another problem — Human Resources is too process-driven, dull and mechanical when really it should be (and in many cases is) about people interacting with people.

I’d like to think we’re one of the companies that is “helping you get a more relevant candidate flow or at least being able to filter them” because our focus is on helping companies establish and promote a strong employer brand, market themselves (and their jobs) and reach their target audience properly. We hope that companies can build on-going relationships with candidates more easily and give candidates what they want in terms of information & connectivity. And ultimately that effort (although I hardly think it’s much of an effort) will result in a more relevant and higher quality candidate flow, and/or give companies the ability to more quickly filter people.

And I see a lot of opportunity for Applicant Tracking Systems to reach beyond their process-driven world into truly useful and effective career web sites, where they recognize the importance of the candidate experience, and the relationship building that has to take place between employer and candidate before the resume gets parsed, sorted, ranked, archived, etc.

Standout Jobs will be presenting at CIX - Canadian Innovation Exchange on April 30th in Toronto. We’re given 8 minutes to pitch with a couple minutes of follow-up questions.

What is CIX?

It’s a 2-day event for the Canadian venture community, angel investors and startups to get together. Here’s how CIX describes it:

An action-packed two-day event that showcases Canada’s hottest new and innovative technology companies

• The North American who’s who of investors
• A nexus of multiple meeting and networking opportunities designed to enable investors to discover Canada’s next great companies
• Great facilitated and informal networking events
• Key industry experts share inspiring insights, ideas and success stories
• An innovation marketplace with a special focus on technology transfers from leading learning institutions
• Flash-forward presentations on the future of media, software, mobile and technology
• Sessions to help entrepreneurs understand more about private and public funding and more importantly how to get it

It’s great to be considered one of “Canada’s 20 Hottest Innovative Companies”, and we’re looking forward to the event.

And here’s a list of the other companies that will be presenting:

• Accipiter Radar Technologies Inc., Fonthill, ON
• Acquisio, Saint Lambert, PQ
• Akoha Inc., Montreal, PQ
• Big Deal Games Inc., Toronto, ON
• Biosign Technologies Inc., Toronto, ON
• Blueprint Software Systems, Toronto, ON
• Brainpark, Inc, Toronto, ON
• CellWand Communications, Toronto, ON
• Coveo, Quebec City, PQ
• Digital Payment Technologies Corp., Burnaby, BC
• dthree Inc., Mississauga, ON
• HomeZilla, Toronto, ON
• Kaben Wireless Silicon Inc., Ottawa, ON
• Mobidia, Inc., Vancouver, BC
• Octopz, Toronto, ON
• Planeteye Inc., Toronto, ON
• Redwood Technologies, Calgary, AB
• Spatial View Inc., Toronto, ON
• Streametrics Corporation Inc., Montreal, PQ

I’m a bit late with this news, having spent the day at ERE Expo in San Diego, but we did put out a press release about some new functionality in our Candidate Relationship Management Tool. This is an area of the product where we’re adding some good functionality to improve the experience for employers. There are a few areas we’re focusing on:

1. Helping companies take applicant and candidate tracking out of email;
2. Improving communication between employers and candidates (always a pain point from the candidate perspective); and,
3. Improving internal collaboration and communication around resumes, applications and candidates.

We put this press release out along with my attendance and presentation at ERE Expo. And here it is:

MONTREAL, April 1 - ERE EXPO - Standout Jobs has added new applicant tracking features to its employer branding and recruiting product, RECEPTION. These new relationship management tools make it easy for recruiters and HR managers to identify, interact with and track candidates.

RECEPTION is a do-it-yourself interactive career site that integrates video into job postings and incorporates social media tools like blogging and RSS feeds. With RECEPTION, companies can publish relevant content directly to job candidates, and post job ads to multiple free and paid job boards at the click of a button. An online tour of the RECEPTION product is available at http://www.standoutjobs.com/tour.

New applicant tracking features include:

• Candidate Sourcing: Improved sourcing through the Talent Scout bookmarklet for finding candidates and researching them online.
• Employee Reviews of Candidates: Invite employees to review candidates voting and leaving comments to improve collaboration throughout the hiring process.
• Add Files to Candidates: Associate files to candidates including portfolios, assessment tests, and more.
• Research Candidates: Quickly gather online information about candidates from Google and social networks, and associate it to their profiles in the Candidate Relationship Management Tool.
• Improved Usability: The Candidate Relationship Management Tool is the easiest to use on the market. Streamlined features and well-organized interfaces ensure quick adoption for the HR staff and entire team.

Ben Yoskovitz, CEO of Standout Jobs, said: “Businesses can now easily manage candidates through the hiring process without the cost and complexity associated with traditional applicant tracking systems. This is
especially important for smaller companies that need to implement robust recruiting solutions while keeping costs down.”

RECEPTION is a software-as-a-service solution that can be integrated into existing sites or operated as a stand-alone website to power companies’ recruiting efforts. RECEPTION is offered completely for free.

Dan Melinger, Co-Founder of Socialight, said: “Reception helps us manage the candidate funnel much more easily. It’s nice to get applicant tracking out of email, with a tool that’s simple, elegant and priced
right.” Socialight’s career site, which is powered by Standout Jobs’ RECEPTION, is at http://jobs.socialight.com

Standout Jobs CEO Ben Yoskovitz has been invited to speak at ERE Expo Spring 2008, taking place March 31 to April 2 in San Diego. Yoskovitz will take part in a session at 2:15 PM on April 1 that also includes speakers
from JobScore, Path 101 and VisualCV.

About Standout Jobs, Inc.

Standout Jobs makes tools to help companies promote their employment brand and hire the best talent. Standout Jobs’ RECEPTION product is a suite of web-based tools that combines a do-it-yourself, customizable career site with back-end applicant tracking features. The company was started in February 2007, and in January 2008 received a $2 million investment from venture capital fund iNovia Capital and angel investors. For more information, visit http://www.standoutjobs.com.