Standout Jobs

A few days ago we received some very cool news — we’ve won an award! Specifically, we’ve won SEOMoz’s Web 2.0 Award in the Employment and Jobs category.

If you’re not familiar with SEOMoz, it’s an extremely popular and well-respected resource led by Rand Fishkin focusing on SEO, social media and social networking. If you’re looking for ways to rank better in search engines, build traffic, links, etc. you should check out SEOMoz.

Their Web 2.0 Awards are given out annually to the best Web 2.0 sites on the Web in a host of categories. They used nominations from people (although we didn’t nominate ourselves), as well as their own research and analysis. And then they use a panel of judges to vote on the best.

They rank the sites on 5 criteria:

• usability
• usefulness
• social aspects
• UI & design
• content quality

We ranked 5 out of 5 stars on each, except for social aspects (only 4 out of 5 stars).

And who did we beat out?

Well…everyone else, since we did get 1st place, but the runners-up included CareerBuilder, Monster and Mployd.

As the winner, SEOMoz also did a short interview with me about Standout Jobs.

Although being recognized for being “Web 2.0″ is cool — the most important thing is the criteria SEOMoz uses to judge the sites. We’re trying to build a usable, useful and quality experience for employers and candidates. Being acknowledged for those efforts is great.

I’d like to thank the folks at SEOMoz for giving us the award. Here’s hoping we can continue to impress and improve for the Web 2.0 Awards in 2009!

Socialight is a New York-based startup in the mobile technology space. A location-based social networking platform, Socialight lets people access and share rich media content about real-world physical locations via their mobile phones and web browsers. Using Socialight’s urban recommendation service, users can find useful information relevant to their exact location — such as food, shopping and tourist attractions — recommended by the people they trust, almost anywhere in the world.

CHALLENGE

Socialight is a technology startup with less than 10 employees. The company has an exciting workplace, but limited resources for hiring and staffing programs or recruiters.

Since its creation, Socialight used a variety of tools to find employees, including personal and professional networking, Craigslist, targeted technology forums, and university career sites.

These options varied in terms of the number and quality of job candidates they could reach. But across the board, they failed to effectively brand Socialight as a desirable employer, and empower the company with the tools and flexibility to stand out in a competitive recruiting environment.

SOLUTION

Socialight recognized that it needed a more effective way to develop its employer brand, attract job candidates, including “passive” job seekers exploring their options, promote a positive candidate experience, and manage applicants more efficiently through the hiring process. Rather than wait until conditions permitted the company to design its own career portal, Socialight turned to Standout Jobs’ Reception product for a solution, enabling it to showcase its culture and team, advertise open positions, and input job applicants into the hiring process. In January 2008, Socialight became one of the first companies to launch a career portal powered by Standout Jobs’ Reception product.

RESULTS

According to Socialight CEO Dan Melinger, the career site was easy to create: “Just a couple of hours’ work and we were presentable to the world.”

Melinger found Reception’s back-end both light and simple. The process of creating a career site was fast and easy, allowing the company to hit the ground running.

“It was important to us that we could launch the career site quickly, but also make sure that we were doing a great job of representing Socialight as the fantastic and exciting work environment it is. Standing out in a crowded job market isn’t easy, but we’re empowered more than ever now with Standout Jobs,” said Melinger.

In March 2008, Socialight used Reception to advertise a job opening for an intern, and hired the candidate in April 2008. According to Melinger, using Reception to recruit new hires is superior to the company’s previous approach, which was “improvised and decentralized.” Melinger says he intends to continue using Reception.

Socialight’s experience is yet another example of how Standout Jobs is helping companies save time and money, while putting their best foot forward, reaching quality candidates, engaging them and adding them to the team.

Please visit Socialight’s Career Site for a number of great opportunities including: Ruby on Rails Engineer, Interactive Designer and Mobile Java Engineer.

And please check out Standout Jobs for more information on employer branding and job site software.

On May 15th and 16th we saw more sign-ups for our free job site software than ever before. I wasn’t able to immediately track down the reason, but just recently I figured it out. I was reading a blog post on ERE’s site about Southwest Airlines new blog and saw that a presentation had been embedded in the post. The presentation - titled Web 2.0 Recruiting - was a webinar put on by Kevin Wheeler.

As I was going through the slides, I was pleasantly surprised (on Slide #27) to see Standout Jobs featured. Kevin’s been supportive from the get-go, but I didn’t expect him to use us as an example of effective Web 2.0 recruiting.

Here’s the presentation:

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Personally, I don’t think we need studies anymore to prove the value of using social media and social networking (both the principles and tools) for recruiting purposes. Still, it’s always worthwhile to see studies emerge that say exactly that:

Also, a study conducted recently in the United Kingdom shows that only 10% of recruiters use social networking sites and only a small minority use blogs, videos, or other Web 2.0 technology for recruitment. The research suggests that one of the reasons why social networks have been slow to take off as a recruitment tool is because recruiters do not consider them a credible way to communicate, despite large numbers of their target labor market using them regularly.

“Recruiters may be missing a trick by not adopting Web 2.0 technology. They need to engage with job seekers to encourage them to apply for jobs. Text-heavy recruitment pages with no interactivity will not win the hearts and minds of the Web 2.0 generation,” said Cranfield University research fellow Emma Parry, in the study.

It’s not necessarily hard to get people to apply for a job. Getting the right people to apply is another story. One way to improve the quality of applicants, is to improve the quality of content you put out as an employer. It will attract likeminded people. And for those that apply almost randomly to hundreds of jobs at once, it becomes dead simple to filter them out; because you can very quickly tell they put no effort into applying.

So a quick thank you to Kevin Wheeler for using Standout Jobs as an example, and hopefully we’re able to generate great results for all the companies that signed up after watching his webinar in action.

At a recent event in New York I heard the story of Zappos.com and one of their unique tactics for hiring the best people. Every employee goes through a few weeks of training. At the end of that training, Zappos offers those people money … not to stay on the job, but to quit! If you take the money, you were paid for the time you spent, and they know you weren’t really buying into the Zappos dream, team and culture.

I chuckled when I heard the story, but in some ways it makes sense. They get rid of the people who aren’t truly invested in Zappos, and they do it by paying you off, so it wasn’t all for naught. Plus, I’m sure it encourages Zappos to pick wisely upfront (why wouldn’t you after all, right?) so they don’t waste a ton of money paying people off to quit.

I do wonder if it encourages people to apply and try to get through the screening process for a couple of bucks — it wouldn’t shock me if some people do that, although there have to be easier ways to make money.

Judy McLeish at McDaniel Partners references the original story which appeared in the Harvard Business Review.

She quotes the original article in a couple places:

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

It’s a small practice with big implications: Companies don’t engage emotionally with their customers—people do. If you want to create a memorable company, you have to fill your company with memorable people. How are you making sure that you’re filling your organization with the right people? And how much are you willing to pay to find out?

One the secondary advantages to a unique program like this is the buzz it creates. The story is now being told (even if it’s a bit broken) at conferences and networking events. Bloggers are writing about it. All the while, Zappos’ employment brand gains recognition and awareness; and I’m sure that’s worth an absolute ton to the folks at Zappos.

Sadly, I found Zappos’ career site less than stellar. They have a lot of great content to check out, but it’s not packaged as nicely as I think it could be. And the job listings are still just thrown out there, like a giant laundry list. Zappos could do so much more with their career site - take the great content they have in various places, package it up, present it more attractively and intuitively, and leverage much more SEO for their job postings. Zappos: Give me a call.

(zappos box picture by theritters.)

I recently did two interviews that I think came out well. The first was a video interview with Bill Vick over at XtremeRecruiting.tv. We talked about Standout Jobs, Recruiting 2.0 and where I see the business going. Bill’s doing an entire series of videos with recruiters, recruitment consultants, social media gurus and more. It will be one of the largest and most comprehensive repositories of video interviews related to recruiting.

I’ve included the video below:

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The second interview was with Scott Lake at Startup Ottawa. The focus of the interview is on my own background as an entrepreneur and how we came to start Standout Jobs. I also reveal how long I’ve been married!

I want to thank Bill and Scott for taking the time to interview me, and hopefully there’s some worthwhile information in there for people to enjoy.