Standout Jobs

The Talent Buzz is a great blog. Written by Jason Buss, a 10+ year veteran of the HR world, The Talent Buzz goes deep into a number of HR issues. Jason’s done an entire series on career sites and their failings, and ways they should be improved. That’s one of the things that attracted me to the blog from the beginning.

Recently, Standout Jobs was featured on The Talent Buzz.

It’s an interview I completed with Jason about myself as an entrepreneur and the state of career sites in general. We didn’t talk a great deal about Standout Jobs; Jason was curious about my view of career sites in general, where online recruiting is failing, and what can be done about it.

I hope you’ll check out the interview and Jason’s blog.

The IDC just came out with their report on the 10 Web 2.0 Companies to Watch in Canada. We’re very pleased that Standout Jobs was named one of those companies! Here’s our official press release on it…

Montreal, July 24, 2008 – Standout Jobs, a leading provider of Web-based tools to power companies’ online recruiting efforts, today announced it has been named one of “10 Canadian Web 2.0 Companies to Watch” in a new report issued by leading IT market research and advisory firm, IDC. The study, “10 Canadian Web 2.0 Companies to Watch” (IDC #CA2TIW8), profiles 10 companies IDC believes are worthy of highlighting to the broader industry and have the potential to make an impact in the information and communication technology (ICT) market. IDC provides insight into the solutions, go-to-market strategies, partners, and customers of the profiled vendors. Lessons learned may provide a model for other emerging companies in the Canadian technology marketplace, and help larger vendors and investors identify partnership and investment opportunities.

Standout Jobs offers an employment branding and job marketing platform companies use to reach potential employees and interact with them more effectively. Standout Jobs incorporates the latest social media technologies and principles to attract and engage high value job candidates based on their talents and cultural fit with the company, while providing the employer with a significant point of marketplace differentiation.

Standout Jobs’ platform is provided as a hosted solution; no IT or technical experience required. Smaller companies with limited resources or personnel enjoy a dedicated, interactive career site that can be up on the Web and attracting candidates in just minutes. Standout Jobs is “drag and drop” simple to use, saving time-strapped multi-taskers valuable cycles while presenting potential candidates with a professional look and feel to the company’s brand. Larger enterprises enjoy similar benefits, letting hiring managers company-wide or even at the departmental level update their look to attract high-value, Web-savvy prospects for newly opened positions.

Standout Jobs’ platform provides enterprises of any size two key benefits:

• Affordable branding opportunities. Organizations can use the solution to develop their employer brand to differentiate themselves and attract candidates who are a good fit with the company.
• Active Candidate pool speeds up the hiring process. The solution enables organizations to engage with candidates on an ongoing basis, providing a source of prospective employees who are already interested in the organization.

“To succeed in the long term, Web 2.0 companies will need to transition from providing ‘cool’ Web-based solutions that users want to try to ‘critical’ tools they need to have,” says Krista Collins, Analyst, Canadian ICT Innovation and Export at IDC Canada. “The companies featured in IDC’s latest study are positioning themselves to make that transition. Standout Jobs’, with its web-based tools to power online recruiting efforts, provides a way for companies to promote themselves, not just the job openings, and foster ongoing relationships with applicants.”

Other benefits to Standout Jobs include:

• A strong applicant tracing system. Standout Jobs allows hiring managers to collaborate with others within the hiring company about prospective employees. The candidate tracking and relationship management features keep everyone within the organization up to date on where prospects are in the hiring pipeline and helps to ensure a good fit based on skill sets and company culture.
• Market jobs instantly across multiple job boards. Post a job once and Standout Jobs does all the “heavy lifting” of posting a company’s openings to multiple job boards, both paid and unpaid, from one central, easy to manage dashboard.

“We’re very excited to have IDC, one of the most respected research and analyst firms in the world, recognize Standout Jobs’ concept and business by listing us as one of its 10 Web 2.0 Companies to Watch,” said Benjamin Yoskovitz, co-founder and CEO, Standout Jobs. “When we started the company we knew there was a better way for employers to attract high-value talent online than static web sites and ads on job boards, and we justified that hunch in just a short period of time. Standout Jobs has accumulated well over 150 customers in North America alone in just a short amount of time. Our customers know that regardless of the economic climate, businesses need to effectively brand and market themselves online to attract great talent and continue to thrive.”

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And here’s the entire list - congrats to each of the companies:

• AdHack - Vancouver
• dthree Inc. - Mississauga
• Octopz - Toronto
• Overlay.TV - Ottawa
• PlanetEye - Toronto
• Ramius Corporation - Ottawa
• SceneCaster - Richmond Hill
• Standout Jobs - Montreal
• Tomoye Corporation - Gatineau
• Tungle - Montreal

Standout Jobs was recently awarded a Top 20 Web 2.0 award by KPMG and Backbone Magazine. They ranked the top 20 and gave us the #9 spot. Thank you!

Kate Trgovac, one of the judges, called the site a “fantastic product” and added, “It has a great target market, excellent business potential (talent wars are huge; culture is everything) and the implementation and tools are excellent. This is really exceptional.”

The list is great, and includes a number of companies we’re good friends with including Freshbooks, ConceptShare, Octopz, NowPublic, b5media and SmartHippo.

KPMG and Backbone held an open nomination process, and then had a group of judges picking and sorting out the winners. We’d like to thank all the judges for their input. We appreciate the positive feedback … and stay tuned for much more to come in the next few months!

Standout Jobs is pleased to announce that we’ve hired Steve McNair as our VP Business Development.

Steve has 15+ years in the HR space working for TMP, Wanted Technologies and others. He brings a ton of experience to the team and a deep knowledge of Human Resources, recruitment advertising and more. Plus he knows a lot of people…

Here’s a rather formal picture of Steve:

Not to be confused with the “other” Steve McNair:

Steve’s an entrepreneur at heart, and a sucker for punishment. So he’ll fit right in. As one would expect in a startup, Steve’s going to wear many hats (excluding a football helmet) but he’ll be focusing most of his energy on strategic partnerships. When asked by RecruitingFly.com about his role, Steve said,

We are looking to establish partnerships with ATS providers, recruitment ad agencies, job boards, and a plethora of other HRBPO firms, who believe that enabling a highly-interactive and cost-effective career site for their clients would provide them with a strategic advantage.

I’m excited about the opportunities Steve brings to the table. I’ve already seen a number of them, and it’s only a matter of time before we’re working with some of the top companies in the HR space (and outside of it.) His experience and domain expertise in HR are invaluable assets for a startup company like Standout Jobs.

Here are a number of jobs posted recently by our customers that look really interesting:

• Assistant Product Manager, Fun Web Products: Who wouldn’t want to work on fun web products, right? At IAC you can do exactly that. The Fun Web Products group at IAC handles their fun and interactive toolbar products, including SmileyCentral.com, Zwinky.com, Webfetti.com and MyFunCards.com.
• Community Evangelist: We’re seeing more and more job titles like this, especially for Web 2.0-type startups where building communities and leveraging social media effectively is so important. This job is with our good friends at Brainpark and is based in Guelph, Ontario.
• Quality Assurance Lead: Software companies are only as good as their QA Teams (as far as I’m concerned), so here’s an interesting opportunity to work for a Montreal-based startup called Tungle. Tungle offers an Outlook plugin that makes coordinating meetings easier. It’s slick, and their CFO (Mark Macleod), is a great guy — the type of person you want to work for.
• User Interface Designer:: What’s interesting about this job at Wandrian is that you won’t just be designing for the Web - they’re looking for a designer who is going to think about kiosks, mobile applications, etc. And Wandrian’s in a unique business, related to train travel. Here’s the mission for the job, “Our goal is to build the most compelling user experience possible for the shopping, purchase and fulfillment of train travel.”
• Software Engineer / UI Designer: This job comes from one of our latest customers - Plum - a well-funded, cool startup (in Boston and San Francisco) that helps people share stuff online with friends and family. They have a few job openings that are interesting.
• Web / Graphic Designer: This job is cool because it’s with Blogtalkradio, a well-known streaming media company in the Web 2.0 / blogosphere world. I know a ton of people who use their services regularly, so you should check them out.
• Associate Analyst, Online Marketing / Automotive: This sounds like a very interesting and unique opportunity with Jupiter Research to work as an analyst and develop yourself as a thought leader in the online automotive industry.

These are just a few examples of interesting jobs that are customers are trying to fill. I hope you’ll take a look at all the others as well in our Jobs section.