Standout Jobs

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.

Every so often I like to highlight different companies using Standout Jobs to power their career sites and online recruiting efforts. As we add more customers, we see a wider range of industries and company sizes represented. Here are a handful of our latest customers, each of which has a number of interesting positions available:

• Ericsson LMI: Anyone want to work in Ireland? I’d certainly like to visit someday, but in the meantime, Ericsson is hiring for a number of interesting telecommunications jobs including Mobile TV Solution Architect, Graduate Systems Engineer and IPTV Solution Architect.
• Fetchback: These guys are making waves in the advertising business, and it seems like a great time to get on board. Fetchback is hiring an Online Ad Sales Representative, and they’re based in Tempe, Arizona. Apparently the most important thing is that you like dogs! (They’re words, not mine…)
• Ultra Electronics: I think it’s best to quote directly from their career site: Ultra Electronics designs, develops, delivers, and supports real-time tactical command and control systems. We have delivered systems to all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces and many of our Allied and Coalition partners. Our systems and personnel have supported every major conflict since our founding in 1987. They have a number of jobs available in San Diego and Austin, Texas including Software Engineer (Intelligence). They’re not trying to highlight that you need to be intelligent (one assumes that goes without saying!), but in fact they need someone with “specialized intelligence experience”.
• Roundarch: Roundarch is a web service company with a heavy emphasis on UI/UX-related work. They currently have a number of jobs available in their Chicago office, including Flex Developer, Technical Architect and Senior Javascript Developer. They’ve got some great looking perks too like a Wii, foosball, in-office massages and more.
• JupiterResearch: They put together a great career site, including information about the company, its culture and more. And they did it in less than a day! Currently, JupiterResearch is hiring a Marketing Analyst, Online Financial Services in their New York office.

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.

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.

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.

  
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• 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!

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…

The first episode of The Social Media Recruiting Show was a great success. Chris Russell and I had a lot of fun talking about social media recruiting, and we received some great feedback after the show.

Our second show is coming up this week: Thursday, March 20th @ 12pm EDT

Please come listen: The Social Media Recruiting Show

We’ve invited a guest — Dennis Smith from WirelessJobs.com so that we can focus most of the show on blogging and how to use a blog in recruiting.

I’m a huge believer in blogging and its value in building a reputation (for people and/or companies), and reaching into the community to join the conversation. I’ve been blogging for over 2 years (primarily at Instigator Blog) and its brought me a lot of great things - tons of valuable contacts, friends, business opportunities and more. You can’t go wrong with blogging - and it can most definitely be used for recruiting purposes.

So don’t forget — this Thursday (March 20th) @ 12pm EDT — come to http://www.blogtalkradio.com/SocialMediaRecruiting/ and listen in. We’ll also have phone lines available for people to call in and ask questions.

We want to make it as easy as possible for companies to promote their jobs and for prospective candidates to find those jobs. With that in mind we’ve added a few features to help candidates out, making it easier to locate interesting companies and jobs.

Candidate Dashboard

The Candidate Dashboard - which is what you see when you sign-up and login as a candidate now has some added functionality.

1. Search for Jobs: You can now search for jobs from the top right-hand corner - using keywords, location or company name. This search feature is also available on the main site so you don’t have to be signed in to search.
2. Jobs by Location: You can now see a full list of locations where our clients have posted jobs. It’s a pulldown menu on the right-hand side of your Candidate Dashboard. This is easy to use and immediately brings you to a list of appropriate jobs.

With this functionality in place, it should be much easier for candidates to discover the great companies we have on board and the jobs they have available.

Job Listings Pages

On the main site we’ve added a number of job listings pages that immediately show you job opportunities with our customers.

• All Jobs: Here’s the list of all jobs.
• Jobs by Location: Here are some example pages of jobs by location — Jobs in Vancouver, Jobs in San Francisco, Jobs in New York, and Jobs in Palo Alto.
• Jobs by Tags: Here are some example pages of jobs by tag — Design Jobs, Ruby on Rails Jobs, and Web Jobs.

Chris Russell and I have only recently gotten to know each other, but we’re both in the business of helping companies leverage social media and social networking tools for recruiting purposes. So we decided it’d be fun (and hopefully educational and worthwhile) to start up an online radio show.

Enter: The Social Media Recruiting Show

Date/Time: Thursday, March 6th @ 12pm EST

We’re running it using BlogTalkRadio which allows Chris and I to chat, but also allows others to come in and ask questions.

Chris describes the show perfectly:

The goal of this program is to educate HR people and recruiters on the evolving social media landscape as it pertains to recruiting. We encourage anyone interested to call in and ask questions about things like Facebook, Youtube, blogging or any other web 2.0 technology that can help you recruit.

Chris and I will each take a couple of minutes to introduce a topic of interest - related to social media/networking in recruiting - and then we’re off to the races. Hopefully people will call in, ask us questions, comment on news in the recruiting industry, and so on. We’ll make it as free form and open as possible. And I think it will be a lot of fun.

So come listen in (and participate!) at The Social Media Recruiting Show (Thursday, March 6th @ 12pm EST).