Standout Jobs

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.

It’s not that any country, industry or business is doing such a great job of recruiting top talent (except for our customers *smile*) but it seems Canadian businesses are really struggling. From the Ottawa Business Journal I recently read an article stating that only 25% of Canadian firms have a strong recruitment program.

The article was based on a recent survey completed by Bedford Consulting Group. Here are some of the additional findings:

70% of top executives and human resource leaders surveyed in a report by Bedford Consulting Group said they are experiencing a shortage of talent, while 54 per cent said it is affecting their companies’ financial success.

Canadian companies are ill-equipped to attract and retain top talent, with only 24 per cent of respondents saying they had some kind of program to round up the best applicants, despite 85 per cent reporting that it was important for their business.

95 per cent of those polled said having an inspiring recruitment proposition is now vital in securing the best talent, but only 40 per cent of companies said they had such a proposition.

These are pretty harsh numbers. My take is that many companies are unsure of what to do and to a degree, are overwhelmed by the options. They hear about “social media recruiting”, social networks, etc. and they recognize that the world is passing them by, but they’re not sure how to catch up and how all of these things are relevant to HR. And another huge challenge for Human Resources is focusing on the transition from being about “process management” to “sales and marketing”. The fact is that HR is about sales and marketing; it’s about building relationships and understanding how to continuously communicate & interact with prospective candidates. It’s about putting your best foot forward and getting people excited about working for you.

HR will always have a “process management” component to it, but everyone gets that. We know that works. The companies that will succeed in hiring the best people will go way beyond that basic understanding of Human Resources and turn HR into an employment branding, sales, marketing and PR machine.

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.

Yesterday, Standout Jobs was featured in the Financial Post:

Playing in the major leagues - Online tool helps smaller firms compete for talent. It’s a good overview of our product, why we built it and how it helps.

I was particularly pleased to see one of our clients - Apption - quoted in the story:

Sam Zaid, Apption Software chief operating officer said the response he has received from his company’s career portal has helped attract high-profile candidates that may have gone to a rival firm such as Google Inc. or Microsoft Corp.

“It would have taken 10 times more time to get a whole slew of features for our career site than if we would have done it ourselves,” he said. “I’d definitely recommend it to any small business that’s looking to brand itself on a major scale.”

Thanks to David George-Cosh for writing the story. I hope you’ll check it out here.

(And if you pick up a copy of the newspaper itself, you’ll be graced with not one … but two pictures of yours truly! I’m smiling in one, and I’m a bit more serious looking in the other.)

When a startup first starts hiring people, it’s exciting. It’s usually a good sign that things are heading in the right direction. But more often than not, startup founders have no idea how to interview candidates properly. It’s not something they teach in school, and rarely something that startup founders rush to get advice on. After all, they’re too busy building their business and product. But hiring is the single most important issue for fast-moving startups, and unless you have a lot of experience doing it (and doing it well), it’s not easy.

Here are 5 of the biggest interview mistakes that startups make:

1. Not Asking the Same Questions to Each Candidate. You need a structured list of interview questions that you ask each interviewee. The list will vary depending on the position, although some questions will stay the same. If you don’t ask candidates applying for the same position the same questions, it’s very difficult to rank them. This is one of the most common mistakes I’ve seen. Very often it’s because the interviewers are basing a great deal of their judgment on their own gut. They’re basing decisions on whether they like the person or not, or if they get a good vibe from them. This is absolutely critical - since the person will have to fit in well with the team & culture - but you need to go on more than just your “feelings” about someone.

   Mark MacLeod just published his new hire checklist. It’s worth reading. You’ll notice he’s listed a few personality traits, including animal-like tendencies and energy. These are the kinds of things you can find out about someone without structured questions, but you can also be fooled by people. It’s important that you do “get a feel” for the candidates you’re interviewing, but it’s as important (if not more important) that you’re able to rank all interviewees on the same scale.

2. Not Having Candidates Do Tests. At a recent event, Joel Spolsky said (and I’m paraphrasing), “Every interview is like an audition.” And he’s 100% right. You need to test interviewees by having them do something. Talk is good, but actions often speak louder than words. For technical people this is fairly straightforward — setup a technical test (or multiple tests) and have the candidates go through them. Developers and programmers should code something. And it should be hard. Really, really hard. You might start it off easy, but if it’s too easy everyone will succeed. At Standout Jobs we call it “The Gauntlet” - a technical test with multiple phases (starts with a pencil and paper and eventually moves to the computer), where it’s almost impossible for people to finish the test. Finishing isn’t the point. The process the person goes through, the questions they ask, the approach they take, and their attitude, are some of the things we’re measuring - not whether they finish or not.

   For sales and marketing people, tests are a bit harder to devise, but not impossible. You can setup mock sales exercises. Get a sales person to pitch you on some random product. Get a marketing person to build out an email marketing campaign. There are definitely ways of testing business people - and in some cases this is more important than testing tech people because business people are often much slicker and smoother during interviews. If you’ve never hired business people before, I guarantee you that most of them will seem like excellent candidates after an interview. You gotta test them.

3. Rambling About Yourself. It’s not unusual to be nervous when giving an interview. It’s also not unusual to go overboard when talking about yourself, your company and wandering off-topic into a no-man’s land of conversation. You want to talk about yourself, your co-founders, the startup and the team — and you want to sell people on working for you — but don’t go overboard. Make a list prior to the interview about the points you want to make, and stick to them. Meandering conversations are nice over a beer or two, but if you’re talking more than the candidate, there’s a problem.
4. Delegating the Hiring Process. I’ve commented in the past that everyone on your team should be involved in the hiring process. And I think that’s 100% true. But, if you’re the CEO, then hiring great people falls squarely on your shoulders. Don’t delegate the hiring process to others. You’re responsible for the make up of the team. You’re responsible for instigating and incubating the company culture. You pay the bills. And your startup will succeed based on your ability to hire great people. Aside from all these things, it’s also important to realize that your other employees (or even department managers, if you have departments … and managers) may not be great at hiring people. They might not have a lot of experience, or they might not be familiar with your structured interview process. So don’t throw them to the wolves. Get everyone involved in the hiring process, but don’t delegate the process entirely. And certainly do not delegate the decision.
5. Lying by Omission or Exaggerating the Truth. Be honest. Be open. Be truthful. Don’t “forget to tell the candidate that funding is running out” and don’t tell the candidate that a “huge deal is 100% going to happen and make everyone rich” unless you’ve got a signed contract and a lot of money in the bank. You may want a star candidate really, really badly, but you don’t get anywhere by pulling the wool over people’s eyes. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sell them the dream — by all means, sell it to them and sell it hard — but don’t claim it’s reality. I’ve always felt it’s better to be straightforward about things. I tried to “scare” one of the last people we interviewed by making sure they understood what startup culture was all about — it’s messy, hectic, stressful and intense. I wasn’t going to pretend that we had all the answers. I wasn’t going to tell them that everything was nice and cushy and chill. It’s not. I’d rather we get the proverbial skeletons out of the closet before they start…

There’s no one absolute style for performing interviews. But the more mistakes you make during the process, the more likely you’ll make mistakes in hiring the wrong people - and that’s bad news for your startup (or any company). Doing great interviews takes practice and preparation. You can’t go in and assume it’s like having any old conversation at the pub. You’re trying to really learn about the candidates, and be able to put them head-to-head and make the best possible decisions for your company.

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.