Category Archives: Job Boards

091207 Jobvite

Jobvite

There are a ton of companies moving into the use of social media for recruiting. None are as advanced and focused as Jobvite. The Burlingame, CA startup, is the industry leader in the development of innovation and functionality in Social Recruiting.

The company began its life as a referral driven Applicant Tracking System. As it began to catch the social media wave, its market presence began to include social media features from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Ultimately, the market wanted to be able to have just the social recruiting functions.

While Jobvite will easily perform various job board placement functions, the core idea of the service is to build solid referral networks using social media. In other words, Jobvite competes easily with traditional job placement services and the new emerging social media recruiting tools. But it has an astonishing difference.

Where most of the other tools are built on a series of scripts, Jobvite is a standalone software application. The development team is a polished Silicon Valley startup crew with deep industry experience. The application is data savvy and uses the client’s recruiting experience to make the client smarter.

It’s easier to think of Jobvite as great referral recruiting than as a social media dashboard (although it certainly offers the social media dashboard functionality). The real value of the system comes from using it.

Every member of a client organization gets a Jobvite account. The idea is that employees use their referral networks to generate hires. Jobvite provides widgets and tracking tools. Employees evaluate (with some very smart Jobvite automated matching support) which of their friends and connections might be interested in a job. The invitation (a jobvite) gets sent and the system tracks and follows the recommendation.

Over time, you get a picture of who’s connected to whom; which connections are most productive and how hiring works in your particular ecosystem. Jobvite does what I’d call ‘on the fly job matching in the social media ecosystem’. It’s not just a job publishing tool. It gives intelligent guidance and collects data that improves its guidance.

There’s also a great widget that allows a user to have an app from their company on their facebook page. The app offers jobs from the company, edited as appropriate by the user. One of the goals at Jobvite is to make real the idea that every employee is a recruiter.

At Jobvite, the vision is that the Internet is the Job Board. While the tool capably optimizes traditional job posting, its core intent is to harness the power of social networks; not by brand name but as an emerging reality. The platform operates on the assumption that any job is better filled by a trackable recommendation and that clear metrics are essential elements of knowing whether or not your efforts are effective.

Where others provide publishing tools, Jobvite provides an integrated recruiting framework and toolset rooted in the power of referrals.

There are two basic packages you can by from Jobvite: Jobvite Hire and Jobvite Source. JHire is an ATS with social media recruiting capabilities. JSource is a fully functional social media recruiting campaign execution tool.

Since the firm itself resides in Silicon Valley, it has an easy time building smart integrations with various local vendors. The team is composed of seasoned Valley technologists who are well connected in the emerging army of Valley based social media empires. As a result, the company is a good corporate citizen in the areas of privacy and Terms of Use compliance. You’ll never see Jobvite’s accounts at data providers getting pulled for the overenthusiastic use of spidering.

Regular readers will certainly have heard about Jobvite before this piece. My recommendation, though, is that you get a demo sometime soon. The Jobvite toolkit will improve your recruiting effectiveness.

Also posted in All, Applicant Tracking Systems, HR Tech, HR Technology, HR Trends, Industry Analysis, Networking, Recruiting Strategy, Social Software, Talent Management | Leave a comment

091203 In The Know v1.04

091203 In The Know: Five Useful Links

  • Discussions with our Research Members: Five Topics to Watch for 2010
    Josh Bersin’s membership roundtable suggests the following issues will be top of mind in 2010

    • Diversity as a talent management strategy.
    • Leadership assessment as core to the leadership strategy.
    • Expanding career development beyond promotion.
    • Focus on the HR generalists and field training teams.
    • First line management continues to be the weak link

    One could be excused for summarizing the list as “HR licks its wounds, scapegoats line managers.” It’s really astonishing that productivity improvement or some level of contribution to bottom line business results didn’t make the list. We’d like to suggest a sixth “Scramble to be relevant in advance of the outsourcing contract.”

  • Bragging Rights In Academia
    Is there a change coming in the status of US Universities? There’s at least some research that suggests that the old school strong reputation institutions have been resting on their laurels while more agile competitors (formerly the second class citizens) have been more agile in their development of programs andd research. Are you validating the quality of your talent supply line?
  • 10 First-To-Market Products That Lost
    Being first may only be a n advantage to people who like to be first. Smart and early is often a recipe for market failure. Being out in front for innovations is a risky business and not necessarly a good idea. The people who "don’t get it" may actually be on to something.
  • Forbes List of “America’s Fastest-Recovering Cities” – Not a Good List for Job Seekers
    At Wanted Technologies, they’re trying to make employment data more useful and relevant. From time to time, this involves an eye blurring brush with their inner policy wonk. Still, the company offers more insight, pound for pound, than you can get elsewhere. They’re really working the data hard. In this piece, they deconstruct the recent Forbes List of the fastest recovering cities. The result is a list of cities in order of their worth to a job hunter. Reading the article will give you a great insight into the ways that statistics can mislead.
  • How job seeker behavior affects job boards
    There is a change happening. But, as this article points out, new technology is not enough. The job board scene will not change until job seekers move elsewhere. Being an innovator in social recruiting or other aspects of online HR may be sexy. It just might ot be the best way to reach the people you want to hire.
  • Also posted in Daily Links, HR Trends, In The Know, Social Recruiting, Talent Management, Workforce Planning | Leave a comment

    091119 Five Must Reads

    091118 Five Must Reads

    • Wanted Engineering Supply-Demand Hot Spots
      The data is a little stiff (no one really works some where called the San Francisco – Oakland – Fremont Metropolitan Statistical Area but tons of people commute to the individual cities). But, the idea is in the right place and this is a move forward. Wanted Technologies Supply-Demand profiles are a good first step towards really understanding the labor market.
    • Quarantined Conferences: Claustrophobic Technophiles or Attentive Audiences?
      The inevitable blowback has begun. Conferences that disallow interaction and social media. Next to return? Straight Jackets, Thorazine and Loony Bins. Who’s behind the movement? The very people who brought you Web 2.0 in the first place. Talk about planned obsolescence.
    • Pixar on Successful Creative Teams
      Talent alone is never enough. Figuring out how to get people to work together is equally important. That involves learning to negate things that organizations do naturally. You have to upset the natural tendency for classes to form and for expertise to cncentrate at the expense of agility.
    • Universe.jobs
      This is a pretty interesting idea whereby Direct Employers takes a badly executed vision (the dot jobs domain name) and resuscitates it. Adoption of a new convention is always an expensive proposition. It will be interesting to see if the folks in Indianapolis can pull this off. Nice ROI if they do. The other people who have made things like this work used advertising dollars (superbowl ads) to create the traffic and brand awareness.
    • Cloud Computing In Plain English
      Commoncraft is the source of those great videos that explain things simply. This one gives you the fundamentals of cloud computing in a way your Mom could understand it. Simple communication is hard to do. These folks make it look easy.

    Also posted in Daily Links, HR Technology, HR Trends, Industry Analysis | Leave a comment