standout jobs.com could stand out (someday)
January 31st, 2008
With the unbridled enthusiasm around all things social networking these days, a solution like Standout Jobs was inevitable. The company, which recently added $2 million to the bank account, offers the ability for hiring companies to add a customized, Facebook-like component to their own site.
I called CEO and cofounder Benjamin Yoskovitz yesterday for the lowdown:
(20 mins.)
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A look at some of the sample sites located on the homepage will give you a very good sense of what this company does. It’s a good idea with sound (and improving) technology behind it. The bad news is it might be too ahead of it’s time.
Let’s face it. HR is not the most progressive group in the world. Concepts as mainstream as usability, site metrics and search marketing are still largely alien concepts. The more nimble among us will adopt this option much easier than the bureaucratic messes and risk-averse natures that define most companies, which unfortunately hinders Standout Jobs’ ability to hit a critical mass anytime soon, if ever.
It’s also difficult to imagine that if a concept like Jobster (with $50 million), which aims for mass consumer appeal marrying social networking and the job search, can’t get traction, how the idea on corporate career centers is going to take-off.
Frankly, most employers would fair much better leveraging a site like Facebook, which is integral to many people’s daily activities and the viral marketing opportunities expand to a multitude of personal networks as opposed to an exclusive one.
This should be fun to watch, but I’m betting this will be another case of smart people with little experience in the employment space getting a bunch of money early-on for an idea that’s ahead of its time.
… stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
For more insight, the company was recently featured on DEMO.com.
January 31st, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I’m not sure why an employer wouldn’t just use Ning to create their own employer site. It’s free (although some employers might consider that a bad thing). I guess as long as their price is low enough the customization towards jobs might be worth it. Or maybe they should charge a lot more.
A lot of Standout Jobs’ sample sites are dead links too. That looks really bad.
Great idea. It’ll be interesting to see how many companies take to it.
January 31st, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Willy … I ask Benjamin that very question in the podcast, so be sure to have a listen if you have time.
January 31st, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Looking forward to listening to this. Definitely interested in knowing the answer to the Ning question.
January 31st, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Thanks for pointing that out Cheez. You got me to listen.
You asked some great questions about domain names, content ownership, SEO, and ATSs.
Thanks for convincing me to listen.
January 31st, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Interesting concept.
Here are a couple of questions:
-Who is their competition? When we get beyond the social networking experiments in recruiting and get into hardcore sourcing, we are looking at typcial ATS vendors like taleo, kanexa etc. Taleo small biz edition goes for $99/month/user and for a small company that is sufficient. A company needs to add a bunch of videos, blogs and a few other ’soft’ things on their career page and they are good to go with any ATS in the marketplace. CATS has pretty good ATS capabilities as well and is almost free.
-They are charging $150/month per company. How many customers do they need to break even? Or to recover $2million. Over 1000. Just ask a typical ATS vendor the pain in getting and retaining so many customers.
-If the economy turns sour and the talent wars become a thing of the past (it has happened in the very recent past), would employers be willing to spend anything on this?
February 1st, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I like what I see and the direction. Yes, NING and / or other solutions can and will be used. I have to say the Standout message reminds me of Hire.com in ‘96. The strategic direction - to help companies attract and build talent communities of value at their own websites. The downturn took us into the slippery slope territory of ATS integration and customer demands. And the initial religian and strategy became too diluted. It will be interesting how these waters are navigated today with new technology.
The only things I see missing so far is deep domain experience and understanding how and what it takes to create and nurture valued recruitment relationships with private talent.
On the right track.
February 1st, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Hi all — Joel, thanks for posting your thoughts and the entire interview, didn’t realize you were going to do that.
Let me see if I can tackle as many questions as possible, but please keep asking:
1. Standout Jobs vs. Ning — It’s a good comparison and a good question. And I do expect some companies will go ahead and create Ning sites (although they’re not entirely free and they do include Google ads). The differences are in a few places:
* Our focus is on recruiting. That’s the biggest. As we evolve the front-end career sites we’ll put more emphasis on recruiting-related content. Ning is a generalist platform.
* Privacy / social networking. We’re not a social network. We ensure that candidates’ privacy is maintained and they have full control over that. Ning is about open social networks and having everyone in each network engaged. That approach doesn’t work as well in recruiting, when a candidate wants privacy.
* Recruiting functionality wrapped around the Career Sites. We currently offer recruiting functionality that Ning does not. Will Ning ever offer it? I don’t know, although since they’re focus is on “generalist social networking” I doubt it. We offer a simple Candidate Tracking tool, job marketing functionality, etc.
2. Dead links to sites. This was something Willy pointed out. This was a hiccup early on when the home page was showing non-published Career Sites. We’re also caching the front page because of the traffic coming in. This is something that’s fixed now, or will be completely fixed soon.
At most, there were 2-4 of these, whereas we have over 30 customers that are active and live.
3. Competition. This is a big question, because as we all know the job market is a big one.
Taleo’s price point is per user. That’s an important differentiator. I’m not sure what size company you’re referring to, but in a 5 person company, if they want all people involved in the hiring process that’s already almost $500/month. We’re $149/month — with unlimited users involved.
From a functionality standpoint, Taleo certainly does more for ATS than we do. I reference what we’re doing as “Basecamp for HR” and we’ll focus on the minimum / core functionality to help companies track people through the hiring process. If you want the “bigger” functionality of Taleo, I don’t think we’ll ever get there (which is on purpose.)
I can say that every customer signed up so far (from 400 people down to 5 in size) weren’t using an ATS at all.
4. Business model, etc. — I can’t really answer this question, sorry!
5. Domain knowledge — Hank mentioned this, and I think it’s definitely valid. We are working with advisers in the HR space, I just can’t name them for now.
Thanks again for all the feedback!
April 17th, 2008 at 11:13 am
It seems many people assume that the whole planet uses Ning. Good SN site - but most people I know who started signing up for the gaggle of SN sites have consolidated in the past few years as the numbers have been too numerous to manage. I deleted many other accounts and just use facebook and linkedin at this point. If you’re a recruiter using EVERY SN site on earth - that’s great - but don’t assume candidates are using them all.
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:44 am
Cheezhead -
What does your gut tell you - can this company last???
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Sure, but simply “lasting” isn’t too difficult to do.
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Excel? Stay alive beyond 24 months?
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Actually it is : ) But can they become a player in the space?