Comments on: standout jobs.com could stand out (someday)

By: RecruiterRick

RecruiterRick — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:58:23 +0000

Actually it is : ) But can they become a player in the space?

By: RecruiterRick

RecruiterRick — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:40:24 +0000

Excel? Stay alive beyond 24 months?

By: Joel Cheesman

Joel Cheesman — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:04:32 +0000

Sure, but simply “lasting” isn’t too difficult to do.

By: RecruiterRick

RecruiterRick — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:44:09 +0000

Cheezhead –

What does your gut tell you – can this company last???

By: JoeyPeeps

JoeyPeeps — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:13:27 +0000

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.

By: Ben Yoskovitz

Ben Yoskovitz — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:39:45 +0000

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!

By: Hank Stringer

Hank Stringer — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:50:45 +0000

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.

By: Wondering

Wondering — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:21:38 +0000

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?

By: Willy

Willy — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:11:10 +0000

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.

By: Shannon Seery Gude

Shannon Seery Gude — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:45:10 +0000

Looking forward to listening to this. Definitely interested in knowing the answer to the Ning question.