Nicely funded start-up Jobfox has received a mini-flood of good news lately.
Some recent highlights:
- 1. Named a Red Herring 100 Award Finalist - Award honoring the most innovative private technology companies based in North America. Click here for the news release.
2. Received “Official Honoree” Distinction in Employment Category for the 12th Annual Webby Awards - Dubbed the “Oscars of the Internet,” this organization celebrates “outstanding work that is setting the standards for the Internet.”
3. Signed job wrapping deal - Partnered exclusively with JobTarget to give employers the ability to automatically cross-post jobs to other job board accounts.
Not everyone looking to be the “eHarmony of jobs” are created equal - and it’s really early in the game - but considering its deeper pockets, respected leadership and track record to date, Jobfox may gradually be coming out of the pack as the market leader.
Popularity: 10% [?]
April 14th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Hi Joel,
Very nice summary – I would only add Vitruva, http://www.vitruva.com, to your list of the next–generation job matching web sites. Our matching accuracy is about 2-3x higher than that of Jobfox mostly due to an extensive use of artificial intelligence technology. That allowed us to introduce the first and only career website that offers a performance-based business model. Employers pay only when they receive the best-qualified candidates for a posted job opportunity.
In addition, we allow job candidates to have multiple profiles at the same time. In each profile they can emphasize different strengths thereby targeting different types of opportunities. Furthermore, job candidates using Vitruva have much stronger control over their confidentiality. They can not only give permission to an employer (as on Jobfox) but also they can remove the permission anytime.
The users’ favorite is the capability to refine matching results on-the-fly without a time-consuming process of opening, editing, and saving a profile. You can see this in our live demo at http://www.vitruva.com.
Whether Vitruva, Jobfox or others – the profile-based matching websites offer a dramatic improvement over the onerous keyword searching and, most importantly, both job candidates and employers benefit.
Jindrich Liska
(full disclosure: I am a founder of http://www.vitruva.com)
April 14th, 2008 at 11:12 am
“the profile-based matching websites offer a dramatic improvement over the onerous keyword searching”
Great theory. Really. I said almost the excat same thing when I ran careercowboy.com.
And kudos to Jobfox for the awards.
Where these folks are missing the boat is in building a following. They are leveraging technology well but only building temporary communities. The value prop around “better matching” is old school.
As a job seeker, if you end up as an applicant in a resume vortex, what s the freaking difference? As an employer if your reach is the same community reached by monster etc how is that different?
April 14th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
The site does not work. That Webby thing is joke is they are actually awarded it. Every “match” has been inappropriate - either WAY below my career level or WAY above. It seems as though they are only capable on matching by keyword - despite their claims. My friends, who have had the patience to get through their questions and faith to believe their hype…have had similar experiences as me and think the same things. I think they are just very well funded, with a big name CEO. But their product does not work. (Besides - why would they assume that anyone looking for a job needs a web-site too match for them? That is a bit of an insulting assumption…) I am really interested what other folks experiences have been with Jobfox…
April 14th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
I am about to finally finish on on research “project” where i tracked 10 jobseekers from the first day of the job fox launch….if ya cant wait for my blog post…i would be happy to email the headlines.
April 16th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Hey Joel, is the the company you wrote about a while back that was embedding some code is the candidate resumes so the candidates could see when their resume was being looked at? I can’t remember. Thanks
April 16th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Yep.
April 18th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I’m intrigued by the tracking code that’s injected in the modified Word resume.
Is it analogous to the 1×1 pixels often used in email marketing campaign tools or a different type of tracking code or system?
April 21st, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Sounds cool, but technology will never take the place of a human being. Candidates are too sick & tired of filling out ‘profiles’, ‘assessments’, and ‘questionaires’ on career/job-board sites that not too many are going to use a matching-service like e-Harmony . . .
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:35 pm
If JobFox is such a great tool, why can’t they rely on it to make internal hires? I noticed a while back that they posted a job on my job board…
http://www.smuz.com/jobs/JobSeeker/index.cfm?page=position-description&start=1&jobid=1013
Glad to help :-)
Paul Pickthorne
chief Free Officer
Smuz.com - 100% Free Job Board
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:16 pm
I read that jobfox recently came out with resume pal. Is this a new jobfox product or is it a service? Or is it something separate from jobfox? Do employers have to be signed up with jobfox to take advantage of it? The article I read said it was the paypal of resumes but I am still not sure what that means and how it relates to jobfox.
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Dont forget the thejobnetwork.com in the compete comparison…its a real eye opener. Thejobnetwork domain is Realmatch’s powered by Network. Our strategy was always to plug in the technology where our target audience congregates instead of trying to get them to come to us. This is why we have 773,000 users according to Compete…closer to 1.2 million according to Goog analytics.
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Ray - I am pretty sure resume pal is a separate thing from jobfox. However it uses the jobfox “matching technology” to match users who apply through an ATS to other jobs in the system. In the ERE article below it says that jobfox users are automatically resume pal users although resume pal users don’t instantly become jobfox users….. As a result, jobfox is the only job board using resume pal (convenient). I’m not sure what jobfox is up to…..
Here is the ERE article that mentions jobfox & resume pal (you’ll also notice the resume pal site looks almost identical to the jobfox site).
http://www.ere.net/2009/03/31/universal-job-application-system-introduced-by-jobfox/
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:08 am
Rafael,
Is the jobnetwork domain simiar to jobfox or to resume pal? I know Realmatch is a direct competitor of jobfox so is the jobnetwork competing with resume pal? Or is it another jobfox competitor? Thanks for your help.
Stan,
Thanks for the info about jobfox and resume pal. After your explanation I don’t see how resume pal will be able to help jobfox. I’m guessing that jobfox must have a plan with resume pal…otherwise why did they create and launch it? I think it is also interesting that jobfox chose to call their ATS product another name and not jobfox resume pal or resume pal powered by jobfox.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Well, jobfox could be thinking if people pick up and start using resume pal then they will be more likely to use other job matching sites (e.g. jobfox, realmatch, etc). However, this is a bit of a leap if you ask me. I would imagine matching sites have a hard time getting users to answer all the questions they ask as opposed to just doing a search. Though in theory the results you would get on jobfox or realmatch would/should be better. I haven’t gone through the resume pal process but I bet it is similar to the jobfox process. If jobfox changes the rules and automatically opts resume pal users into their product, then they would greatly increase the number of overall jobfox users. Then again the idea could bust and jobfox could be left without an upside.
April 24th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Stan, I see your point however I think it could hurt jobfox as much as it could them unless they use it to get more new users. If I were jobfox I would be afraid that users would be turned off by their process. BTW, thanks for your comments.
As a side note, I wonder if jobfox plans to allow other job boards to use resume pal in the future on their sites (not send them to the jobfox / resume pal site). That could be a way for jobfox to get more $$$ and increase the overall value of the jobfox brand. The other side of the coin is if they did decide to do this they would lose their unique value as a job board but maybe jobfox wouldn’t care if they were making lots of money. In this economy I don’t think anyone would care if the money was coming in (including jobfox).