Sources tell us all but 15 people were laid off at start-up itzbig this week. We’re trying to get an exact number of people who are now looking for work as a result.
Additionally, the number of execs who have apparently or definitely disappeared from the organization recently, including founders Hank Stringer and Jim Hammock, plus a VP of marketing, is quite telling.
It will also be interesting to see how this bodes for other start-ups in the “eHarmony for jobs” space, featuring Jobfox, Climber and Trovix.
Time will tell if this is an isolated event or a trend.
Popularity: 9% [?]
April 29th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Isn’t this maybe a smart strategy… people come and go into business to get them to a certain point. Staying LONGER than that point is foolishness, isn’t it? Its like leaving your lights on after you’ve left for vacation.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I’m the CEO of itzbig. We did lay off 8 employees yesterday (on 04/28). We also gave notice that we would not be extending the work of some of the outside contractors who have been assisting us develop the product. Since the bulk of our product development work is now completed, we are shifting more of our focus to our strategy for expansion.
Like any startup, we certainly face lots of challenges, ranging from entrenched competitors to customer inertia and everything in between. But we still believe we have a tremendous opportunity to change the way the world recruits.
Our system offers true anonymity to candidates, active or passive. It is a real-time sysem that uses structured data (not keywords) to instantly match, score and rank candidates against jobs and jobs against candidates. It allows both candidates and recruiters to set visibility thresholds to control who can see/contact them via our system. Our system is free for candidates, and free for recruiters to post their jobs. Recruiters only need to pay to “unlock” a candidate when they find one who is Interested, Qualified, and Available (IQA) — a true pay for results approach.
We want to change the recruiting paradigm so that the measure of success is to very quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively get to a small number of candidates who are IQA and from which the right hire can be selected.
Obviously we hope we succeed. And we hope you’ll help us ;>)
Thanks,
Jim
Jim McGovern
Chief Executive Officer
itzbig
April 29th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
are you sure trovix is still running?
i get “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.” for most links like the ‘about us’…
April 29th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
So “itz-smaller” then?
A friend of mine just got hired by the original market leader in the ‘e-harmony-for-jobs’ sapce, QuietAgent. So they are still around I guess….
April 30th, 2008 at 5:33 am
Startups in this space fail to create a clear value prop for clients; who are generally interested in “instant results” not “intelligent matching…”
April 30th, 2008 at 11:51 am
this is why the third party recruiter sits back and laughs.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
I am the PR guy at Jobfox. As pioneers of what Joel calls the “eHarmony for jobs” space (Is everyone using that now?), I can tell you that Web 2.0 recruiting startegies are much more than a trend.
Jobfox is experiencing month-over-month record sales and, today, we attract more than a million unique job candidates each month. Our national market expansion continues. We now have more than 60 sales representatives and 10 regional offices to handle our growth in employer adoption.
Under the leadership of CEO Rob McGovern (no relation to Jim McGovern), Jobfox began beta testing in 2004 (as Market 10) and is now on the road to rapid expansion. Many of us, including Rob, were on the original team that founded CareerBuilder. Collectively, we understood too well that the traditional job board model — treating job seekers as commodities instead of putting them at the center of the universe — is no longer viable.
Not every start-up is going to succeed in this competitive space. However, the buzz in this industry is for more innovation. We don’t have to look hard for customers to tell us their dissatisfaction with CareerBuilder and Monster.
Our mission is to build the best product in the industry. We have many more innovations to come. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when eHarmony starts saying: “We’re the Jobfox of the online dating industry.”
May 1st, 2008 at 9:56 am
Barry,
For a PR guy you certainly are not very bright. You chose to ‘blog-jack’ this post about a serious situation at Itzbig and make it an ad spot for Jobfox? How uncouth. Granted Itzbig is a competitor of Jobfox, but at least 8 people lost their jobs. Given the size of Itzbig’s total employee population this was a significant event for their company. Stop the spin cycle for one second and show some humanity. Perhaps you should have offered to ‘eHarmonize’ them, or to help them become the hunted instead? That would have been a more palatable way for you to pimp Jobfox’s business.
If you want to advertise Jobfox on Cheezhead, why not just buy banner ads like the rest of Joel’s sponsors? Or even better yet, write your own blog I’m sure your ‘innovative’ infomercial style of prose will attract a huge following in the blogosphere.