Sources are telling us itzbig shut its doors today. A call to the company’s 800 number got us in touch with a worker that had been laid off this morning who “wasn’t in the office” when we spoke to him. He was hesitant to talk, but it was pretty clear something bad had gone down.
We’re hoping to hear something more official soon and will update this post accordingly.
UPDATE: The shutdown has been confirmed by a company spokesperson. The CEO is getting together a letter describing how things went down and where things go from here. The spokesperson said 20 remaining workers were laid off today.
UPDATE II (9/5/08, 8:35 p.m., ET): Letter from itzbig CEO Jim McGovern …
It is with great regret that I am writing to inform you that itzbig will be discontinuing operations.
On behalf of all of the itzbig employees who have worked so long and so hard, I’d like to thank you for your support.
We set out to build a next-generation service that instantly matched, scored and ranked jobs against candidates and candidates against jobs, without all the junk results. Our approach was to allow recruiters to post jobs for free and to interact with anonymous candidates in order to determine those who were interested, qualified and available (IQA). Recruiters would only be asked to pay to unlock the contact information of candidates in whom they were interested. Based on the very positive feedback that we received from many of our users, I think we were making good progress. Unfortunately, however, we have been unable recently to secure enough additional funding to continue.
While we are winding down operations, the itzbig website will be kept alive and will be made completely free to use for everyone — candidates and recruiters.
Our passion for revolutionizing the way the world recruits remains undimmed, and many of us will continue our efforts in the future. But for now we are obliged to close this chapter of our lives and move on.
Thank you again for your support. We are saddened by this outcome, but we’ve learned a lot and enjoyed serving the HR/recruiting community as best we could.
Regards,
The itzbig Team
UPDATE III (9/6/08, 3:50 p.m., ET): For those curious as to how much money the company went through … from what we’ve collected, the total number seems to be around $7 million. Series A was $2 million. Series B was $4 million. The final round was a bit too cloudy to get to a concrete number - this was when the original round of layoffs occurred - but something around $1 million is probably close to accurate.
September 5th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Interesting news. Over the past week they suddenly began to blitzkrieg my inbox with “matches” (a la Jobfox offering): Weird
September 5th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
wow…, didn’t they just fully launch last year? I think this is the first of many of the “e-harmony for jobs” sites that popped up to not make it. It’s much easier to match people looking for each other because you’ve got a lot of criteria from both parties to match against. When using technology to Match candidates to jobs, I believe you just don’t have enough information from a job posting to make that perfect match they were promising.
September 5th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
In theory this stuff works great. In reality, neither side is willing to spend the 30-60 minutes that it takes to build a proper profile. People are willing to do that when they’re looking for a mate but not a cube mate.
September 5th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Met a couple of these folks last year. Some interesting ideas and what looked like a genuine attempt to bring more sophistication to matching — not that they didn’t face many challenges in realizing the vision (not the least of which are current economic conditions). One of the key problems with matching is that it obviously depends on matchable data. I don’t think that describes what can be realized at least as itzbig envisioned. Most of the data you are going to capture is at its core marketing material. Candidates marketing themselves to employers and vice-versa. This isn’t necessarily good or bad, it is just the way it is. That is why automagic matching isn’t going to produce magic results — it takes a few passes for each side of the equation to understand what data can be relied upon.
Sad news - but I did like your headline.
September 5th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
They says its better to fail fast if your gonna fail so to some point being in and out of the game within a year (if thats how long they were at it) may be the mark of good management.
September 5th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
The CEO was a joke. He refused to go after the business that would have pushed the company to be better and refused to listen to what the customers said. He sat by and let a disastorous move into N. CA fail after claiming the company hinged on its success and was caught completely off guard when the VC’s pulled all the expected funding back in May.
He was great at taking vacations, speaking French and bragging about his college.
This was a company that could have been successful if it had been led by someone who knew anything about customers, sales and strategy.
September 5th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Keeping the site active? Sounds like a good way to gather personal information from unsuspecting jobseekers in order to eventually sell that data? Not that they weren’t doing that already, but a site with no legitimate means of sustaining itself should not remain active without notice to its users.
September 6th, 2008 at 8:42 am
I wonder if the company would have been more successfull as a “plug-in” to existing job boards and ATSs? They have a lot of data already, are just missing the “e-harmony matching” piece.
September 7th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I never quite understood itzbig and its value to the job seeker. First I question the name they adopted. “Itzbig” had better be something that lived up to its name, unfortunately it did not, nor did its name relate to jobs or careers. I agree with Jennifer that these types of sites may be better off being added to the major job boards. None of the matching startups will ever be able to overtake the big 3. Their marketshare is just to big to overcome. Perhaps thats why Trovix was bought by Monster.
September 7th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
While “matching” sites promise so much to employers and job seekers, I’ve yet to see anyone pull this off. Seems to me that you need great data on both sides, not just profiles. To be in the “matching” game, you need to have something to match to (like real jobs).
To Steve’s point, I also never quite understood why people think that anyone is going to spend that kind of time on the web for any single transaction. It goes against the grain of what we all know and have learned over the past 10 years of web usage and usability preferences.
If someone can figure out how to take a pasted resume and deliver quality matching jobs, (and vice versa), then maybe this oft-promised feature can make it to prime time.
September 8th, 2008 at 6:46 am
To ustobeitzbig: your comments remind me of the Confessions of an former CareerBuilder Sales Guy (http://www.cheezhead.com/2008/06/22/ex-careerbuilder-sales-rep/) posting a few months ago. Ad hominem attacks against the CEO due to your inability to close or convince your client base is laughable.
Sounds all too similar to the ex-CareerBuilder sales folks that couldnt close, then blamed CB sales training and some alleged directive that they couldnt call HR for their own inability to succeed.
September 8th, 2008 at 9:59 am
I have never seen the profile builder on itzbig so it may have taken 30 or 60 minutes which would of course have an extremely high abandon rate by everyone. Job seekers on our site build a matching profile in less then 180 seconds and so far we have 2.3 million profiles built. I cannot speak for the other “matching sites” but I don’t think getting the profile is the hard part. There are 2 barriers we have had to overcome.
Critical mass – You need tens of thousands of jobs to create any value for job seekers. You need hundreds of thousands of profiles to create value for employers. This is usually not attained and this is what leaves a wake of frustrated job seekers and employers.
Matching – You need an algorithm that can take the information captured by both sides and connect the best ones.
Again, I don’t think capturing information (profile building) was the problem but I have never seen their profile builder.
September 8th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Silly, talk about ad hominem. When multiple people at a small company contunually tell the CEO what the clients are saying, while closing sales by the way, and that valuable information is dismissed out right, who else is there to blame.
The company had successes and prospects that were willing to move the company forward.
You weren’t there so I won’t take to much stock in your comments, but felt you needed a fuller picture.
September 8th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
an algorithm ?
Job match is more chemistry than math.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I think that this will be pretty consistent with the matching systems that are out there. JobFox being the biggest offender, but someone keeps dumping $$ into them. I think that in the end, its a fundamental refusal to leverage networking and human contact. You can get a better feel for a “fit” byu a conversation than some overblown matching system. If it were that easy, we’d all be married, after posting 1 personal ad. :)
September 10th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Job Match is more work than posting a job, filling out a profile or pressing a button. They keyword here is “work”, remember that?
September 11th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Chad, in general I would disagree. Job matching combines job posting and resume searching into one simple process. Posting the job takes as long as any other site although I will agree whether keyword or matching some sites have a better UI then others.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Great technology and they had the profiling for the candidate side down to a few minutes. The problem with matching is, as many of your readers correctly point out, it’s the time it takes to enter data. The recruiter side is a problem they attempted to solve in ways that wouldn’t work – wouldn’t scale and were just wrong. Others in the matching game are doing the same today and will meet the same problems tomorrow.