Last month I wrote about how the founders of Eggsprout, a Seattle-based tech job site, were working on a secret project – a new niche page that can be created and customized by you, the user. In essence, the site would be your very own social job board complete with your logo and visual design, job postings, blog postings, Twitter feeds, and discussion forums.
After a reader clued me in to the hush-hush venture, Brian Ma, one of the site’s founders, reached out to me with more details. He thought the timing was great to write a more in-depth profile since they officially launched last Friday with the help of 20 selected partners from all over the nation. Here’s our Q&A:
Brian, how was your ’secret’ beta period? What kind of improvements did you make?
Friday we launched our actual private beta. We invited 20 private beta users (selected out of a pool of 100+ users that I personally talked to) to start social job boards with us. In the past couple months, we’ve been operating in “stealth” mode in order to make sure we had the best platform possible for our beta users, and we’ve incorporated much of their feedback in this launch.
Our users are extremely excited about this platform as it fuses the best of two worlds – job boards and social networks. We’ve already made a bunch of improvements including backfill jobs, customized backgrounds, importing of Twitter and RSS feeds, forum email alerts, saved searches, and we’re working on a bunch more! As long as people keep using, we will keep building.
Who did you launch with? What industries are covered?
We’re trying a bunch of different things in the private beta and have incorporated a very diverse group of people: recruiters, recruiting firms, networkers, media companies, existing job boarders, colleges and universities, and even converts from Twitter. The power in this platform is that anyone can create a social job board in less than 10 minutes.
We’ll have job boards covering everything from wireless, to accounting, digital media, biotech, green jobs, social media, healthcare, IT, teens, cloud computing, sustainable energy, and more. Here’s just a sample of the some of the social job boards that will be launching first. You can see a more comprehensive and updated list on our homepage.
Recruiter Earth
Seattle Pacific University
Ex-Microsoft Network
@seojobs
Help wanted Hawaii
Singapore Social media
Australia IT/New media
ITJobFest/HealthcareJobFest
Teen job scene
California Recruiting Events
California Medical Career Network
What criteria did you use when selecting your 20 partners?
We were looking for people who shared our vision for revolutionizing the online job search and networking experience. I wanted people that had great ideas and weren’t afraid of going out and doing something totally crazy and different. Leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, networkers – these are people that you probably already see online trying out new ideas or leaders/officers of existing physical communities wanting to push their organization to a new level.
What is the advantage to using these social job boards over competitors?
To be honest, there are not a lot of people out there who are trying to do what we do. There are definitely people doing similar things like job boards like the Monsters and Careerbuilders, job board software like Jobtarget, and create your own social site like Ning and Wetpaint. We combine the best of all those worlds. I can go on and on about why we’re different than all of these sites, but it really comes down to this: we’re fusing two aspects of the job search experience – job boards and professional networking, and we believe that is a very powerful combination.
Eighty-five percent of people find their next job through networking yet most people are still on job boards submitting hundreds resumes and not getting results they want. There is gigantic gap right now between job boards and professional networks and we want to fix it. There is a lot of untapped potential here. Social job boards is only the first step to what we believe can be a solution to this problem.
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Interested in a beta code? I’ve got five to give away. Please email me for more info.
Popularity: unranked [?]
May 21st, 2009 at 9:01 pm
1 question: Who, if anyone, pays? The screen shot above indicates “free” and I browsed the associated sites in an attempt to understand their business model but was unable to satisfy my curiosity.
May 24th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
The thing that so many of these efforts are missing is the trust factor.
Why would someone want to join such networks, and how can one trust that one will connect with other legitimate people?
In the real world, people are incredibly scared of strangers. It used to not be that way. Yes, Networking worked because you knew people around your block, in your schools, churches and offices. People were willing to talk to you on the subway not thinking you were going to assault them.
Nowadays, you may have 5,000 friends on Facebook, and you don’t even know your next-door neighbor even if you live in an apartment complex of 500 units with 1 tenant each. Similar things happen with people on LinkedIn, including many who abandoned their profile and only created one because everybody else was doing it. They didn’t build up the industry contacts they wanted; if anything, technology made rejection even more rampant.
If you can get the technology to restore the trust that’s missing throughout society, you’ll have a winning product. Otherwise, this product like many others will have initial excitement at first, followed by tremendous disappointment when the contacts that could mean something don’t materialize.
May 27th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
@Catbert Thanks for checking out the sites. Right now, the business model is employers pay for job listings on the sites – similar to how other job boards work. Niche owners (people who setup these sites) have the flexible of choosing a price point that works for them.
@Glenn I totally agree. The fusion of job board + social means that we inherently need to capture (or recapture) that trust factor. A social community isn’t a community if people can’t be transparent enough because of a lack of trust. That is why we’re trying to bring real physical communities online instead of creating new ones just for the heck of it. (Ex. working with universities, existing professional groups, etc)