Review - Job Board: Company Meet Creative

I got a tip about a new job board called "Company Meet Creative" which has just launched this past week in the U.K. (actually in a town within the U.K.) What I notice right off the bat is how simple the site is. Founder James Young tells me that he purposely made it easy to remove many of the distractions that other job sites have. The design is very Web 2.0... just look at the bubbley logo!

I asked James to give me his thoughts on why Company Meet Creative is different/better than the competition. He replied, "Where CMC differs from other jobsites is the element of giving creatives an opportunity to build a portfolio for themselves which they can then use to simply apply for jobs on the site with one click - which then sends the employer a copy of the portfolio to review and download cv's, work samples and view urls etc. Employers can of course do the normal job posting as you would expect but can also opt to browse through the profiles of the creatives and contact them directly if they have a suitable/interesting vacancy. It's all about adding more two-way communication than you see on a lot of job sites."

The site is completely free for job applicants and £99 ($200) per job posting and/or access to full applicants portfolios. I also noticed today that Monster has reduced their per job postings to $375/per posting. (CMC is free until June)

What's good about CMC is that you can create an in-depth portfolio. Show sample work both links and graphics and you can create a skills overview as welll. I guess on the flip side, you can't share it with anyone unless they pay the fee. I think that might be a limiting aspect from the job applicant side. I would suggest allowing the creatives' profile to be displayed in full, but contact details are hidden until the employer pays.

I like that they have decided to start local. While they say you can register from anywhere in the world, I would almost discourage that. Having one applicant from the U.S. and one from Germany makes the site seem sparse, whereas having only applicants from the regions within the U.K. they select will help them to really focus.

Some other suggestions would include:

• Offering a RSS feed so job applicants can view the openings from anywhere
• Offering a variety of widgets so local company web sites can feature jobs on their sites
• I would look at getting out into the local area and going door-to-door and agency-to-agency
• Own local, then regional, then look at expanding out further
• Perhaps attempt to work with other local job sites, creating a "local network" whereby each site passes to each other when a local from another location appears
• Find creative/developer web sites to partner with to display the jobs on. For example, I could do an IP lookup and if you are from the area which CMC serves, then it shows you available jobs. If not, you see a job widget from another provider.

I like the look and the function of the site and think that if they pound the local pavement, this just might be a winner. Also check out our other job board reviews and other content.