Standout Jobs Archive

Standout Jobs is a Canadian company that launched a year ago and their service allows companies to create recruitment portals to help publicize their openings along with offering a better process for applicants.

Today the company has announced a number of new pieces of functionality to the Standout Jobs offering. The first update allows companies to setup chats with interested parties. The chat functionality comes from TinyChat and can be thought of as a simple way to setup an online career fair.

On the job listings side, they have added the ability to feature a Twitter account on the page. This gives potential applicants a chance to see what the company is up to.

There is also a new option for an expanded bio page (they call it a "people widget"). The bio page can include links to all of the social services a person is a member of – see a screenshot below. 

Also check out Standout Jobs’ founder Benjamin Yoskovitz’s post on tips for hiring top talent at startups.

StandoutJobs is announcing a partnership with Scribd tonight. The partnership takes Scribd’s iPaper application and brings the functionality to StandoutJobs’ Reception candidate tracking system. The idea is pretty simple – rather than forcing the Reception user to download a resume and then view it in the application that created the resume, now they can view it directly inside of the candidate’s folder. The employer can also view supporting documents using iPaper as well.

While founder Benjamin Yoskovitz doesn’t make any references to the candidate side, I assume any documents that the employer wants to share with the candidate could also utilize the iPaper plugin.

What I like about this partnership is that it will allow candidates to upload the formats that work best for them — they aren’t forced into Microsoft Word or a PDF. 

Here’s an example of the iPaper integration:

Check out Benjamin’s tips for hiring top talent at your startup.

Hiring at startups is hard. You’re swamped, running in a ton of different directions and don’t necessarily have a big budget set aside for recruiting. But hiring top talent at startups is essential. You can’t afford to hire anything but A-players. Sadly, too few startups dedicate the time needed to recruit properly.

David Lefkow has a great article titled Recruiting Guide for Startups. It’s a must-read for any startup founders (or employees). It’s also extremely valuable for non-startups too — smaller companies from 200 people and down will have all of these issues.

I want to follow-up on David’s points with some extensions and a few others:

1. Get everyone involved in the hiring process. David rightfully says that the CEO must be involved in the hiring process. It’s surprising how rare this is in so many companies, including startups. I see the problem most acutely with slightly larger startups (once they get past 30 or so people), because they now have “department managers” or even the makings of an HR department. CEOs have to be involved in the hiring process, but so does everyone else! Most companies – when hiring a programmer for example – will have a developer conduct at least one interview. But I would recommend having the applicant speak to multiple developers (even at the same time) as well as people in other departments. In a startup, everyone has to work very closely together and be completely aligned, so get as many people involved in the hiring process as possible.
2. Recruit constantly. In David’s post he talks about having a talent pipeline. I agree 100%. The fact is that you and everyone at your startup needs to be recruiting constantly. This is one of our fundamental beliefs at Standout Jobs.
3. Build a positive reputation in the local community. Most startups hire locally because of the cost & time involved in hiring people from elsewhere. And one thing startups can do to help is build up a positive reputation and brand in their local community. Make sure you participate at local events. Make sure current employees are speaking openly about the work environment. Make sure people know your story as a startup, and where you’re headed. Get people excited. Get them feeling like they know your startup is a great place to work, even if they haven’t worked there. That positive reputation will work wonders to draw people to you.
4. Focus on personality and cultural fit above everything else. Startups live and die by the quality of the people. It’s as simple as that. And many things can be overcome – like a lack of experience – but you can’t fix a broken culture or team spirit without going through some serious problems first. It only takes one bad apple in a small startup to derail everything. So make sure the person you’re hiring fits in culturally. That’s a big reason to have lots of people involved in the hiring process. And don’t compromise on this – no matter how desperate you are to bring on additional people.
5. Don’t oversell stock options. All startup employees expect stock options. And they should be a part of a startup employee’s compensation package. But don’t try and oversell them. Don’t try and blow people away with the huge valuations you’ll get in the future, and how you’ll IPO for billions in 2 years and the soon-to-be-hired employee will be rich beyond his wildest dreams. It shows a lack of respect to candidates if you try and dazzle them too much with stock options. They’re there, every employee should get them, and I hope they’re worth something someday … but you better have more to sell candidates than that.
6. Don’t over-hire. As Mark MacLeod points out, salaries are your biggest expense, so you need to be extremely careful about your growing ranks. Mark makes the point that you should question every hire, and really be sure that the position you’re making available is a necessary one, and once it’s filled that will bring incredible value to the startup. If that’s not the case, don’t hire. Plus, the more you control your hiring, the more likely you’ll avoid hiring the wrong person.

Every hire in a startup is critical. Make a mistake in the first handful or so and you can literally destroy your startup in a flash. Recovering from bad hires early in the game is extremely tough. And costly. But hire the right people – get top talent in the door that gel beautifully – and magic happens.

Ben Yoskovitz is CEO & Co-Founder of Standout Jobs, a startup helping companies hire the best talent through marketing and promoting their employer brand and jobs more effectively. He also blogs regularly about startups and entrepreneurship at Instigator Blog.

Standout Jobs is a Canadian company presenting their service at DEMO this week. The service allows companies to create recruitment portals to help publicize their openings along with offering a better process for applicants. Having been through integrations with some of the largest HR systems, Standout Jobs is a breath of fresh air.

Standout Jobs positions themselves for startups and companies small enough to not need a full back-end system. Most startups just use an emailbox for resumes and applicants which can cause many issues down the road. The Standout Jobs system named RECEPTION includes the following:

• full career site – the typical career site with job listings, company information, benefit information, etc. There are also social media tools and principles, including video, blogging and widgets
• candidate management – this could be the best piece of the service as it allows you to pass the applications internally and add comments, rating, etc. It will keep the records for you
• job marketing – allows you to publicize the jobs in the system on other boards, offer feeds, etc.

The service is free for the first 90 days then it’s offered starting at $149/month. I’d suggest they look at a lower price point for small startups – if they get in the door while the startup is small, they can grow with the startup and move them up in price point along the way. They might also look at partnering with the job boards that blogs offer to display jobs – would be a good way to beat Monster and the other large job boards/recruitment management services.

There are a few companies already signed up to use the service including FreshBooks and Jangl.

I’ve spent a good bit of time speaking with co-founder Benjamin Yoskovitz over the past few weeks and he is committed to making Standout Jobs the best career recruitment service. The difficult part will be in selling the service over not just using an emailbox for candidate management, especially for the smaller companies.

Here is a sample portal using Freshbooks:

Screenshot of the admin dashboard:

Below are four of the newest startups according to Killer Startups for the period ending October 11, 2007. Check out previous Killer Startups posts.

TravelersTable.com – Step Up Offline Meetings

TravelersTable.com is a social network that brings people together in real life; yes you actually get to meet people you have met online in person. You can use TravelersTable.com for many things, to meet potential employers/employees, meet alumni, clients, romance interests, others with common interests, basically anyone you meet at TravelersTable.com. read more »

StylePath.com – Style-Driven Products

StylePath has developed and patented a better way to shop online for style-driven products like jewelry, shoes, home decor, and accessories. Users create a style profile by quickly rating a few test images. StylePath’s patented technology then finds aesthetic patterns in the ratings and matches them to products with similar attributes from a range of websites. read more »

SplashTop.com – Instant Net Access Without the Wait

Here’s an idea, (a rather interesting one too) to chew over: computing, surfing the web, checking your email, all good and normal stuff, when your computer is in that in-between zone, still booting up, not fully on and functional. SplashTop lets you do just that. With SplashTop your computer is ready to use within moments of turning it on; you needn’t wait for it to boot—just start chatting, IMing, and mailing away, nothing so harrowing as boot-up time will get between you and your net needs. read more »

StandOutJobs.com – Video Job Ads

StandOutJobs.com has a visual way of posting job opportunities. Do you every feel like each job description you read is the same? Do you wish you could get a better idea of a company before the interview? Well at StandOutJobs.com you can get a whole lot more information about companies and positions by seeing job opportunities that feature videos. read more »

Polyvore.com – Make A Fashion Statement

Polyvore.com is a site that lets you create your own fashion and share it with friends. Do you find yourself cutting and pasting different clothing items together to create trendy outfits? If you do then Polyvore.com is the perfect site for you. Polyvore.com lets you combined clothing items you find on the web to create the ultimate outfits. You use the Polyvore editor to create your outfits. read more »