Yesterday 2 of us attended a New York University (NYU) Full-Time Job Fair and I have to say — what a captive audience to talk to hiring managers, recruiters, and active job seekers all in one setting. Talking to so many hiring managers, the resounding comment we kept hearing was that hiring online just doesn’t work right now. They were all receptive to roundpegs.com and the idea of having technology filter the number and quality of candidates they see. Every single hiring manager appreciated the comparison to “online dating for jobs” — and hopefully a majority of them come to roundpegs.com to see their potential matches!

Speaking to fresh, newly graduated job seekers was something else. Literally every student was looking for a job and willing to try anything to get one. We saw a definite increase in traffic right after the event.

The whole experience of “in person”marketing at a event with so many captive decision makes and users was great — in the age of online marketing, paid search, banner advertising, email campaigns, and various other methods that move us further away from the customer and treat them more as a number, it was refreshing and energizing to speak to our actual customers, communicate value, and ultimately hand them a card with the location of our business — http://www.roundpegs.com.

We believe that roundpegs.com is going to change the online recruitment game. Heres why:

Employers get

1. Quality, compatible relevant matches.
2. Save time by getting reducing the number of unqualified candidates – roundpegs.com pre-screens for you
3. Private Messaging system to communicate with candidates – to pre-screen them yourself
4. Public Messaging system to allow potential candidates to post public questions (and you answers) to create viral buzz around your job posting (employers can moderate this!)
5. a FREE service that actually works! If you’re an employer, post a job today.

Job Seekers Get

1. Quality, compatible job postings that match their needs and preferences
2. Save time sifting through 1000s of job postings – no need to keyword search
3. Private communication with employers to figure out if the job is for you before applying
4. Public communication with employers so that questions about the job are available to view for all
5. It’s FREE! Create a profile today — even if you have a job you can find out about new opportunities.

If you’re an employer or are looking for a job or are employed but open to hearing about opportunities, check us out!

Our goal in the next few months — to grow our user base and connect job seekers to employers.

However, we need help.

1. Partners — we’re looking for strategic partners to build reach to be able to talk to more job seekers and employers
   • are you a job board? a recruitment agency? a recruitment blogger? got connections? If you’d like to join our team and help build a community of job seekers and employers, email us at mail@roundpegs.com
2. Investors — we’re looking for investment to use specifically for driving more job seekers and employers
   • Interested in the idea and want a piece? Email us at mail@roundpegs.com — we are looking to use any and all investment to build a userbase and help people find jobs and hire effectively online.

In closing — roundpegs.com is going to try its best to fix the online recruitment industry — but we need your help!

Post a Job

Create a Job Seeker Profile

Email us at mail@roundpegs.com if you want to partner or invest!

Some of the similarities include

1. You have requirements

As a job seeker, you know what you are looking for – and there are certain drop dead requirements you aren’t willing to bypass. You need to make X dollars a year, you need Y benefits, and such. You want to work in Z city. We all have requirements that we aren’t willing to compromise in our job search.

As a dater, you also know what you are looking for – and aren’t willing to budge on. Perhaps you have religious beliefs. Perhaps you don’t date someone that watches reality shows. Regardless, we aren’t willing to compromise on some things in our search for a mate.

2. You have preferences

Job seekers have alot of “soft” preferences – things that make a job more attractive – and thus give it a higher score relative to other jobs. For example, to some a casual dress code gives it high points. To others, having a games room with ping pong and foosball make that office more attractive and fun. These are not make-or-break items, but greatly contribute with the attractiveness of a job.

Daters also have such preferences – some of us prefer dating someone who have a certain shade of hair color, or have a certain affinity for a partner that likes watching some obscure re-run of a tv show on weeknights. These quirks are things that contribute to the attractiveness of a partner.

2. You know who you are

A job seeker is able to define what you are – so that you can be represented online. And no, a resume doesn’t do you justice. You can and should have an online profile that defines you – your requirements, preferences, your experiences – who you really are. This is a better spark of interest than a generic resume.

Daters also do the same with the idea of an online profile that is a glimpse of you for others to see and spark interest.

3. You’re looking for something new

Both job seekers and daters are in the same mindset – they are looking for something fresh and new that matches their needs and preferences. They are a captive, engaged audience.

4. You want to be matched

Most job sites don’t do this well. They make you do all the work – enter in keywords, sift through results, and qualify job postings yourself. Its like a big classified section that you click through. All you want to do is see jobs that are relevant to you, and have the technology do the work. But at the heart of it, you want to be matched with someone you want, and someone that wants you.

Online dating has gone a far way to simplify the process. Once you have created a profile, the technology matches you and shows you people that would be a good fit and are looking for others like you.

5. The Human Element – The Dance

This is what it’s all about. The “getting to know each other” phase. It’s like a dance. You try to impress each other. Every thing you say matters. Bring your A-game.

You don’t want to commit right away – you want to flirt and screen. Imagine if people selected mates by looking only at a profile!

As a job seeker courting an employer and vice versa, this stage seems to be rushed. There seems to be a rush to bring someone in and interview them right away – wasting alot of time. It would be more worthwhile to have a “courting” stage where you get to know each other, pre-qualify and pre-screen each other.

On the dating side, this is common. It is very common for online daters to get to know each other online for weeks until they actually meet in person.

What does this all mean?

Our idea, roundpegs.com, aims to bring together some of the ideas I’ve written about here. There is alot of ideas working in the world of online dating that can be applied to finding a job and recruiting online.

One thing to note is that matching job seekers to employers is only half the battle. Its key to bring job seekers and employers together, but the real value is enabling conversations and connecting the two parties – which allows both sides to pre-screen each other and introduce the human element of figuring out if a job is for you.

Why Aren’t Job Boards Working?

• too many results that aren’t a good fit
• keyword searching provides inaccurate, irrelevant matches
• finding a match is too time consuming
• limited ability to pre-screen online

Anyone have any more ideas why job boards aren’t working online right now? Lets get some conversations going.

I think what will really push the needle (for job boards to become a bigger player) is to build a tool that will connect and match recruiters and employers to higher quality job seekers. Ideally a computer agent that sorts through the marketplace of jobs and job seekers and brings together the relevent parties. We’re hoping to do this by connecting compatible job seekers and employers.

Everyone wants to know where they will work – what the neighborhood is like, what the commute is like, what amenities are nearby, and just an idea of where it is on a map.  Part of the process of finding a job is figuring out if its a good fit for you, and part of that fit is how comfortable you are with the office location.

What would be more valuable to the consumers of job data – job seekers and job posters (employers) – would be to have richer data surrounding a job – metadata. The Recruiting Animal, FRACAT, and jobster talk about this.

Metadata would include

• in depth tagging
• assigning categories to different aspects of a job (company size, industry, etc)

There are many benefits to building metadata around jobs and job seekers

• better searching for jobs
• better for matching job seekers to jobs and employers
• Metadata helps to bridge the semantic gap
• better for SEO to have jobs and resumes appear in Google Search
• more hierarchical data
• normalized job data
• association with other types of media with similar metadata – ie a job tagged “silicon valley” could be associated with images from flickr tagged “silicon valley” so that users see images associated with the area.
• similar jobs easier to categorize

Image galleries online made the move to metadata a long time ago (flickr). Mail made the move to metadata recently (gmail and ‘Labels’ on incoming email). Everywhere on the internet we are seeing metadata and tags. It’s about time we start associating this kind of data with job. Check out the meta data we gather in our matching process at roundpegs.com.

I’ve been unsuccessfully looking for a candidate for this job opening for a couple weeks now. So — today I decided to go all-out with what I could, with one constraint – i didn’t want to spend money on a job posting. I’m looking for someone straight out of school, someone hungry and wanting to learn and willing to work alot.

So. I became a job posting machine. NYU. Columbia. NYU Polytechnic University. University of Waterloo. Posted on all their boards. Craigslist – yeah, I went there (not free, but only $25). I even went so far as to post on my Facebook profile!

Later today I thought to myself — wait a minute. I just posted to 6 different locations. With 6 different username/password combinations. With 6 different url’s to visit. Arg! I wish there was one place I could post a job, and that one place would just work. Not having to go to 6 places to post a job would be nice.

So – this is our goal. One place. To post a job. And make it all work.

Cut to 2007 — and you are looking for a job — and the way you represent yourself to a potential employer hasn’t changed since 1994 — the old-school, vintage, Microsoft Word resume.

I won’t go into the drawbacks and issues of depending on a Microsoft Word document as the “definition of you” in a job application — that could be an article itself.

The web hasn’t changed the idea of a “resume” in a job application, but it has changed the game in that employers can now research candidates. As an employer, I regularly google potential candidates, check up on their myspace and/or facebook profiles, and generally e-stalk them a little bit to really find out what they are about. If the candidate has a blog, even better. A perfect opportunity to get some dirt!

Whats interesting to me is how job candidates and society will react to this change in information power. What I see happening is a new, improved, Resume 2.0 — an “entity” online that represents you, that can be tagged and categorized with meaningful data, musings and blog posts associated with it, and a online, living “profile” of who you are, what you can do, and what you can do.

Resume 1.0 — the vintage, Microsoft Word doc was a file with some data about you.

Resume 2.0 — will be a robust, online entity of you as a job seeker — that uses your data to work for you – connect you with the employers that are looking for “entities” like you, expose meaningful information about you, and improve the way you are represented digitally.