Blog of YorZ

We may have jumped the gun a bit with the headline from our last post.

Ever since our August release, YorZ has not had the normal spring in its step. Many pages, especially the homepage have been slow and not as stable as we would like. And the performance problems have been exacerbated by increasing site traffic and a lot more listings.

We took a step toward addressing some of the most offensive issues tonight with a new deployment. The site should run faster and be a lot more stable. We’ll continue to improve site performance in coming releases. Please let us know if you spot a slow feature or bug that needs attention.

With the site more stable and closer-to-zippy, we’re gearing up to launch some exciting new stuff. Stay tuned.

Tonight we made the most exciting update to YorZ since our launch. We introduced a number of new features designed to help our members find great jobs and job candidates by leveraging professional networks. This addition is true to our belief that personal referrals are the best way to open up career opportunities. We think these features make a great complement to YorZ Groups, referral tracking and job board listings already available on YorZ.

So why should you connect to friends and colleagues on YorZ?

Connecting with other YorZ members will give you access to job opportunities, professional experts and job candidates in your extended network. Your network enables you to discover connections you have to other YorZ members (e.g., employers, candidates, service providers) and opportunities through the people you already know.

Each time you add a connection on YorZ, you’ll increase the number of opportunities and people available to you. If you’re an employer, connecting with people gives you a new way to use YorZ to leverage your network to identify top job candidates and partners for your business or to get references.

YorZ offers unparalleled ability among today’s job boards and online networking tools to target and connect with the right information and people. YorZ search enables you to home in on opportunities based on keyword, category, location, bounty value, and listing source. Listing sources not only include specific people and companies, but also the various layers within your network (i.e., your friends, friends-of-friends, friends-of-friends-of-friends) and your YorZ groups. When you post a listing, you decide who to target: specific groups and/or layers of your network, or everyone in which case we’ll put your listing on YorZ’s public board and broadcast it to the major job search engines.

Oh, and membership and posting on YorZ remain free.

We’ve included some other goodies in this release, too, to help you take advantage of the new features. Highlights include:

• One Alert Email to rule them all. We’ve beefed up our alerts feature, so that YorZ can now deliver to you a single daily or weekly email of listings relevant to your specific interests. Tailor your alerts to include listings targeting by keyword, category, listing source (your network and/or groups or everything), location, and bounty value. Create a job alert.
• Unified Search Results. We simplified YorZ search results, so that all of your listings are now viewable in a single integrated list of results.
• Navigation Tabs. We made a number of usability improvements. For starters, we’ve added navigation tabs across the top of most pages in hopes of making it easier to get around on YorZ. You may have seen these tabs before - we used the nifty Yahoo Design Patterns library.
• Improved Member Profiles. Adding your professional and eductional history keeps getting easier. In addition, your profile page now lists off all your connections on YorZ. Edit your profile now.

Like all changes to YorZ, these come from the feedback we get from site users. Thank you for the input and please keep it coming (feedback at yorz .dot. com). Given the scope of these site changes, there will most definitely be bugs that need fixing. If you happen to spot any, please send us that feedback, too, and we’ll get right on them.

If you’re reading this post on the Blog of YorZ, you’ve probably already noticed that we moved the blog from Six Apart’s TypePad to the possibly more fully featured WordPress platform. WordPress is freely available (read YorZ friendly) assuming you already have a place to host it and it is open source to boot.

If you are reading this post in your news reader, we hope you haven’t noticed any changes. Please use the feed in the right sidebar if you want to re-subscribe to our feed.

Let us know if you notice any weirdness that needs fixin’.

We switched to a new full service hosting provider last night - Contegix.  We are very excited about them - the site should be zippier and response time to issues will be faster.  Any hosting shift will have a kink or two, so if you noticed a bug or two since the transition, let us know:  feedback@yorz.com

Recruiters are busy people.  Hiring managers have a ton of priorities.  The last thing recruiters and hiring managers want when recruiting is a bunch of resume spam.  In our conversations with recruiters, it is clear that they would ideally find the needle without searching through the haystack.  While some openings are more specialized, recruiters want to fill most roles with qualified candidates that have the right to work in the US and live nearby.  Qualified, Legal and Local candidates are ready to start and add value immediately. 

When posting jobs, you often see recruiters put phrases like: “No H1-B visa sponsorship available”, “We do not provide relocation assistance” or “Please read the job description – qualified candidates only!”.  Even when these statements are not in a description, they are often the first areas probed during an email or phone screen.  This is smart recruiting - it narrows the field quickly so that the recruiter can focus on the best candidates.

YorZ tries to help companies hire better candidates through targeted groups, referrals and a simple candidate queue.  Now, job posters can choose to ask three quick questions of candidates:  Do you live within commuting distance?  What is your legal work status?  Are you qualified?  When presented with these questions, candidates with unfavorable responses (unqualified candidates, candidates that are not local, and candidates who need sponsorship) will often move on.  If they still apply, the recruiter sees the responses right on the application so that they can quickly screen.  You can read the quick questions and potential responses in our help section.

These three questions are great if you want to widen the net to find great people but you want to reduce resume spam.  For example, if you post on YorZ and repost elsewhere (e.g. Craigslist) while directing candidates to apply via the YorZ system, you should get a higher percentage of Qualified, Legal and Local candidates - and less resume spam!  It’s easy to implement - check a box during our free post a job listing process and the questions are part of your application page.  For candidates, it’s easy to respond, so you don’t inconvenience qualified candidates.  Qualified candidates should view the questions as a benefit since it increases the likelihood that the employer will read their application instead of being swamped by resume spam.

We hope your year is off to a terrific start.

Thank you to everyone who has explored YorZ Groups.  Groups are growing rapidly!  Hundreds of members have accepted invitations to join a group and many more have requested invitations.

Do we have a group for you?  This afternoon we enhanced YorZ Groups, so that we could accommodate more members while also keeping groups highly-targeted and relevant.

• More than 250 new and targeted groups - Join a group if you are…

• A student or graduate of any one of nearly 90 top colleges
• A student or graduate of any one of 50 top business schools
• A veteran of nearly 140 leading companies as well as law, consulting, and accounting firms
• Invited to join one of 10 targeted professionals groups

• More ways to join – Don’t have your alumni email address?  Moved to a different job, but still want to join an alumni group for a past employer?  Have someone vouch for you using the new and improved “Request an Invite” link on group homepages.

• Super-Groups - In order to make it easier for you to share jobs with more than one group, we are introducing Super-Groups (bundles of related groups).  When you post a listing to a Super-Group the listing is submitted to all of the constituent groups.  If you already joined one of the original multi-school or multi-company groups (e.g., Top Colleges or Web Titans), you’ll notice that you’re membership now appears as being in a group for your specific school or company.

Are we missing your profession, company or school?  Email us at feedback AT yorz DOT com.

Browse the YorZ Groups directory now.

You’ll also find a simplified YorZ homepage that now includes listings from your groups in addition to listings from the public board.  Let us know what you think.

Want to share a great job opportunity?  Post it free to relevant groups, super-groups and/or the YorZ public board.  All postings are moderated to ensure quality and relevance.

Lastly, please continue to send us your feedback and success stories (feedback AT yorz DOT com).

First, apologies for the dearth of posts this past month. We’ve had our noses down meeting with many of you and working on some new features and there hasn’t been as much time for blogging. We hope to get back to it, though, in the coming weeks.

So what have we been up to during our days-of-no-blogging? We’re glad you asked.

Tonight we quietly rolled out YorZ Groups - a collection of features that should further help top candidates connect with great companies. Groups are exclusive communities that bring together talented people that want to stay abreast and share quality job opportunities. They offer candidates a way to stand out and employers a way to reach a pre-qualified audience of top-notch passive candidates.

We’re starting with 10 groups spread across three categories:

• Top Schools - university alums and students
  • Top US Colleges
  • Top Engineering Schools
  • Top Business Schools

• Leading Companies - veterans of industry titans
  • Software Titans
  • Web Titans

• Respected Professionals - recommended by their peers
  • Accountants
  • Product Managers
  • Software Engineers
  • QA Engineers
  • UI / Web Developers

Group membership is by invitation only. Anyone can submit listings on YorZ and via group-specific email addresses, but all posts are moderated to ensure the high quality of the listings. Of course, listings can be viewed online, via email, or both.

Many invitations are tied to email addresses and domain names - often alumni or company addresses, so add all your email addresses to your YorZ profile to see your invites.

Please take a look and let us know what you like and what we can do better. Also, thank you to everyone that provided feedback and input on Groups. We know we still have a lot of improvements to make - keep the suggestions coming! You can send product suggestions, bugs or new group ideas to: feedback [at] yorz [dot] com.

Fresh from the Oodle blog - Craigslist content is no longer being included in the Oodle index. Evidently, Craigslist requested that its content not be crawled by Oodle going forward. It’s not yet clear if Craig is opting-out in response to some especially naughty act by team Oodle or if Craigslist just decided Oodle’s approach was more of a threat than a helpful traffic source.  Without knowing the motivation, we don’t see how this is good for consumers, but we can clearly see why it is good defensive move for Craigslist and bad news for Oodle.

A lot of folks are asking “why block Oodle and not the other aggregators (e.g., Indeed and SimplyHired) or even Google / Yahoo?” Indeed (no pun intended), the other aggregators must be asking this question and hoping that Craigslist doesn’t extend the blockade. As our last post suggested, it presents a huge problem (at least in the near-term) for the aggregators if the major boards opt-out of their indices – especially Craigslist given that it’s the biggest classifieds site.

The discussion on John Battelle’s Searchblog is also interesting. One reader speculates on the reason why Craigslist may be blocking Oodle:

“If one scraper is using too much from one source it DOES become infringement and competition. I’m not familiar with Craigslist’s specific beef with Oodle, but I suspect that’s it.”

Since the job-specific aggregators aren’t indexing all of Craigslist’s classifieds – only the job listings – perhaps Oodle will be the only man thrown overboard.

And, in case you were wondering, YorZ has no intention of blocking any of the aggregators from crawling our site at this time.

Despite all the criticism of job boards, it seems that many employers favor them even above their own websites. While we haven’t done a rigorous review of the posting patterns of employers on the boards, there’s ample anecdotal evidence. For instance, in looking at the 20 most recent listings for software programmers posted this morning on Craigslist San Francisco and Monster (10 from each site) we found that 13 (65%) listings were not found on the corporate website. The remaining 7 (35%) were found on the corporate website, but the listings aren’t always identical. We found a few examples of the job board listing including critical information that was omitted from the version on the corporate website – one corporate website version neglected to mention that a position was for the graveyard shift.

We’re not sure why companies don’t keep their listings in sync with what they post to job boards, but most of them must not see a positive enough return on the time investment it takes to keep the corporate website up to date. Maybe they don’t think people visit the jobs section of their site. Maybe it’s just too difficult to make changes.

It raises a couple other questions for us, too:

1. Why haven’t the ATS companies been more successful here? Many good companies sell great ATS products.
2. How credible is it that the job aggregators can exist without the cooperation of the major job boards?  Crawling corporate websites as the primary source of content seems like a flawed back-up plan if companies don’t start keeping their corporate websites up to date. And even if rising traffic from job aggregators gives employers more incentive to post open positions to their corporate websites, what confidence should job seekers have that stale listings have been taken down?

No, YorZ isn’t looking for a new chief engineer, but we know someone who is. Marketing guru Seth Godin needs a top-notch chief engineer to join his rapidly growing Web 2.0 startup. The offer is available on YorZ and at Seth’s blog. Please send your referrals or applications through YorZ.

We’re big Seth fans. In fact, he described a referral based web service with many similarities to YorZ in his seminal 2000 viral marketing e-book Unleashing the Ideavirus (free copy of original here). True to form, Seth practices what he preaches and he’s offering a nice bounty for this position. If you know someone top notch that would be a good fit, do yourself and your friend a favor and make a referral. If you are the right person, apply and Seth’s company will donate the money to the Red Cross if you are hired.