Blog of YorZ

We woke up yesterday morning to a pleasant surprise.  Springwise featured us in their monthly email newsletter.    It’s a nice write up and we’re flattered to be included in a pub that bills itself as the “worlds leading source for promising new business ideas, concepts, and innovations” with a readership of 65,000 business professionals.

Heath Row at FC Now (the Fast Company blog) also commented on the Springwise piece.   He poses the question: “When was the last time you started looking for a new job — for someone else?”  It’s a good question.  Our experience would indicate that, while perhaps not attractive to everyone, matchmaking (for jobs and other things) is a favorite pastime for a lot of folks.   People do it for a variety of reasons - professional recruiters even do it for a living.

Last night we updated the site with several shiny new featurettes including one item that should help you keep track of files submitted by referrers and candidates (e.g., resumes, cover letters, referrals).  For employers, these files are now accessible from the candidate evaluation pages in MyYorZ.  Referrers and applicants need only visit the “Applications & Referrals I’ve Made” tab in MyYorZ to access the files.

Employers - don’t worry if you need to receive all files by email.   We’ll keep delivering them that way, too.

Also, if you use YorZ’s candidate rating system (1 to 5 stars) and Confidential Notes feature, having the resume and other files available on MyYorZ will give you a more complete online record.  Plus, you won’t need to search your email archives anymore to find a candidate’s info.  You’ll have ready access to the data now and in the future.

Let us know what you think at feedback@yorz.com.

Congrats to the Jobster crew on their recent…wait for it…$19.5 million Series B financing. The Seattle Times has the story including an itty bitty mention of YorZ!

Jobster seems to have built a cool, albeit pricey, solution for large corporations willing to invest time and money to build their talent networks. It’s exciting to see several leading employers try their solution. While Jobster and YorZ are different services catering to different sized companies (see one comparison here), both companies embrace the idea that online services can help identify qualified job candidates.

Don’t have a Fortune 500 budget? Take a few minutes now to post FREE on YorZ. Here is how to get the most out of your post:

• If you want, offer a bounty to attract more attention. Set payment conditions you’ll be happy with.
• Repost your listing wherever you think it may be relevant. YorZ will repost it for you to Craigslist at a 33% discount.
• YorZ will promote your listing to members of our network.
• Email your listing to your network of contacts.
• Add your job listings to a blog or website –YorZ’s BountyRoll feature will give you the necessary snippet of HTML. Once you set-up your BountyRoll it runs for all future listings you post on YorZ.

See what happens.

YorZ tracks the interest in your listing (pageviews, emails, referrals, and candidates). You can privately rate candidates and easily sort by your ratings to manage your candidate queue.

Let us know how it goes - send us your feedback at feedback@yorz.com.

You sure wouldn’t think there was an impending labor shortage coming if you were hanging around YorZ HQ in recent months. The YorZ population boomlet continued last week with the right-on-time arrival of the very lovely Evangeline Chu (pictured). Congrats to YorZ’s Rod Chu and wife, Juliana!

Despite our best efforts, not every post on the Blog of YorZ is worth reading, quoting on your own blog, or sharing with friends, but this post is.

For a limited time, we will repost your YorZ listing to Craigslist at a 33% discount. We hope this offer saves you money (up to $25) and time—we’ll do the reposting on your behalf.

Plus, YorZ’s candidate tracking features will organize your queue, track key listing statistics, and email you copies of the applications.

As we said in our Monster Killers post, YorZ and Craigslist make a great combination for many job listings.

This offer is valid for salaried, full-time positions. Employer name must be included in listing.

Ok, maybe the title of this post is a little over-reaching, but with all the hoopla in the sector, we needed to cut through the clutter. We recently launched some exciting new and often requested features that could save employers buckets of money and help better employers and high-quality candidates connect.

1. Improved listing tracking. Now when you post to YorZ, we display a number of stats you’ll want to know in My YorZ (see screenshot - click for larger view):
• number of pageviews for your listing
• total number of times your listing has been emailed by YorZ users
• total number of times you emailed your own listing and to whom
• number of candidates
• number of candidates still “under evaluation”
2. Simplified candidate queue. Easily rate (and sort) candidates on a 1 to 5 star scale in your candidate queue. Mark multiple candidates “not hired” at once and optionally allow YorZ to notify candidates of their status. We’ve also simplified public feedback. (see screenshot - click for larger view)

   

3. Startup and Bounty Jobs filters. We added two new filters to YorZ to help referrers and applicants find relevant opportunities more quickly:
• Startup jobs – Filters search results to opportunities at startup jobs. There are now over 500 great startup opportunities on YorZ.
• Bounty listings – Filters search results to listings offering bounties

As always, please let us know if you have feedback or suggestions – feedback@yorz.com.

If you haven’t already read it, check out last week’s article from the Washington Post about the job aggregators and their potential impact on the major job boards. We agree that the aggregators will put pressure on the job boards to justify their high listing fees over time, but for now, the job boards still attract more than 20X the traffic.

The more immediate threat for the big job boards comes from Craigslist. Craigslist already generates more traffic than any of the big three job boards (Monster, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs) – and its traffic is rising quickly (see chart). While you might think that everyone on Craigslist is looking for a hot date on Saturday night, jobs is Craig’s #1 traffic area (see last question).

In our conversations with dozens of recruiters, we consistently hear that Craigslist delivers better and more local results than the big three job boards, especially for folks located in Craigslist’s most penetrated markets (SF, LA, NYC). Plus, at $0 to $75 per listing, Craigslist fees are only a small fraction of what you’ll pay to list on the big boards.

As those of you that have read about YorZ or who have posted a listing on YorZ already know, we encourage all recruiters to get the word out in as many places as you can, but if you have to pick just one place to repost your YorZ listing, we’d most often pick Craigslist. Now when you post to YorZ, you have the option of having us repost your YorZ listing to Craigslist saving you the time of taking the additional step as well as consolidating your candidate queue on YorZ.

One of the more interesting developments in online recruiting over the past year has been the [re-]emergence of job search sites. These services aggregate millions of job listings from a variety of sources including major and niche job boards and corporate web sites. The value prop is clear: visit one site and find more jobs. For employers, the job aggregators provide free exposure.

These sites have been gaining momentum quickly (see chart). YorZ listings are indexed by Indeed, SimplyHired, and Oodle among others and we’ve noticed a steady increase in traffic we receive from these sites.

While the exposure you’ll receive from the aggregators’ indices is still small compared with what the major job boards can deliver, the (free) price is right and the early users may be an even more attractive and tech-savvy slice of the applicant pool than you’ll find on the major boards. Plus, like YorZ, these services offer email job alerts and RSS feeds for high-quality passive candidates to stay abreast of new job opportunities.

Time will tell if aggregators become the front end for online job searching or if job boards stay on top. Or, as we suspect, some symbiotic middle ground. We’ll be watching this space closely.

These days, it seems that corporate blogs are becoming so commonplace that an initial post explaining why you’re doing it isn’t really necessary. Most folks seem to skip the initial “Hello World” post and jump right in. We’ll largely do the same.

Suffice it say, we’re excited about our new blog as a place where we can share YorZ news (both good and bad), comment on trends in the recruiting industry and, we hope, engage all of you in a discussion about facilitating the perfect match between employer and employee. Comments and trackbacks are welcome.