Montreal Tech Watch

Fred Ngo and Ben Yoskovitz, two of the startup’s co-founders, are presenting standoutjobs today at DEMO, a high-profile conference for technology startups in Northern California.

Standoutjobs was started in March 2007 as a startup that would revolutionize the job market and give a way to companies to present themselves in a more attractive manner to job-seekers. However, apart from videos published regularly on their blog, there was not much info on what exactly they are doing.

I got to go through their product last week and it’s in essence a suite of tools that would allow companies find and hire the best talents.

Each company will have one page aggregating all relevant info - the company’s blog, comments, employees, job listings, perks etc. It’s presented in a widget manner, à la netvibes, with the objective of presenting the company as a great place to work at.

A company will also have access to an administration dashboard, which allows them to track buzz about their company, setup the page’s content and appearance, manage jobs and candidates.

I find the dashboard great, as it gives companies a solid and efficient way to manage their recruiting pipeline. There is for instance a nifty tool that can “broadcast” a job to popular websites, such as SvN, guy kawasaki’s blog, techcrunch etc. The interface is also very clear, and obviously, they spent a lot of time designing this section.

I think however they could spend more time on the client-side. I am not a fan of the “boxes” look (see first screenshot), it presents too much information, with no clear hierarchy, and I am not sure what first-time visitors will actually look at.

It makes business sense to make sure your end-users (here, companies) get an easy-to-use product; but they would actually come in droves if job-seekers get persuaded to join thanks to outstanding/awesome standoutjobs pages.

Of course, that’s just my opinion, and as I mentionned before, Standoutjobs has an “A” team that can make it happen and improve the product. Furthermore, we live in a time where people are switching jobs easily, staying a shorter time at companies, the result being that companies will actually have a harder time finding key talent. This is where Standoutjobs comes and where they can go big.