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Posts Tagged ‘Job Openings’

Facebook-Like News Feed Headlines First Round Capital’s Redesigned Homepage

A visit to the typical homepage for a venture capital firm most likely provides a well designed landing page that spells out the firm’s mission with links to its portfolio companies and VC bios. Secondary to this general information is a page dedicated to press releases from the firm, or in many cases, a company blog with relevant posts. First Round Capital, however, recently redesigned its homepage to place a much heavier emphasis on real-time information from news sources and its VCs, and portfolio companies.

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The feed works in a similar fashion to Facebook’s news feed in that information is presented in a reverse chronological order. It includes news from its portfolio companies, third party news articles, as well as blogs, tweets and even Foursquare checkins from its team of VCs and entrepreneurs – all of which can be subscribed to using RSS. Also included in the feed and on its own dedicated section of the site are job postings from First Round’s portfolio.

“One of the most helpful things a VC can do for a portfolio company is to help them find key hires,” writes First Round Managing Director Josh Kopelman. “And the jobs section of our site contains well over 125 current job openings within our portfolio.”

The job postings complement First Round’s Key Hire Wire, a weekly newsletter released a few weeks ago containing job openings with its companies. First Round also helps its portfolio out by placing these openings on a Twitter account dedicated to blasting these openings out to the Twittersphere.

The revamped site also contains a new portfolio section with some interesting ways to navigate through the firms numerous companies. A standard list of current and former companies is supplemented by options for viewing a tag cloud of industries and other keywords, a map of company locations, or a feed of company tweets.

First Round, which recently snagged the top position (by a wide margin) on Larry Cheng’s list of the top VC firm websites based on average monthly traffic, is leading the way for VC firms with its innovative approach to its homepage. What better way to show potential companies that you not only invest in innovation but that you participate in it yourselves?

And venture firms aren’t the only group that can learn from First Round’s redesign. A news feed of aggregated content from various networks can be a unique approach to the homepage of any company. In startup culture, most entrepreneurs and employees have their own blogs, Twitter accounts, Foursquare accounts, as well as of a number of other social network accounts. Rather than linking out to individual employees and making visitors click out to a slew of different sites, why not provide a handy news feed of relevant information from your employees?

The new site is an excellent one-stop location for startups and entrepreneurs to find pertinent blogs and news, especially for those looking to Foursquare-stalk their favorite VC at the local coffee shop. First Round has created a definitive resource for anyone looking for information relative to the firm, its employees or its companies – a model any company could easily replicate. Let’s just knock-on-wood that Facebook doesn’t go waving its shiny new patent in anyone’s face too soon.

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Zoho Makes Another Move to be the IT of the Small Business Market

Zoho is making another move to serve as the IT department for the small business market. Its latest offering is a service for staffing agencies and human resources to automate the process for hiring people.

The new service, available now, is an applicant tracking system that helps staffing agencies and recruiting departments track job openings, resumes and candidates. The enterprise is stil heavily dependent on email and manual processes for any number of practices with human resources being no exception to the rule.

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Zoho’s strategy is to create a level of automation that makes a human resources functions manageable, a model they have used for the services they offer for sales, marketing and other functions in the enterprise.

Zoho Recruit has a number of features including web forms; the ability to aggregate resumes from social sites and ways to track the status of a client within the application.

Activity streams are emerging as a standard for new social enterprise products. In Zoho Recruit, though, the activity streams look more like simple views into the status of a job opening, profiles of other people on the team and the interviews on schedule for the day.

Here’s an overview of Zoho Recruit:

It’s clear that Zoho s gunning for the enterprise market with a focus on the small business sector. The company is increasingly perceived as a competitive threat to larger, more established companies. This is illustrated by a Microsft executive’s remark earlier this month that Zoho is a “fake” Microsoft office.

Zoho responded with FakeOffice.org, featuring a video they made in September, renaming it “Fake Office – the Movie.”

Zoho is a challenger to Salesforce.com in the small business market, whic has moved up market in the past few years. That approach has worked for Salesforce but in these markets the company faces deep pressures from larger competitors such as Oracle.

Zoho faces its own competition but it has a unique approach. Its products are varied, giving customers the feeling that they are using a service that is customized for their particular needs.

Plus, we like their videos. They explain their products. How about that?

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Roundup: Jobs hard at work on new tablet, Facebook not going on hiring binge, Wikipedia to review revisions on living people

Steve Jobs is really honestly definitely back at work, driving people crazy and working on that tablet you’ve read about — The Wall Street Journal confirms that His Steveness has been hounding employees just like the old days as Apple pushes to get its Crunchpad-like device out the door. Except that Apple’s tablet will be prettier, and it will have some crazy only-Apple-would-do-that gimmick to it, like the talking iPod. I’m hoping it has a button I can push that creates full-time job openings at the New York Times. Don’t laugh, Steve could make that happen if he wanted.

No, Facebook is not going to boost staff by 50 percent — Did you read that Mark Zuckerberg said he was going to hire a whole bunch of new staff now that nerds are cheap? The claim came from a Bloomberg article. VentureBeat checked with Facebook, and spokesman Larry Yu clarifies: “Mark didn’t make such a bold proclamation. This came up when the conversation turned to growth, and the point Mark was making is that we’ve made a conscious effort to not double, which can happen with many companies as they grow. Mark said we could grow by 40 – 50%, but there’s really no rush. Our efforts are of course predicated on finding the right people. To wit, at the end of 2008 we were around 800 people. We’re now around 1,000.”

Yes, Facebook will allow you to invite only the cool people to your events — Finally! When you create a new event in Facebook, it will optionally let you pick from the list of people you invited last time, so you don’t have to filter your friend list again. I’m supposed to write about how this is an amazingly clever feature and Mark Zuckerberg is a genius, just a genius. But really, we all know this thing is really an Unpopular Kids Remover, to be used by the kind of boneheads I went to high school with who conveniently forgot I existed until the day before a big trigonometry midterm.

Micropayments site Tipjoy goes bust after Facebook walks away — Co-founder Ivan Kirigin got himself a job at Facebook, but he and his wife failed to get the company to buy their startup. They’ve returned around $1 million to investors. A statement from the couple says, “It is clear to us that … a 3rd party payment service doesn’t add enough value. We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party.”

Wikipedia will begin to review changes to articles about living people before publishing them — The ongoing Skankblogger scandal has shocked Internet content contributors who presumed they could write whatever they wanted under a pseudonym without repercussions. Now, Wikipedia’s management has accepted that letting anyone write anything about anyone doesn’t always magically lead to the best biographies on the planet. “We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board told the New York Times. “There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

RIM acquires Torch Mobile — Worst thing about my BlackBerry? Its browser. Torch makes a browser built from the de facto standard Webkit source code that powers the lovely lovely Safari on my iPhone. Torch has been bought by BlackBerry maker Research in Motion.

SocialToo app lets you publish your Facebook updates onto Twitter — What, I couldn’t do this already? I thought I was just too lazy to figure out how to do it. But no, it’s new and Leena Rao at TechCrunch did a screenshot for me. Thanks!

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Social Recruiting Startup KODA Completes $3 Million Round Of Angel Funding

Social recruitment service KODA.us has just raised $1 million in funding from a group of private angel investors, bringing the total of seed investment injected into the San Francisco startup to $3 million.

KODA.us essentially wants to bring social networking and job recruiting together into one unified service, which it claims is “more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn”.

The idea is that by broadening the resume job seekers can submit or upload with personal attributes and relevant life experience, employers could get more extensive information about potential candidates based on profiles that are more personal than those usually found on traditional recruitment sites. On the other hand, KODA wants to give employers themselves the opportunity to portray job openings within the context of organizational branding, so that potential job candidates can get a feel of the corporate culture within companies before actually applying.

The site has only been in beta for two months after being in the making for the past two years. Jeff Berger, Co-Founder and CEO of KODA explains why he thinks traditional job boards are not cutting it anymore:

“Using a job board is like searching for a needle in a haystack. KODA gives you more needles, less haystack, and we’ve developed proprietary technology that facilitates a smoother recruitment process for both candidates and employers.”

I’m not so sure online job boards are that unsatisfactory at all, and this isn’t the first service to try and marry social networking with online recruiting. So far, I haven’t seen too many of those ventures get any significant traction, and I honestly think LinkedIn, XING and other comparable professionally-oriented social networks do a fine job with the recruitment part of the equation, even within the target group KODA is eying (GenY’ers).

That said, KODA says it’s seeing increasing traction even while it’s only been in beta for a short while, claiming it has established relationships with over 350 corporations, non-profit organizations and private businesses and already featuring thousands of job opportunities in various U.S. cities and regions. The main reason it has achieved the latter is that its crawler can pull up-to-date job listings directly from employers’ websites and put them on display on KODA.us.

I’m skeptical about KODA’s ability to make waves in this space. Your take?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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