Job boards gotta launch: the latest in recruiting site startups

It’s been months since my last overview of new, new-ish, and interesting job boards / recruiting site startups / sites that refuse to be called job boards. Strangely enough, that hasn’t stopped the wave of entrants into our industry. So without further ado, let’s take a look at some of these contenders:

• Industry: With a good logo, one of those omnipresent ‘roll down the screen’ home pages, and a stylish design, Industry is aiming to be the LinkedIn of the hospitality world. It claims 2500 job seekers and 300 restaurants as of July 1. Reminds me a bit of ShiftGig.
• Planted: Planted (another ‘roll down the screen’ home page) focuses on creating a talent community for young professionals. Formerly known as Lynxsy (new name is an improvement, more or less), it seems to be serving primarily startups. One nice feature: job seekers get a bonus if they’re hired via the site.
• SpareHire: This site in the financial hiring sector is a bit like eLance (umm, guess I should say Upwork now) for financial whizzes. The consultants are vetted by the site, and the companies wanting to use them post a project – then wait for bids. Interesting twist on the usual model.
• SwoopTalent:  Call this one a ‘people aggregator in a box‘. SwoopTalent claims to have data-mined 160 million candidates and aggregated useful info about them – and they can also do the same for an employer’s internal database of candidates. Seems like a good idea.
• Jobbatical: The name is a combination of ‘job’ and ‘sabbatical’ – and “it means a professional career break where people use their skills and knowhow to work on an exciting project in a new team in a new environment.” In other words, are you unemployed and want to get the heck out of Dodge? This may be your site.
• Drafted: Another ‘roll down the screen’ site – do I sound cranky about this? – that promises big bucks from referrals. Companies post jobs, set a ‘reward’ for the job, and then candidates work their networks to refer their friends.
• JobSamurai: JobSamurai wants to be your favorite job alert – just enter a job title and location. The site is a front-end for Recroup, which is a job ad platform. However…when I search for a marketing job, the most recent results were from 3 months ago. Ouch.
• Klujo: Ok, this ‘scroll down’ look is a thing. Question is, is it too much of a thing? Anyway – Klujo is a ‘candidate engagement‘ tool – a Facebook app – for employers that uses gamification for screening. Looks good – curious to hear how it works for employers.
• Landing.jobs: Landing.jobs focuses on the tech sector, and they say “we believe that recruitment in tech is fundamentally broken.” Ok. So what do they do? The Portuguese-based site has you upload your profile, refer your friends – and if an employer hires you, they pay 1% of your salary as a fee. Hmm. Sounds liked Hired.com to me.
• Talent.io:  Speaking of sites that focus on the tech sector, want your referrals, and pay on hire – there’s Talent.io. One difference from Landing.jobs – they focus on the European tech community.
• Triplebyte: These folks get the JobBoardDoctor award for most interesting yet still on target name. And talk about focus – Triplebyte is for engineers seeking jobs at Y Combinator startups.  Plus, don’t forget: “Programmer interviews are broken.”
• Haystack.jobs: No, this is not a site for job-seeking farmers. Haystack.jobs is a recruiting platform that resembles SmartRecruiters and other recent startups: job posting, simple ATS, screening questions, and…job seekers can upload a 60-second video of themselves.
• WorkingNotWorking: A ‘curated’ site of freelancers in the creative industry. Employers pay a flat membership fee to access the freelancers. And yes, they also have a (very long) ‘scroll down’ home page. Not so creative, I think.
• Hotlrs: This site also focuses on the hospitality industry – specifically, hotels, resorts, and cruises. It promises to put job seekers in ‘direct contact’ with industry recruiters. Scroll down? Check.

Well, that’s plenty for this round. As you can see, the job board world is full of startups these days. A word to the wise, though: please reconsider that ‘scroll down’ design – it’s gonna date you as totally 2015!

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