Quick Jobster Review

Just a quick post before I leave for work. Yesterday I had lunch with Dave Lefkow from Jobster who was in Australia on evangelising-type trip, and thanks again to Dave for picking up the tab.

After lunch we sat at a bar in Southbank and he gave me a quick demo of the product. Unfortunately the demo was just Flash-based as we had no WiFi, when will be get more Wife spots in Australia? From what I saw the tool is very easy to use and solves a simple but complex problem for recruiters. While a smart recruiter could probably run similar referral campaigns themselves, Jobster gives you so much more.

They have based the product on several similar ideas, social networks, employee referrals and the fact that many times your best candidate comes from a recommendation, from here the tool builds on this base to provide recruiters (both internal and external) a fantastic framework/baseline for to be build and manage referral campaigns. On top of this they provide further features/reports for recruiters to understand where leads are coming from ie referrals or recommendations and to understand how many degrees of separation exist between each lead.

The web interface is clear and easy to navigate once you have had a bit of training. You can see at each set of the process where your campaign is up to, how many people have received it and how many people have registered. Each time someone registers they end up in your talent base, and such they might match a job you have in the future. Jobster have worked very hard to reduce the amount of information you need to collect about a person before they end up in the talent pool. Another nice feature is Outlook integration, which provides an easy mechanism for recruiters to select their initial contacts for the campaign.

Reporting is a little light however as Dave explained they wanted to get people using the tool and then with customer feedback understand what was needed. Having said this the reports I saw were useful and informative about your campaigns.

Their pricing model is also very sensible and would appeal to most corporate recruiters.

My only concern is around the implementation and change management of such a tool, another item confirm by Dave as being recognised by Jobster. To this end they have begun to find top recruiters and recommend deploying only to a limited set of people so that the system gets success before total deployment within an organisation. This is a very sensible approach and if there are issues down the track it shows that it was not the tool, more the process and practices used by the other recruiters.

In the end if you have hard to fill positions and people who might fill those positions have email then you would find a benefit from using Jobster.

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