Joel has posted a great interview with itzbig CEO Jim Hammock … it is well worth the 10 minutes to view the video.
Jim highlights four key areas of focus for itzbig … areas that regular readers of this blog will recognize as weaknesses in many of the current job boards. If itzbig delivers on all four, they’ll certainly be worthy of a high rank in a crowded market.
Quality – rather than selling ads, or trying to maximize ad impressions, itzbig is focusing on delivering high-quality job matches between jobseekers and recruiters. Users will see match relevance scores and be able to set minimum thresholds to weed out low quality matches.
Efficiency – rather than delivering deluges of marginal quality matches, itzbig is focused on delivering fewer high-quality matches. Finding diamonds shouldn’t be as time consuming.
Privacy – rather than a typical caveat-emptor approach to business, itzbig is promising a high level of protection for personal information. Users will search in a confidential environment. Frankly, I think this is a key to connecting with passive job seekers. I may be the exception, but I no longer use Jobster because of the perception that others can watch my actions on the site … when it comes to searching for a new job while employed, most of us would like the option to keep it private.
Usability – rather than delivering a product with interstitial ads, or a product with sponsored ads that obscure more relevant results, itzbig says they are committed to usability first, and that they will rollout slowly to ensure that they don’t lose focus on usability. Of course, usability, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder … nonetheless, I have to give props to a firm that states that they are highly focused on usability.
Soundzbig to me!
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