Startuply Blog

Optimize Your Jobs for Social Media

We designed Startuply to make it easy for job seekers to share jobs with their friends, especially using social media tools like Delicious, Reddit, and Digg. It’s not always enough to just post jobs and wait, though, and being proactive about leveraging social media can play a major role in driving applicant flow.

Here are a few tips on what you can do to get your jobs out onto the web in front of great candidates, rather than waiting for them to come to you.

1. Use your company profile and job descriptions to tell your story
Once your job is in front of someone, it needs to capture their imagination. Why should a great candidate apply for a job with your company rather than your competitor? Just listing experience and skill requirements is a surefire way to turn off some of the best folks out there; job seekers want to get a sense of who you are as a company. You are unique, and find a way to tell the world.

2. Use multimedia
Have you uploaded pictures to your Startuply profile yet? They are displayed in all of your job postings, too. We’ve literally had users say “love the photos/captions - they do say a thousand words.” So snap a few shots of your office and team and get them up there!

3. Submit your jobs & profile to social media services
We included a social bookmarking button to make it super easy - it’s on the right side of your profile and job descriptions. Good targets include Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Digg.

4. Have your team bookmark/upvote/digg your jobs, too
Once you’ve bookmarked and submitted your jobs to social media sites like these, send your team an email with direct links to the article or post, and to the jobs themselves. A little concerted team effort can go a long way here: as few as 10 Delicious bookmarks can get a page on the fresh “popular” list.

This should be a good start to getting your jobs in front of more great candidates. Need a hand? We’re happy to help. Reach out anytime to support [at] startuply [dot] com.

500 Delicious Bookmarks for Startuply

A day before our two-month launch anniversary, we just hit our 500th Delicious bookmark for Startuply! If you like the feel of nice, round, arbitrary numbers as much as I do, then hopefully you share in our excitement (or mild sense of satisfaction, at least).

Interestingly enough, we actually crossed the 500-bookmark threshold a while ago; if you take a look at the Delicious search results, you’ll notice that Startuply turns up in 82 separate results, and so there are somewhere north of 600 submissions that lead back to us. Some of these are pieces of press coverage, but many are users bookmarking specific jobs and company profiles on Startuply. Sweet!

So if you’re part of a startup that’s hiring, here’s a suggestion: when you post a job (or even just create your profile on Startuply), bookmark it using your favorite social services. We’ve included that handy ‘Add This’ button to make it easy. Then, more importantly, get everyone on your team to do the same. 5, 10, or 15 bookmarks/reddits/submissions/upmods can go a long ways to giving your jobs wings.

The idea of a job posting being cool enough to be passed around like a cold isn’t be a stretch. Startups are the coolest companies on the planet, and we have jobs from startups working on some of the hardest, most interesting, and scariest (also) problems out there. A team opening at a company out to change the world should be compelling in its own right; seeding it outside of our little job board is just an accelerant.

I don’t use the word “compelling” arbitrarily, either. People always talk about compelling content, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about compelling advertisements. Profiles and jobs should be content, not ads. Human beings create content to communicate with other human beings; advertisers rarely use ads to inform, but rather to persuade, convince, or even (gasp!) manipulate. I’ll go so far as to say that you probably don’t want candidates who respond to generic, boring and generally lame job ads. You want the folks who consume your content, interact with it, think about it, and get involved in the conversation.

Jobs should be content, not ads. More on this later. In the meantime, wanna bookmark Startuply? ;)

After your many stern instructions and very polite requests, we’ve finally implemented job seeker application notifications to help you keep track of which jobs on Startuply you’ve applied to. When you apply for a job using the site, Startuply sends you an email confirming that the application was sent (which means the employer can also access it in our little applicant tracking system).

Sorry for the delay, and thanks for asking for it in the first place. Keep telling us what you want to see, and we’ll do our best to make you happy!

Cheers,
Luke

I’ve spent more time than just about anyone I know checking out & playing with company job pages, and I have a few quick thoughts on a way to keep this recruiting channel as wide open as possible. I’ll also hazard that your company website is perhaps the primary way that you can connect with some of your best sources of talent: your current customers, users and fans.

Here are some cheap and easy hints - might seem elementary, but I am continually surprised by how many people fail to take these first basic steps.

Make it very, very clear that you are actively hiring. At the very least, have a link to your jobs page in your website footer. Ideally, stick a little banner callout somewhere above the fold, too; fly your recruiting flag high, literally. You’d be surprised by how many people have told me that they’re “actively recruiting” and yet make it hard to find their jobs.

Prominently feature links to your jobs (and preferably the jobs themselves) on your blog, and encourage your whole team to do the same. We’d love it if you used our free & easy job widget, or just stick it in there yourself - but do it, one way or another. Your blogs are an especially high-value recruiting channel. If people are hanging out, reading what you save to say, and (hopefully) even participating in the conversation, you’ve already got them interested. They are thinking about you, your company, and what you’re thinking about/talking about/working on/building. For goodness’ sake, make it easy by sticking your jobs in front of them. Customers are also a great source of talent. These folks know your product better than just about anyone - definitely better than some people on your team - and can get caught up enough to want to join your team. You’re obviously working on something cooler than they are, anyway.

Use pictures. They say a thousand words. No, seriously, that’s a quote from one of our users: “love the photos/captions - they do say a thousand words.” I’m not making this stuff up.

Elaborate. A job description is a marketing document. It can be evil PR-speak lies (which I hope come back to haunt you), or it can be an attempt at open and honest communication. Along the other axis, it can be a truly lame 200-character, plain text, bullet point list, or it can be a visually and intellectually appealing piece that actually catches the eye, and backs the flair up with interesting content. Here’s the point: you want your job descriptions to make people dream about working with you, rather than being stuck in the crappy cubicle in the dreary office where they are currently stuck watching their soul wither and die. How can you justify not putting 15 minutes into each of your job descriptions? Seriously. I know that HR is one of your two biggest expense categories, unless you’re Elon Musk and have to pay for rocket fuel. This is the best you can do? Really? (I actually really like the layout and interaction, which makes the bizarre lack of content even more flabbergasting)

Elaborate. Seriously. We made Startuply to make it really easy for you to have job descriptions that suck way less than yours do now. And in spite of my little lecture here, this shouldn’t be chore either - it should be fun. You have a great excuse to talk about yourself. Make it entertaining. Every startup that I’ve ever seen has it’s own personality; figure yours out, and tell people about it.

Cheers.

Last weekend, we pushed out a Startuply release that adds significant new functionality to the resume tracking system in our employer accounts. (If you’re a job seeker, keep reading anyway - it’s good for the brain).

The meat of the new feature set is the ability to rate and comment on individual applications. Have as many people as you like score resumes from 1-10 stars and leave notes directly from your account, or use the “forward” feature to send a resume to anyone and everyone on your team to get their feedback on a candidate. Startuply automatically emails them a unique link to view the resume and include their thoughts, and it’s trackable, too - you’ll see both the average score and rating/feedback by individual respondent.

We’ve also integrated Scribd’s iPaper into the applicant management system, so you can view resumes directly in your browser and not have to download (and lose) anything. Currently, only applications that were received after 8/1 have iPaper capabilities, but we’re working on a solution that will convert all of your older stored resumes, too. Scribd is a Y Combinator alum, so we get the added bonus of spreading some YC love.

This is our first big step in building out a simple, collaborative, and intuitive applicant tracking system. What do you think? What do you need and want to see? Right now, everyone who applies directly from Startuply or through one of our job widgets (which are on your blogs, hopefully) ends up in the tracking system.  We’re also working on ways to feed in applications & resumes from other recruiting channels, so that you can manage and track all of your candidates in one place.

Not only will the resume rating system be a useful tool in managing the hiring process, but it also creates a powerful feedback mechanism for us to learn more about your needs and the quality of candidates that we’re reaching. Because we have detailed structured data on each company and job - including job type (role), location, industry, and more - rating resumes will give us specific insight about where to channel our resources. For example, maybe the average product manager applicant is a 7 out of 10, but the average engineer only a 4.5 or 5 - this is concrete, actionable data that we can use to create more value for our startups and community.

So, please rate your candidates! Your feedback here helps drive our strategy.

In honor of the approaching weekend (not that we actually take weekends off right now), I thought I’d pass along one of my all-time favorite startup HR posts. This comes from Dharmesh Shah, CEO of Hubspot, who blogs over at OnStartups (which should definitely be in your RSS reader).

Most of you have probably already seen this, but it’s worth a fun little reread. You can also check out the original here.

Happy Friday.

Startup Developers: Telling Schmucks from Superstars (5 min quiz)

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Mon, Jan 14, 2008

Thanks to the folks at Twitterfeed, you can now get sweet startup jobs on Twitter. Just follow @StartuplyJobs, and you’ll get a snapshop and link to all new Startuply jobs as they’re posted.

Enjoy!

Since our (re)launch and recent press coverage, we’ve received a tremendous amount of feedback about the new Startuply site and service. Plenty of love, but even more bug reports and feature requests - which are exactly what we need. A big part of the “release early, release often” philosophy is about the value of getting an admittedly rough product into the hands of your users, because they (you!) can figure things out a lot faster than we can. And you sure have.

Here are some of the major bug reports and feature requests that we’ve received, and how we’re addressing them:

RSS for specific search results
Definitely necessary - implemented on Sunday night.

Advanced search functionality
Released today. This includes searching for telecommute jobs, PT/FT, and adding a location radius to the search. To use it, click on the “advanced search” link at the bottom of the search box, and a drop down box will expand. This is an early iteration, and we’ll keep improving it. What else do you want to see in the advanced search?

Small Screen UI
Startuply didn’t “degrade gracefully” to fit smaller/lower resolution monitors and windows. It’s not OK for people using 1024×768 to have to scroll to see the whole screen, so we’ve pushed out a UI update. The scroll bar may still show up at the bottom of small screens, but you shouldn’t have to use it. This is a temporary fix, as we’d had to make some UI tradeoffs that we’re not thrilled with, but we think it will work for now. What do you think?

Registration Issues
We’ve seen quite a bundle of registration issues, most of which were addressed by a few quick tweaks. Hopefully almost no one should be getting stuck on the initial registration page any more. Some of the email confirmations are still getting stuck deep in spam filters; if this is you, please reach out to support AT startuply DOT com, and we’ll take care of you asap. Some people are also running into a bug with the “# of employees” field in the profile wizard. We haven’t been able to track this one down yet, but for now you can just skip this in the wizard, and enter it directly in the “profile” tab in your account.

User Accounts
We’ve seen high demand for user accounts where job seekers can store resumes and cover letters, track applications, and be recruited directly by startups. This has always been in our product plans, but we didn’t think we’d get such a strong response this fast. So, the good news is that we will absolutely build job seeker accounts into Startuply as part of our larger social strategy. The bad news, in this case, is that we won’t be able address this as quickly as many of you would like. This a bigger set of features than most of our recent additions, and it’s going to have to jockey for resources with some of other plans. Because yes, we do have other plans that we’re scheming about, and they ain’t simple, either.

Thank you all for your feedback (especially the news.yc testing strikeforce) and your patience as we work to make Startuply as useful as possible for the startup community. What else are we missing? We always want to hear from you, so please feel free to drop us a note anytime at support AT startuply DOT com.

Best,
Luke G
Startuply.com