This will be a short post. What the hell does this website do? Some HR pundit out there who I should probably not annoy extolled itzbig on some blog somewhere. It sounded to me as if the itzbig guys were using a matching engine for CVs and Jobs (nothing really new there) to tell you what skills you might need in order to be eligible for a wider range of jobs (kind of new, but poses problems). But when I went to investigate, and first landed on the website, it basically told me, the would-be job seeker, “piss off, there’s no jobs for you.” The next time, it told me to “piss off, we have your email address already.” I didn’t bother with the employer section yet – because why bother if the website tells candidates to piss off? Anyway, I’m annoyed. I’m annoyed because this website was hyped. I'm annoyed because this website looks like it has a nice Web 2.0 interface but secretly is hard to use - at least for me, the dumb user. Itzbig, improve yourself and come back to me in 1 month’s time. Get out of Beta, or whatever.
Mark,
I'm the CEO at itzbig. I'm sorry you had a bad experience. We are a young company and currently are still focused on only a very small number of cities, so that we can work closely with our early adopter customers. Candidates who are interested in jobs in other cities are asked to leave their email so that we can let them know as we expand. Our plan is to refine the product until we have everything just right, and then to roll out nationally (and eventually internationally) as quickly as we can. We intentionally chose this approach so that we could do a better job of ensuring a quality experience for both candidates and recruiters.
If you just want to check itzbig out, you could register as a candidate interested in, say, Dallas or San Francisco. But if you do so, please be sure to mark your profile as Hidden, so that you don't "pollute" the results for recruiters.
As for why some of the HR pundits are extolling our virtues, I think it's because we truly are doing some innovative things (e.g. allowing candidates to remain completely anonymous; giving candidates control over what personal info to share and with whom; using structured data profiles for accurate results; perfecting a progressive profiling process that lets you quickly and easily provide bits of info a little at a time and see your results in real-time; dynamic matching, scoring and ranking of candidates against jobs and jobs against candidates (i.e. bi-directional), et al).
We've still got a lot of work to do, and have room for much improvement, but our early adopter clients are excited about our vision and are helping us make it a reality.
Posted by: Jim McGovern | January 19, 2008 at 06:32 PM
Jim,
Thank you for your comment, and thank you for reading. I sense some of your enthusiasts got ahead of your own market rollout plan, which is probably a good problem to have. Sometime soon I'll take another look at Itzbig, try to delve deeper into the services, and make a supplementary posting. Best,
Mark
Posted by: Mark Radoff | January 21, 2008 at 06:24 PM