JobFox has been doing presentation for recruiters in the New York areas all week.  I attended one this afternoon and heard a marketing presentation by CEO Rob McGovern.  The following are my notes from the presentation, with a few notes that I made immediately after:

Jobfox is intended for passive job seekers.

It has a huge empasis on their matching technology and conceives of itself as the next major job board, with Monster, HotJobs  and CareerBuilder (Rob's first baby) squarely in the crosshairs. The of a "candidate-centric" board that gives the candidate the ability to pick and choose employers in the same way that employers pick and choose them playswell when compared to thebig boards, who have tilted heavily in favor of the employers who pay their bills.

Jobfox candidate pool has grown 5x since August 2007.  Rob did not mention how large the starting point was, which would be necessary to figure out just how relevant those growth numbers are (after all, it means one thing to go from 1,000 resumes to 5,000, and another thing entirely to go from 1 million to 5 million!)  

After the session was over , one of the Jobfox sales team said that there were “over a million” candidates in their database.

It was founded in 2004 By Rob McGovern & a team of  ex-CareerBuilder employees.

Gives seekers a “career web page” in the same sense that Facebook or Myspace do for personal web pages

Elements of that page:

o    Basic info

o    Work preferences – presented as a cool cloud tag

o    Skills – when clicked, it shows where the candidate learned that skill (not sure if this is self reported or parsed by software?)

o    Personality type – there was a bullet point that said that this was a $75 value, which seemed like an odd thing to say…

Borrows heavily from dating sites – employers and candidates can “wink” at each other to show mutual interest.

Typical JobFox customer is already using the big job boards.  Not a ton of overlap in that candidate base.  I missed the actual overlap numbers, which were based on a study done for Jobfox by Peter Weddle.

Big job Boards use a chronological model to display job postings – this results in a job applications flurry in the first few hours and then response rate drops off dramatically.

JobFox displays matches in a proprietary “scientific match order.” A recruiter can add emphasis to certain criteria by “starring” them.

Salaries are inputted into the system using a double blind system – neither the candidate nor the employer can see the other’s data, but it is used for matching purposes.

Match results page seems a lot like kayak.com – search criteria on the left and a dynamic listing of results on the right. (That’s a good thing.)

Rob intends to raise a total of $100 million in VC.  Not sure if those plans are already in motion or if it is in the distant future or what the money will be used for.

70% of customers sign up for an annual contract, as opposed to longer or shorter term agreements.

Candidate pool skews high in the techie demographic – 17% of the Jobfox database.  Other fields are represented more in line with the overall population in the US.

Supports Instant Messaging – cool!

Cost of JobFox is $12,000-$80,000 per year depending on the size of customer

Very cool – “Featured Employers” on the service are the most active employers on the system, not the ones who pay for it. Kind of a refreshing change, and I like how it rewards participation rather than straight payments.