Jobster takes more money to spread social job search
Do job seekers and employers outside of Silicon Valley want user generated content, tagging and feeds in their employment services? The premise that they do will likely be put to the test on a global scale now that the fast growing …
Context & Ripple Effects
Jobster's new round — reported at [[a:none|$18 million]] by GigaOM alongside TechCrunch — funds a deliberate bet: that the social-software toolkit of user-generated content, tagging and feeds belongs in employment services well outside Silicon Valley. The company is taking that premise global rather than proving it first in one market.
The pickup was immediate across the early blog ecosystem — TechCrunch and GigaOM ran the same story on or about July 19, 2006 — reflecting how closely the Web 2.0 crowd was watching whether 'social' mechanics could carry a vertical business like recruiting.
First-order effects
- Jobster now has fresh capital to fund an international rollout of social job search, exposing employers and seekers in non-tech markets to profiles, tags and feeds as hiring tools for the first time.
- The raise puts Jobster in direct feature competition with established job boards, whose listings-and-search model has no social layer.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent job boards must decide whether to bolt on community and tagging features of their own or cede the 'networked hiring' framing to Jobster — either way the definition of a job site broadens.
- Employers outside the Valley become test subjects for whether passive candidate discovery through social graphs outperforms paid listings, shifting where recruiting budgets flow if it works.
Third-order effects
- If mainstream employers adopt social search, recruiting consolidates around platforms that own candidate networks rather than job-posting inventory — a structural shift from classifieds economics toward network economics in the hiring market.
- If they do not, the round becomes a case study in the limits of importing consumer Web 2.0 assumptions into professional workflows, tempering how venture capital prices 'social X' verticals.
The trend: Mid-2000s venture money is funding the export of consumer social-software mechanics into specialized verticals, with recruiting among the highest-stakes tests of whether the model travels beyond early-adopter markets.