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Start-up JobOn.com offers new way of connecting employers and applicantsOct 09, 2011 (The Capital - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- The typical way of applying for a job at a restaurant or a retail store goes a little something like this. You walk into the business, request an application and fill it out. Then you wait for management to call you. But that's so yesterday, say Jody Presti and Chris Ourand, co-founders of JobOn.com. "It's a traditional process, but it's very broken," said Ourand, the company's marketing officer. On JobOn, job seekers can search for open positions, shoot a quick video with a computer or smartphone, upload it to the website and wait for a few hits. Employers who belong to the site can log in, sift through the applications and decide whom to hire. "The benefit to employers is, they get to view candidates in a way that they couldn't earlier," Ourand said. Presti, of Kent Island, launched the site last month at a Silicon Valley tech conference. The site focuses on retail, grocery and restaurant jobs; so far, he has lined up about 100 clients in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., and has plans to go national by Thanksgiving. The service is free now, but Presti plans to charge companies $25 to contact an applicant or $100 for unlimited monthly usage. He and Ourand have invested $250,000 in JobOn, and they'd like to raise about $5 million to $6 million in venture capital by early next year. "We do feel like this is something that can grow very, very quickly," Presti said. The dot-com's six employees are divided between Kent Island and Leesburg, Va., where the technical staff works. Presti, who plans to have a dozen employees by January, said he eventually wants the company's headquarters to be in Annapolis. Presti and Ourand became friends when they were instructors at Kent Island Martial Arts Center. Presti worked for 10 years in the online recruitment industry as a sales director for Dice.com, a website that lists technical jobs; Ourand's background is in public relations and marketing. They joined forces last year after Presti noticed he was seeing a lot of teens walking around the local malls, a half-dozen job applications in hand. "That hasn't changed in 20 years," Presti said. He began thinking about two of the Internet's most popular websites -- Craigslist and YouTube. JobOn is sort of a mash-up of the two, he and Ourand say. "We were in the right place at the right time," Ourand said. And while more businesses are using Skype to interview professionals, there aren't really any video websites for lower-end jobs, they said. "With Skype, you also have to all be available at the same time. It's live," Presti said. Job seekers on JobOn pick from a list of 10 standard interview questions and shoot a video of themselves responding to three of them. Employers can view the videos at their leisure. "Everyone is on the same playing field," Presti said. Ourand said the concept makes sense for job seekers, particularly those who are applying to lots of jobs at once. "If you're looking for a summer job, or a part-time job, or even a full-time job ... you go to the mall, you go to a few dozen places, and there's no way the manager is going to talk to you when he's got a line of customers," Ourand said. "The best-case scenario, you might sit down at a computer terminal and fill out an application." Mike Willard, who owns Quiznos restaurants in Pasadena, Kent Island and Easton, said the convenience factor drew him to JobOn. "It's a pain in the butt to look through 100 job applications when you're trying to hire someone," Willard said. The website cuts right to the interview, he said. "In today's world, convenience is the best thing," Willard said. "As a business owner, everyone thinks money is most precious to me, but really it's time ... the more time I have, the better I'll do." ___ (c)2011 The Capital (Annapolis, Md.) Visit The Capital (Annapolis, Md.) at www.hometownannapolis.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |