Salary, Benefits and the View Out the Office Window

Jobster is adding social-networking features to its employment services. The two-year-old start-up has attracted $48 million in venture capital. (Screen Grab From Jobster.com - Screen Grab From Jobster.com)

Many Web networking sites provide similar profiling features, but most have a broader mission of helping people connect for various purposes. While business networking site LinkedIn and MySpace have added job features, they are secondary to their core networking missions. Jobster is pretty much the reverse: Jobs remain its key focus even as it adds social features.

Monster.com, one of the Web's biggest job boards, has offered networking tools since 2004 -- but no reviews -- but they are buried deep on the site. The new Jobster, in contrast, prominently displays its social features on the home page under a "People are talking" headline.

The innovation Jobster added last week that sets it apart from other recruiting sites is the workplace reviews. Users can answer 10 questions about where they work and have their answers appear in their profiles. Users are asked about such things as the job-interview process and what music people listen to in the office.

Anyone searching for "Microsoft," for example, might see the profile for former Microsoft employee Russell Williams, whose list of things he could see from his window when he worked there included: "1. Very nice landscaping with pond outside the window. 2. Not much else -- Microsoft likes separate offices which tend to isolate people."

Jobster employees have been seeding the site with comments about life at their Seattle-based start-up. It remains to be seen, though, whether enough workers at enough companies will share useful thoughts about their career experiences to create a critical mass of useful data.

Also up in the air is how Jobster will control its open review system in which people "tag" others. Curse words and similar nastiness are no-nos, but policing the tags could be challenging. "We don't allow people to comment about specific people by name," Goldberg said.

Traffic to the site has spiked since the makeover. In June, people conducted more than 3 million searches on Jobster, Goldberg said. Since the redesign went live last Thursday, daily traffic has jumped 50 percent.

Jobster is still in the early stages of building its networking toolkit. Now, you can link to any other people on the site but can't communicate with them. That feature is coming.

Also coming is a feature designed to build credibility by letting people vouch for one another. "If five people say they worked with me at the White House, that will increase my reputation on the system," Goldberg said.

This all makes Jobster a site worth watching. It's anyone's guess, though, whether we should tag this Internet recruitment service as "the future" or "nice try."

Leslie Walker welcomes e-mail atleslie@lesliewalker.com.