By Leslie Walker
Thursday, July 20, 2006; D04

There's something about Jobster that intrigues Internet investors.

On the surface, it sounds like just another Internet job-listing site. But by creating something different -- a site that adds the social aspects of the job and employer, the MySpace of the workplace, if you will -- Jobster has raked in $48 million in venture capital over the past two years, including an $18 million round led by the venture arm of publishing giant Reed Elsevier, announced yesterday.

Jason Goldberg, a former White House aide who founded and now runs Jobster, says traffic to the site is growing at a heady clip because it's adding features that job seekers and recruiters find useful. Last week, for example, Jobster launched a makeover that lets employees write and read reviews of corporate workplaces, much as TripAdvisor encourages travelers to review hotels and restaurants.

"We are bringing more of the human element to job search," said Goldberg, who spent six years in the Clinton White House. "We read reviews about everything else we buy. We are bringing that into job search so people can learn what it's like to work somewhere before they make a career decision."

Plenty of Web sites have tried with little luck to become the social networking site for work, letting visitors create personal profiles and connect to share professional information. But no business networking site has scored the runaway success of teen social hangout MySpace.

Jobster may be on the right track, but it has got work to do, particularly in persuading worker bees to be candid about the hands that feed them, with their bosses able to read over their shoulders on the open Internet.

Jobster launched in 2004 as an Internet headhunter, helping employers recruit new workers. It still provides subscription recruitment services to nearly 400 corporate clients, including Starbucks, Microsoft and Boeing.

Companies pay Jobster up to $9,000 a month to help them find candidates through employee referrals, e-mail campaigns and other advertising programs. Goldberg said his company employs 125 people and took in $3 million in new business last month. Revenue has been up an average of 50 percent quarterly for the past three quarters, he said.

Jobster has plenty of competition from such big names as Monster and CareerBuilder, and from job listings on newspaper Web sites, including washingtonpost.com.

But in the past year, Jobster has been on an acquisition tear to broaden its repertoire and offer more services to job seekers. Last summer, it bought WorkZoo, a service that crawls the Web for job listings from many sites. The WorkZoo purchase turned Jobster into a searchable job board with more than 2.5 million listings from over 130,000 employers.

Last month, Jobster bought Recruiting.com, a blog for the recruiting industry. And two months ago, it bought Jobby, whose system for letting job seekers "tag" themselves and others with phrases to attract attention from prospective employers has been incorporated into the new Jobster, allowing people to create profiles using descriptive words.

"This goes beyond a static career Web site to interacting and building relationships," Goldberg said.

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.