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New MonoX project: Jobsboard/Poslomat

02/20/2012Categories: MonoX
We've been building several exciting services on top of MonoX during the last couple of months. I'll talk later about the new functionality distilled from these project that will be introduced to the core of MonoX, but for now we want to present one of the newest additions to our projects gallery. It is a social recruitment service Jobsboard.ie (or Poslomat.hr in its Croatian version).

JobsBoard is a unique recruitment service. It differs a lot from the traditional job portals that typically charge employers for each job posts they publish and each CVs they access. When using such sites, job seekers have to go though lenghty registration and CV creation process before they can apply for a job. Obviously, these services cannot succeed in bringing right candidates to the employer's attention. What we need is a change in the way recruitment takes placem and this change isn’t just cosmetic or incremental. Human resource professionals and recruiters just recently started to grasp the importance of social media and building talent communities. There is a strong movement away from the traditional model and towards the new social recruitment metaphor. For more ideas behind "Recruitment 3.0" , please visit the following article: http://www.ere.net/2011/06/14/a-vision-for-the-future-of-recruitment-recruitment-3-0/ 

With JobsBoard, we tried to build a new recruitment model based on a close integration with major social networks. It does not require long and boring steps like registration, CV entry and manual recreation of users' business network list. We are aware that almost every user has its own profile and a social graph on Facebook or LinkedIn. What we tried to do is to place a new, nonintrusive, recruitment-focused layer over these services. People do talk about companies and recruitment perspectives on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, but the signal to noise ratio can be (and almost always is) very high. So instead of building yet another social network with a handful of users, we tapped into largest candidate and employer pools on the web.


Home page and user dashboard - Poslomat

So how does it work? From the start, our users may register using the traditional approach (register/approve/log in), but Facebook login integration saves them time and enable automatic import of their profiles and social graphs. After all, nobody wants to keep track of another username and password combination. User profile is automatically created, based on the data from other social networks. It contains all relevant information about user education, work experience and skills, and is what sets him apart from others on a global jobs market. Jobsboard can aggregate and manage all profile data from different sources. From the moment our users log in, they have all the information they need to start using the service - all their contacts are ready. They can imediatelly use social networking features to locate people that work in companies that may be of interest in their job search. JobsBoard allows people to get inside information from friends and business contacts, including contacts on other levels of social graph (friends of friends, etc).



User profile and wall pages

Technically, this project was very interesting and quite challenging project. The existing MonoX functionality drastically reduced the time needed to implement standard social networking features (walls, blogs, social networking relationships, messaging, ...). Apart from that, the project required a lot of work on integration infrastructure: LinkedIn and Facebook API support is needed for profile and social graph exchange, wall posting and messaging. We also included support for the Twitter API (each job or wall post can be instantly retweeted). Google Docs API is used to enable integration with Google Forms, which are used by employers to design custom application forms. Additionally, we implemented a real-time multiple job posting functionality for recruiters that includes direct integration with all major Irish jobs sites. All jobs on Jobsboard can be broadcasted to external job sites with a single mouse click, allowing employers to target candidates faster than their competitors. Third-party portals usually require job posts to be sent in a custom format, so we decided to additionally include full support for Metaweblog API. Our users can therefore post their jobs to all major blog engines and CMSes like Wordpress.


User contact network and a list of companies

Jobsboard comes with fully features personalization system that is built on top of powerful MonoX infrastructure. Employers can change the look and functionality of their pages using a set of interactive tools that work in a drag-and-drop fashion. This allows them to host "mini-portals" inside the main site, and choose from a set of modules that enhance thie users' experience.  



Interactive help/tour in action

User profile aggregation and "deduplication" was one of the less glamorous, but still very complex tasks. Social networks have largely been built on the premise of being walled gardens in such a way that users can't communicate or share content between networks. While some of them are slowly opening up, it is still practically impossible to deduct if the user JohnSmith at Facebook is the same JohnSmith at LinkedIn - at least without letting the original John to log in to both networks. The same holds for company profiles: companies do not have a unique identifier anywhere on these networks, so there is no way to know if the Microsoft in John's profile references the Redmond giant, or a 2-people shop in the middle of nowhere. Although there is always some room for improvement,  I'm proud to sat that we solved these issues in a way that requires minimal user intervention.


Messaging and job post modules


"My social networks" connector and a personalized mini site
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We would like to invite all our readers to take a test drive of these new services. Please let us know what you think of them, and contact us if you need to build a similar social networking service.
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