MassTLC 2008 Innovation unConference!

Genotrope is proud to be selected as one of the sponsored startups attending the MassTLC Innovation unConference on October the 2nd held at Sun Microsystems in Burlington.

This is a great opportunity for early stage founders to get feedback and advice from some of the prominent VC’s and expert entrepreneurs in the Boston area.

We are really excited about the event since as a sponsored startup, we get the opportunity to have a couple of small table meetings with a select group of experts chosen for our specific areas of interest.

If you have a chance to come out to the unConference, I highly recommend it and please stop over and say hello.

Do we really need better Job Descriptions?

I have recently read a couple of blog posts at some new job board companies concerning the need for better job descriptions. I am wondering if that is really the case?

Do we need job descriptions at all? We’ll leave that topic for another day.

Does a detailed job description effectively target the exact talent being sought or screen them out?

My experience has shown that a significant percentage of the time, the hire that is made does not match the job description. Why is this?

I. The requirement changes over time.

II. The job description was the “kitchen sink” variety that actually described three positions

III. The company hired the best talent not the best “fit” to the description

IV. The great software engineer didn’t apply when they read the term “rockstar or ninja” in the description.

We think about recruiting using the concepts of Attractors and Promoters.

Attractors are what draw people towards your opportunity. The magnets pulling in candidates such as the background of the company including the stories about the founders, the “cool” product, the interesting or difficult problem being solved, the exceptional work environment, the high quality team and the investors. Anything that makes the company attractive to potential employees.

Promoters are the ways you get the word out about your company. Blogs, articles and media exposure, Events, and advertising. Job postings are one of your promoters.

So how do you make your job postings most effective as a promoter of your company?

First of all consider how they will be viewed. Job postings usually come in large groups as a list of results from a search. Therefore, to be effective, bringing the viewer to your site is the primary goal. This way you will have their attention and a much higher chance of generating interest.

So is a long and detailed job description going to the most effective means to get the viewer interested? Maybe not. A job posting may be better used as a description of your company, using your attractors, and a succinct overview describing the position. Candidates already know what the general requirements are for their current job. Too much detail regarding duties and may send a candidate packing because they do not fit that description, even though they could do the job.

Potential employees make the decision to work at your company based on the quality of the people they will be working with (the Company), the vision and problem the company is solving and if what you want them to accomplish is something they will love to do.

Maybe it is a semantics issue, but this information is not going to be contained in a job description. Better to write copy that makes your company interesting and attractive to potential employees. People go to work at Companies, not jobs, so spend your posting real estate mostly on promoting the attractive qualities of your company and less on detailed job descriptions.

Site Outage

We are very sorry that Genotrope has been down for several days. What started as routine maintenance ended up as a confluence of several problems that kept us down so long.

We apologize for the inconvenience we have caused you. Changes have been made so this situations will not happen again.

Genotrope is sponsoring TechCocktail Boston2

For all of you who attended the previous TechCocktail Boston at Tequila Rain, you know it is a fun event attended by founders, VCs, developers and representatives from the entire start up eco-system.

Well, the next one is coming up next week, Thursday July 24th and Genotrope is a sponsor. It will be another great time and a chance to meet a lot of people. The event is filling up fast so RSVP and come out and mingle.

I would love to get the chance to meet more of our users face to face. We’ll buy you a drink.  

New Improvements for July 08

A few things to check out.

New VC Directory Page

Registered User Home Page now shows new companies added to your graph as well as articles and career postings.

Weekly count of start up jobs in the Boston area on Home Page.

Tell a friend link on Company Page now makes it easy to alert your friends to companies you think they may find interesting.

We are continually adding and improving. let us know what you think.

Working on Improving Usability

I just finished a great session sitting down with users and observing  their interactions with Genotrope. The main takeaway is that there is a learning curve for first time users and since Genotrope is different from any other online career site (not Job posting or keyword search oriented), we need to do a better job of explaining how we match people and companies as well as how to submit your resume to the companies of your choice.

Along with that, there are a lot of little UI tweaks that will make the navigation self-evident. So stay tuned as we are on a weekly build schedule and almost every week we have made some improvement to make Genotrope more useful, engaging and easy to use.

Dont forget to check out your personal feed you can access from the RSS button at the top of the Find Company/Jobs page.

Please let us know your comments, complaints or suggestions.

thanks

New Features: New Companies and News from Professional Graph

John and Ganesh have worked hard to deliver the latest round of new features for Genotrope. Now registered users can see the new companies and recent news from their professional graph. Just click on the RSS Icon at the top right of the Find Company/Job page. If you wish, you can then set up a feed so that you will know about recent news or new companies that have been connected into your graph.

Secondly, we have gotten rid of the dreaded java applet that produced the company graph. Ganesh has built a fresh and much more functional flash version that delivers a lot more information and does not randomly bork.

Hope you like these improvements. As always, let us know about any problems, questions or suggestions you have to make Genotrope more useful for you.

thanks from the team

What do I do when not much appears on my Find Company Page?

We realize that one of the features we need to add is for those of you just getting started or breaking in to the start up market.

Not having a company in your profile that is connected to other startups or VCs will mean that there are few to none companies on your Find Company Page.

We are soon releasing search features that will give you an overview of the startup market, from which you will be able to submit your resume to companies you find interesting.

In the mean time, it is a kluge but if you add a VC as a past employer in your profile, it will let you look at the list of companies they invested in, when you go to the Find Company Page.

If any of them seem interesting and you would like to keep informed of their progress, add them to your “watch list”. If you would like to explore potential opportunites, submit your resume to a single company or make a list from the Find Company Page.

In the future we will let you do this in a less convoluted manner, but for now, a kluge will get the job done.

We are working towards not “having major design problems, though.”

We received a great email from one of our new users last week that started like this. “I see a lot of demand for something like this” and ended with “you have major design problems, though.”

On one hand not want you want to hear, on the other it came with some very specific input outlining what could be fixed and what new users see and think upon first arrival.

We have always wrestled with explaining what Genotrope does to the new user, versus having too much instruction built into the pages which will be unnecessary once learned.

The initial idea was to build good contextual help features. So most of the answers to the questions we get are contained in the help files, problem is, few like to click on the small orange question mark Icon to find what they are looking for. So we are working on ways to make the site more clear and easy to use.

In the mean time, the help files will tell you

1. the data base of companies is Peer Produced, as a registered user, you can add companies and connections.

2. To find companies that may be of interest, you need to enter your past employers in your profile and make sure the companies connections are as robust as possible.

3. Once you navigate to a company or VC page, you can navigate around the graph by clicking other company nodes. You can also pan and zoom the graph. If you prefer, you can navigate by clicking on companies from the list below the graph.

4. Registered users have a personalized feed of information and opportunities from companies in their professional graph. Just click the RSS icon on the Find Company page.

5. Users can submit resumes to a list of companies once they have perused the Find Company list and checked off companies of interest. Resumes can also be submitted from the company record as well.

6. Genotrope follows up your resume submission by contacting the hiring manager on your behalf.

So, we are working on getting this information to new users in a more obvious and affordable manner. In the mean time, check out the help Icon when you get stuck on a page.

Database problems (fixed)

Sorry for the inconvenience, some of the records in our database are unavailable. We are aware of the problem and will have it corrected as quickly as we can. Thanks for your patience. ( caching problem as a result of a bad build)

Just when you think things are going smoothly something like this pops up. Typical rev 0.1 release I guess. Everyone is digging the new VC Directory though and we are getting a lot of attention from it. We will incorporate it directly into the site soon so you wont have to get to it from the Startup Buzz blog.

regards, ts