CareerBuilder founder launches jobs site that tracks resumes

Computerworld - The founder of the popular jobs site CareerBuilder.com today launched a new career site designed to allow job applicants to brand themselves and track who has viewed their resume online through real-time text messages.

Jobfox.com is designed to provide a better online option for job seekers than the Internet job boards available today, which help only 5% of the job seekers who use them actually find work, said Rob McGovern, CEO of Jobfox and the founder and former CEO of CareerBuilder.

"The product fails 95% of the time," McGovern said. "There's a tremendous amount of discontent among job seekers and employers that the job boards just don't work."

Instead of serving as a gathering place for the top performers in their fields who may be employed but looking for a new job, existing job boards instead function more like an "electronic unemployment office," McGovern added. Those who are hesitant to use existing job boards fear that submitting a resume to an online jobs site might lead to their information being sold to a list broker, he said. The recent identity theft scandal, in which 1.6 million records containing personal data on 46,000 people were stolen from Monster.com also prompted job candidates to shy away from online job sites, according to McGovern.

"What happens to a candidate is really frightening, because short of their Social Security numbers, you've got everything out there," he said. "You can pretty much create somebody's ID from a resume database."

Jobfox, which already has been beta-tested by 500,000 job candidates and 1,000 employers, allows job seekers to "brand" themselves by creating a unique Web page to highlight professional skills, talents, career aspirations and job-change receptiveness.

"The MySpace and Facebook generations of young people are now in the workplace," McGovern noted. "A lot of what Jobfox is about is about is allowing those people to have a professional existence on the Web."

Candidates can choose which companies can view their Jobfox pages which have their own unique URLs. Jobfox uses matching technology that McGovern compared to the tools used to match couples on dating sites like eHarmony to match candidates with potential employers. The site then can send employers to a candidate's personalized Web page and forward a resume, he added.

In addition, candidates can use Jobfox's free Resume Tracker tool, which automatically sends a mobile text message whenever the resume has been viewed by an employer. The tool can tell candidates when the resume was opened, how many times it has been viewed and if it has been forwarded to anyone. "[Candidates] view the job boards as this big black hole, and we remove that obstacle," he said.

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