The Jobster-Facebook Connection

Considering the layoffs earlier this year, I've been reticent to write about working at Jobster. Even though the development side of things wasn't nearly as affected as other parts of the business, the morale ambiguity was palpable. I'm not going to term it a morale "dip" simply because I don't think the net result of this change has been negative. This is the first round of layoffs I've experienced, and it's a difficult thing—especially at a company like Jobster, where we have such a tight-knit community. However, after hearing the motivations behind those actions, I think the company made a good decision—albeit in a slightly languid manner.

I'm writing now for two reasons: first, the layoff-induced haze is beginning to clear; second, some really cool things are happening.

When I was interviewing for my internship, CTO Phil Bogle posed a hypothetical—but not unlikely—scenario to me. Being a college student, I was likely (and quite naturally) a member of the Facebook. Given my knowledge of the site and the data it collects, how could a site focused on jobs partner with Facebook? We discussed briefly the sort of information that Facebook users enter, how it could possibly be used to create potential job matches, and what sort of architectural decisions would go into implementing such a feature.

My internship involved working on other (really cool!) things, but I always wondered why that hypothetical situation wasn't turned into a reality.

Today, Jobster announced that we will be Facebook's exclusive job search partner, and we'll be launching a career center on Facebook in the spring. What was just a twinkle in the development-team-of-June-2006's eye will soon come into being. And though I don't think I'll be working on this particular facet of Jobster, it's still really exciting to know it's going to happen.