Flush with the glow of very early success, Stelz-ner and a few volunteer developers are building a networking site that takes the concept a step further, aiming to help seekers find the perfect angel.
"If Match.com and LinkedIn had a child, this is what it would look like," he said, referring to the popular dating and professional networking sites. Stelzner still must decide if it'll be a money-making venture or just a labor of love.
I'm not sure how the economy's affecting the online dating scene, but as for job seeking, LinkedIn - a major employment and referral site - says it's getting about half a million new users every week, at least twice the rate of a year ago, and the number of applicants per job has doubled, too.
No one likes a job shortage, of course. But to employment professionals comfortable in the realm of social media, the growing appetite for work spells opportunity - if not for profit, then at least for a chance to play Web entrepreneur.
And Twitter's skyrocketing popularity has engendered its own culture of micro start-ups - small, off-the-cuff outfits like JobAngels that offer a simple service and are generally built in days or weeks rather than the months or years it can take big software developers to get to market. With light-speed business building, planning a revenue model is usually at the bottom of the priority list - especially in a recession. The Field of Dreams approach is often the mentality of choice for excited Web innovators.
Recruiting industry pros Robin Eads and Michael Quale, a couple from Tampa, Fla., built a job bulletin board in a little over a month using free online software. JobShouts.com has two advantages over big brothers like Monster.com and craigslist, on which posting fees can add up for employers: Not only is it free, but every job that's posted there is instantly tweeted to all of the company's followers, many of whom "re-tweet" the notices to their own mini-audiences.
Since the company launched two weeks ago, it's seen more than 200 job postings, including from the likes of Google and JPMorgan. No word on the first hire.
But though 200 or 300 job tweets a day may sound like a lot of leads, it's not. If the job happens to be in your career zone, the likelihood that it's also near you is small. The Twitter job ecosystem and its newborn applications are not sophisticated enough to give targeted offerings - so finding a good lead takes plenty of patience.
