In The Door searches for jobs in new ways.
How many of your Facebook friends work for companies that are hiring? Chances are you don’t know, but new job search startup In The Door launches Tuesday and plugs into Facebook to surface that information.
In The Door’s premise is simple: Let job seekers use their social graph to find open positions where they might have an inside edge…
You need only log in with Facebook and In The Door will find and sort job listings at the companies where your Facebook friends work.
CEO and founder Liz Carlson says she wanted to create the site after she learned that a friend landed a job at Google by way of a recommendation from a mutual friend. Her online job applications, meanwhile, were being automatically rejected by computer algorithms and never reached the desk of a hiring manager or recruiter.
“I wanted to figure out how to digitize the process,” she says of being inspired by her friend’s success with an inside recommendation. “Instead of just seeing a long list of unqualified jobs, why don’t we start by showing companies where you have an inside connection?” she thought.
Carlson took her idea to the Founder Institute, where she participated in the summer 2010 program. Tuesday, she’s ready to launch the bootstrapped Facebook-infused job search site and solicit feedback from users.
The site, in its present state, lets you view all the companies hiring in your network, explore by city and search all the surfaced job listings. The home page shows friends’ companies that are hiring, with a count of friends employed by the company and jobs available listed next to each company. You can then view a company’s page to check out all job openings, and see which of your friends work at the company in the question.
For now, In The Door merely aggregates job listings from third-party job sites such as Indeed. It also leaves the friend-to-friend, “I need a favor…” conversation piece to Facebook. Later, these two pieces will become more tightly integrated into the site experience so that companies can accept applications and recommendations through the site.
Friends-of-friends job search is also in the works. “Users will be able to explore second degree connections,” says Carlson.
At launch, In The Door does a solid job at surfacing positions you might have a better chance landing because you have a friend on the inside.
The startup is giving away 100 invitations to companies who want to personalize their company page and link to their career site.
