RescueTime’s awesome user-friendly service inspired a $900K investment from True Ventures, Chris Sacca, Tim Ferris and some other notable angels back in 2008. The company broke even in 2010, and has since been focused on building hockeystick-type growth. Today, RescueTime is cleverly expanding its service into complementary territory with a new feature called RescueTime Introductions, which offers a way for top talent to find jobs at top companies — and may very well excite that next round of funding.

Back in 2006, RescueTime Co-founders Tony Wright and Brian Fioca sold their two-month-old startup called Jobby to Jobster. Unlike Indeed, Jobs.com, etc., Jobby offered a cool new approach to the hiring process by taking information directly from job seekers in an effort to help recruiters filter through job qualifications by offering a fast tagging and tag filtering approach. Wright and Fioca brought key members of the team with them to RescueTime (and even recently added Jason Grimes, who worked with Fioca at Jobster, as VP of Product Marketing) — and with RescueTime Introductions, the team is integrating its experience with the recruiting process into its web-based time management service.

In today’s digital world, competition for highly skilled engineers is extremely high, and the companies that can find talent quickly have the best chance at recruiting that top talent before it’s snatched up by the competition. RescueTime is aiming to help those companies streamline the recruiting process, find talent that wouldn’t have thought to apply or might be (unhappily) working at another company, and remove inefficiencies that would turn away or turn off top people.

Fioca told me said that the idea for Introductions came about because many of their friends at Y Combinator companies and local startups were continually asking them if they could recommend good programmers for their companies. It occurred to Fioca that the same methods RescueTime was using to screen its own hires during the interview process could be used on a large-scale, using the profiles of RescueTime’s 350,000 users.

Thus, RescueTime Introductions aims to be the “Carfax report for candidates”. Instead of promising recruiters that it can find a candidate that is 100 percent perfect for a job, RescueTime Introductions narrows candidates down based on the right “cultural fit” and vouches for a candidate’s skill set, but of course, your company will still have to interview them.

So, how does RescueTime it work? The service uses machine learning and pattern matching techniques to find matches between companies and employees based on “archetypes”; in other words, people are matched to companies based on the ratio of, say, time spent in productive categories, tools used, industry websites visited, research done, and so on. Fioca cited an interesting example, saying that it turns out using Aquamacs is a good indicator that someone is likely to be a great programmer.

RescueTime Introductions downplays the importance of things like efficiency scores, downtime, distracted time, and so on, although Fioca did say that patterns in these areas can sometimes indicate that a person is bored in their current job and is looking for a new challenge.

The startup currently has partner companies running RescueTime on their own teams to develop internal profiles of what working in particular positions within the company entails, so that Introductions will then be able to find matches based on those profiles, rather than having to post jobs or write confusing job posts on craigslist, for example.

Fioca also said that privacy is the team’s primary concern. In doing some due diligence with current RescueTime users, 98 percent of them were favorable to the idea as long as they could control with information is shared with what people. Fioca said that RescueTime has been careful not to build a lead generation service for recruiters that they can then use to spam potential candidates without RescueTime intervention.

“We’re calling it ‘Introductions’”, Fioca said, “because the idea is that we serve as the agent, spotting the top talent, and so we ask the user if they want to talk to a list of possible companies, making the handoff only once they’ve given us permission”. What’s more, none of the user’s usage data is shared with recruiters. Huzzah.

RescueTime isn’t changing its model to be a recruiting company or selling recruiting software, it’s building a market where top talent can be introduced to top companies — if they choose to do so. And the best part? Fioca says that the team will only consider working with companies that they would want to work for themselves, which is why Dropbox, Twitter, Justin.tv, posterous, and eBay are among those they’re offering at the start.

For a brief handshake with RescueTime Introductions, check out the video below, or visit the website in its office here.

Founded in 2004, Seattle-based Jobster is an online job board that has had a rough time over the past few years. The company radically changed its business model and suffered several rounds of layoffs. In 2006, Jobster acquired the Recruiting.com domain name and blog, and subsequently operated its business-to-business online recruiting tools under that brand. Last year, Jobster officially changed its name to Recruiting.com. As part of the deal, Recruiting.com is selling Jobster and its technology to Zapoint; and Recruiting.com will remain as an independent company. We are told Jobster and Recruiting’s CEO Jeff Seely will remain with Recruiting.com.

Zapoint develops SkillsAssessment, a technology that gives a quantitative value to the skills and value of employees and prospective job applicants. Additionally, Zapoint’s SkillsMapper product helps employers identify potential skill gaps in the organization, giving hiring managers a guide more effective hiring. Zapoint says Jobster’s talent profiling capabilities will be complimentary to SkillsMapper and will also add a number of users to Zapoint’s technologies. Currently Jobster has around 800,000 users on its social job search platform. Jobster has raised a total of $55 million in funding since its launch.

But they are approaching the market in a different way than Yelp and others. Instead of talking users into coming to their site and writing reviews, they’re taking a decentralized approach and aggregating available reviews from trusted sources around the web – local newspapers, citysearch, etc. The approach is very similar to what Rotten Tomatoes has done successfully with movies.

Users can vote on each restaurant in the system and can also leave comments – effectively their own reviews. And anyone that wants a review they’ve written on a blog or elsewhere to be included can do so by adding a bit of code to the post.

So far, so good. They’re claiming 1.5 million monthly page views on 500,000 unique visitors. The company covers fourteen U.S. cities currently, with fifteen more on the way. And they’ve done all of this with a three man team and no funding. All three founders, Ethan Lowry, Adam Doppelt and Patrick O’Donnell, are ex-Jobster employees.

Now a new storm is brewing over a former employee, Jason Davis. Davis previously sold a recruiting blog to Jobster, and worked with the company for a while. He eventualy left, but apparently had a non-compete in place.

Davis may have violated that non-compete when he started a new blog, RecruitingBlogs.com. Jobster and Davis have been “discussing” the issue behind the scenes, but it all became public today when Jobster sent Davis a cease & desist letter (see here and here as well).

I’ve pinged Goldberg for his side of the story. His response is below.

Hi Mike.

I will make my only public comment on this here to you, as follows:

We at Jobster are actually big fans of the www.recruitingblogs.com website. It’s a great site and offers recruiters an online blogging community that can be very valuable.

Our issue is not with recruitingblogs.com, rather it is with the site’s founder, Jason Davis. Jason Davis sold the www.recruiting.com online recruiting blogging community website to Jobster a little over a year ago. Jason Davis stayed on to run www.recruiting.com until a few months ago – when his one-year contract with Jobster ended. We parted amicably and wish only the best for Jason Davis. As part of his departure from Jobster/recruiting.com, Jason agreed to a fairly standard non-compete.

Jason has now launched www.recruitingblogs.com.

As would be expected, we’ve asked Jason Davis to honor his contractual agreement with Jobster. We’ve also offered/suggested that there is probably a good way for us to work together going forward. When we spoke to Jason Davis last week, we offered for him to come up some ideas on how we might work together. We would like to work this out in a way that benefits everyone.

Today, Jason Davis decided to go public instead.

Our overarching intent at Jobster and with our Recruiting.com website remains to foster online community in the recruiting industry — the more the better. At the same time, Jobster needs to ensure that our employees and contractors uphold their commitments.

I am certain that we can and will arrive at a good outcome for everyone on this.

Jason Goldberg

I’m not familiar with the law in Washington on non compete agreements, but in California its pretty clear – if you sell your company to someone for stock, they’re enforceable. We’ll see how this develops.

This week Jobster quietly rolled out phase two of the plan, adding pay-per-applicant job listings to the mix. The listings are still free, but companies who agree to pay a per applicant fee are shown on the top of search.

CEO Jason Goldberg says it will be a much more efficient model than anything that exists today. Companies don’t pay anything unless they receive a qualified job applicant. This gives Jobster the incentive to make sure lots of potential employees see their listing.

During a beta period, Jobster is charging $5 per applicant. Later they’ll allow companies to set qualifications, so they will only pay for, say, the application of someone who lives in San Francisco with Ruby on Rails development skills. At that time, they will also be moving to an auction model and let companies compete for those top places on search results pages.

Jobster is also the exclusive Job Listing provider to Facebook (mentioned at the end of this post), although the new Facebook developer platform would also allow other services to add their application. The new job listings will eventually make their way to Facebook, Goldberg says, increasing Jobster’s reach exponentially.

Seattle-based Jobster, which has raised nearly $50 million in venture capital, previously had a similar model – charging employers a lot of money to help them find qualified candidates. But late last year they made a decision to try something different. They went through a round of layoffs earlier this year and are making a dramatic business model shift starting tonight, by making all job listings free (and much more).

Their goal is to do what PlentyOfFish is doing to Match.com. PlentyOfFish is a dating site very much like Match, but doesn’t charge its users to hook them up. The company is doing quite well based solely on advertising revenue, and has been a serious thorn in the side of the for-pay dating sites. By reducing the cost of a job listing to zero, Jobster hopes to make a large dent in Monster’s billion dollar a year revenue stream.

Jobster is also a social network, and is more like Facebook or LinkedIn than Monster.com or other job sites. Like LinkedIn, it’s a place people can keep their resume up to date at all times, even when they aren’t looking for a job. Users also tag themselves (your top five tags are called “supertags”), and Jobster will notify you of jobs that may fit your profile. See CEO Jason Goldberg’s profile page for an example. All of this tag-based matching comes from Jobby, a company Jobster acquired last year. Tags also help users match with other users, and additional information.

Employers can start listing jobs immediately and for free. The form (see image below) has just five fields (Company, Title, Location, Description, Tags). The employer will immediately be alerted to potential candidates based on the tags, and candidates will also see the opportunity appear within their profile. Jobster is also syndicating these listings out via RSS and other methods, so job search engines like Simply Hired and Indeed will be able to add these to other listings from around the web. Edgeio (a company I co-founded) will be one of the first partners to integrate Jobster data into their listings.

Given that Jobster already has a large footprint in the job listing space, this is more than an experiment. It’s a full frontal assault on Monster’s business model. This can also hit LinkedIn indirectly if people start focusing on Jobster as a more interesting place to keep their resumes and contacts. Monster will probably be keeping an alert eye on how Jobster is doing, and this may also force them to update their aging platform and pricing models to more modern standards. For employers and job seekers, this is nothing but good news.

In the same press release announcing the new product, Jobster also confirms the rumor that they have become Facebook’s exclusive partner for job listings (beating out Monster.com and others). The new functionality will be available this Spring.

Since adding a host of new social elements just last week, Jobster now brings most Web 2.0 features that you can imagine into the job search space. If Monster is the blue chip job search company in the accelerated history of web services then Jobster is trying to make itself the hip new player. Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg is explicitly positioning his company as MySpace in the workplace. Job seekers can create profiles, leave comments about their workplace and subscribe to RSS feeds.

Jobster recently acquired a service called GoJobby, has formed partnerships with SixApart, JobCentral and the VirtualEdge Corporation and says it’s seen seen 50% quarter over quarter growth over last five quarters.

But is this MySpace at work formula one with potential internationally? MySpace itself is widely expected to face serious challenges when it launches localized international versions beginning later this summer. Add to that the questionable sincerity of user generated content when it comes to matters of employment.

Jobster says it doesn’t really need the latest infusion of cash, but that Reed Elsiver’s international strength is exciting. Whether a substantial number of employers internationally will find it worth their investment to pay the monthly Jobster fee, or whether the new social features are considered hype driven and overpriced seems to me to be the key question.

I profiled Jobby when it entered it’s beta in late March. Unlike Indeed and Simply Hired, which aggregate job listing from other sites, Jobby takes resume information directly from Job Seekers and then invites employers to search through listings. Jobby also allows employers to search for highly specific skillsets and subscribe to future results via RSS. I gave Jobby a thumbs up: the Ajax interface for filling in skill/resume information, along with the excellent search features results in a really cool user experience. It will be interesting to see how Jobster integrates Jobby into its existing solutions.

Jobster has raised over $20 million in venture capital. Investors include Trinity Ventures, Ignition Partners and Mayfield.