In France, the excitement is already building up. LeWeb, the famous conference that pretty much transforms Paris into Silicon Valley, is only 1 week away.
For everyone who is coming from abroad to attend, I thought it’d be a great time to introduce you to Korben (photo), one of the well-known French tech bloggers, and his new real-time tech job board, RemixJobs.
Now for anyone who doesn’t know Korben (aka Manuel Dorne), he began blogging back in 2004. At the time he was writing mainly for forums and whatnot, until eventually he decided he’d had enough and went off to launch his one-man blogging show. He has single-handedly accumulated some 1.2 million monthly readers since. And while we’re at it, I may as well mention that he’s a die-hard Android fan, lives on open source and has also launched a site to defend privacy and the liberty of expression online.
But enough about Korben, let’s talk about his latest project: RemixJobs. RemixJobs, launched officially last year, has just released a new version of its real-time career and job search platform. Korben had been wanting to post offers on his blog but found that the traditional model used by online job sites was costly and time consuming – both for the recruiters and the job seekers. And so he’s teamed up with Justalab to do things a little differently.
But let me be clear – Remixjobs is not a simple Twitter account with job offers; it’s an entirely separate platform (but integrated with Twitter and a number of social platforms, naturally). This means job seekers do not have to glue themselves to Twitter all day just to be the first to get the job – well, ok, you still kind of have to be on your toes but let’s be realistic; as the community is still developing, new jobs are not popping up every 2 seconds just yet. In addition, Remixjobs is slightly more generous than Twitter’s 140 characters, which can be rather limiting when presenting a job or one’s profile. In the end, the founders are hoping that this real-time model will help the best candidates stand out and save recruiters the time and hassle of having to sift through hundreds of CVs.
Yet, unlike what you might find via Yakaz, for example, the offers on RemixJobs are strictly for technical positions. Looking for a user interface engineer, a developer or a operations engineer? The company has already helped certain French startups hire – including Allmyapps, Yoocasa and Kontest – and apparently the likes of Google, Yahoo, Netvibes and Quicksilver.
Ok, so honestly, there’s nothing that revolutionary about a real-time job board for tech jobs. Or is there? Let’s not forget that this project is coming out of France, a country where traditional recruitment processes (yes, this means they are unnecessarily complicated and take forever) are still wildly popular. And while local startups tend to recruit very differently than large companies, it seems that this fast-paced model is catching on slowly but surely.
There are currently some 1,000 recruiters registered on RemixJobs, which is still entirely in French but 100% free. The paid version should be launched sometime next year. Korben also says he’ll eventually be developing his project internationally but not right away.
For anyone who wants to brush-up on their French before LeWeb, check out this interview we published with him on TechCrunch France.