Hiring a staffer from the comments isn’t something that came out of left field for Jalopnik: in fact, the site’s editor, Matt Hardigree, more or less telegraphed his intention to start doing this in February, when he launched the new version of the site’s comment system, which is based on Gawker’s proprietary Kinja platform — a model that essentially gives every commenter their own blog where their discussions are highlighted. As Hardigree put it in a note about the redesign:

You’ll also be able to republish articles from our site (and eventually all Gawker sites) and we’ll be able to do the same. If we do republish something you created you’ll get the byline, the credit, and it’ll be clear where it came from. When we look for the next generation of writers for our site, and other sites, we’ll be looking at who does well in Kinja.

Comments as “a farm system” for a blog

Hardigree said in a blog post about Ballaban’s hiring that while Jalopnik and other Gawker sites have hired commenters to be writers before — including Ryan Tate, now a writer at Wired, who was hired (ironically) after he trashed a job ad posted by Gawker — this is the first time it has taken someone from the pool of Kinja-based commenter/bloggers. The Jalopnik editor said he was “particularly impressed with [Ballaban's] passionate Suzuki eulogy and evaluation of American cars.”

In a discussion we had with Nick Denton before the launch of the Kinja platform, the Gawker Media founder said one of his goals for the new system was to even the playing field between commenters and writers — to make it easier to highlight good content from readers, and give that the same prominence as writing from the actual staff of the network’s blogs. In a note earlier this year, he called it a “a farm system for the main Gawker teams.”

Other media outlets that have hired commenters include political blog network Daily KOS and The Atlantic, where Yoni Appelbaum was such a frequent and eloquent commenter on writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog that the magazine asked him to be an occasional contributor and then eventually hired him. Coates’ blog is known for its thoughtful comments — so much so that the Atlantic writer actually thanked his commenters when he won a National Magazine Award for his writing.

Critics such as Buzzfeed writer John Herrman argue that there is little value in reader comments, and some high-profile bloggers have stopped allowing them. But blogs such as Coates’ and that of Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson (where at least one startup, Engagio, was born out of a discussion on his blog) show that there can be value in comments when a writer or a site takes an interest in engaging with readers. And in some cases, it can even turn into a job.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Tang Yan Song

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But in what is likely a familiar refrain for a lot of liberal arts majors—and considering today’s economy, just about anyone— after graduation I found myself often struggling to make ends meet. My options were dwindling; if I wanted to seriously pursue acting or arts management, I knew I’d eventually have to relocate to Los Angeles. I’m an East Coaster at heart, and I love Philadelphia—so LA (or even New York, for that matter) just wasn’t going to happen. The time finally came where I realized I had to start thinking about other options to further my career.

This was during the late 1980s, and personal computing was only just beginning to take off. So I began to experiment with an old IBM desktop that had been gathering dust in my office at the theater. It had an old program installed on it called Q&A — a DOS-based mini-database with a proprietary BASIC-like programming language for creating text-based, forms-style applications. I cracked the Q&A programming manual, slowly but surely taught myself to use it, and found it came pretty naturally. Mind you, I had taken the requisite calculus classes in college and borrowed my roommate’s computer to write a paper a few times, but until then that was the extent of my technical background.

One of the first things I did once I had figured out the basics was to design a program that would help track membership and ticket sales at my theater. Prior to that, we’d been relying on a manual ledger, which wasn’t always updated quickly or accurately. I figured there had to be a better way, so and created a custom ticketing and membership management platform. And it proved to be quite successful. Suddenly, we had a much better idea about customer trends – which shows sold better on which days, when customers were likely to buy, which prices sold the highest number of tickets, the cost-effectiveness of subscription-based membership, and so on. Little did I know that that desire to explore a practical problem in search of a solution would lead toward my co-founding a software company some 10 years later.

I quickly came to find myself more and more interested in programming and felt I had a knack for it. I was a musician, trained to read music, arrange it, perform it, and even compose it.  It eventually dawned on me that programming wasn’t so different, as it’s ultimately an activity that’s equal parts left- and right-brained. You need to be creative, to apply physics, math, and logic, to adhere to a universally accepted and codified form of notation, and to finally present it in a manner that humans find intuitive and gratifying.  All of that is as true with software as it is with music.

It was at this point that I decided to go all-in on the idea of staring a new career. One day, while scanning the want ads in the newspaper (yes, those used to exist), I answered an ad for a small Philadelphia company that was seeking programmers with the pre-requisite “no experience necessary, smart people only need apply.” The hiring manager was initially skeptical when he learned about my background but he agreed to give me a 30-day trial—fully expecting that he’d be firing me at the end of it. The 30 days came and went and I was able to prove my mettle enough to be hired full-time. Within 60 days I was head of their nascent programming department.

Over the course of the next decade, I pushed myself to learn a number of different languages and platforms and finally found two niches:  database modeling and programming; and browser-based technologies.  Eventually, I evolved from “programmer” to “software designer” and worked at a variety of tech companies, gaining invaluable experience along the way.

And then the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, the NASDAQ crashed, and once again I found myself at a crossroads akin to the one I had been at 10 years prior, when I was trying to figure out where to take my career from that small Philadelphia theater.

During the previous decade I had worked at LaserLink, a virtual ISP in the dial-up days, where I had encountered a problem I recognized from my days at the theater: how to effectively manage billing entities and subscription-based customer relationships. And so, along with Ed Sullivan (the head of LaserLink), we decided to found Aria Systems. Our focus was on disrupting the traditional billing industry, which was clunky, overly complex and not particularly intuitive. We also saw a great opportunity on the horizon in the form of cloud computing – which allowed users to access powerful engines in an on-demand manner.

The startup we founded back in 2003 is now a successful SaaS business, with customers ranging from high-tech startups like Automattic and HootSuite to large enterprises like AAA, Disney and VMware.

I figured my story would be particularly relevant in today’s down-and-out economy, when graduates have to get increasingly creative to find work. I’m not going to sit here and say that there was some kind of secret sauce to my learning to code and ultimately founding my own company—there wasn’t. Straight up, it took hard work and dedication, not to mention a couple of right -place-at-the-right-time moments. But without a doubt the most important were the courage and self-confidence to gamble on a career switch.

To the budding technology entrepreneurs out there, young and old alike, I say this: Just because you weren’t an engineering major in college doesn’t mean you can’t break into that field later in life. It comes down to motivation more than anything else. Sure, you have to be wired for programming—and not everybody is. If you can get past that barrier, though, you just need to apply yourself and believe in yourself enough to take calculated risks.

Learn to write a web page in PHP. If it works out, run with it. Convince somebody to give you a chance, or work for free if you have to, puff out your chest when you need to, and don’t stop. (Insider tip: There are many hiring managers out there like me for whom who you are and what you can demonstrably do carries far more weight than where you went to school or what you studied.)

As a programmer, you’ll find yourself in a unique position: you’re a builder with almost no constraints. And no matter what anyone says, there will always be some new interesting problem that needs solving. Not everybody will be equipped to solve them, but some will. Being able to program is a huge differentiator. It truly boggles the mind to consider the coming innovations in the Digital Age, most of which we probably haven’t even conceptualized yet. So ask yourself two questions: “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a system that did [insert crazy notion here]?” And “What do *I* think I’m really good at?”

Brendan O’Brien is co-founder of Aria Systems. 

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock. 

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The pace of change today is simply quicker than it used to be. A great example is Finland’s paper industry, which has traditionally been a big deal. The investment period between the country’s first and most probably last paper machine was 156 years, and now there’s news about major layoffs on a weekly basis. These cutbacks leave us with an educated work force that we need to re-employ. 

It’s all part of a bigger transition that these traditional industries need to go through in order to survive. Competitors operate in countries where it’s simply more effective and cheaper to do business. So what’s the cure?

I’m going to look at examples from Northern Europe — the Nordics, Baltics and Russia — because that’s where Startup Sauna, the accelerator I help run, operates. But the same things could apply anywhere else in Europe.

Simply put, Europe needs more startups. Here’s why: jobs.

According to the Kauffman Foundation’s research about job creation and loss in the US between 1992 to 2006, “startups create an average of 3 million new jobs annually. All other ages of firms, including companies in their first full years of existence up to firms established two centuries ago, are net job destroyers, losing 1 million jobs net combined per year.” In Finland between 2007-2010 it has been calculated that there were 668 startups which accounted for 4.4 percent of companies with over 10 people. This fraction created a net of 51,000 new jobs — over half of the total number.

Of course startups will not necessarily employ the newly available workforce completely, but you get the idea.

But what do Northern European startups need to grow into these employers of the future?

Ambition, Attitude and Know-how

Since 2010 Startup Sauna has organized over 50 events in Northern Europe, spent one-on-one time with over 500 startups and coached almost a 100 companies through in our acceleration program. Here are the three things that startups from Northern Europe seem to lack:

- The ambition to be the world leader in their industry
- The attitude where people think big and strive to create something new instead of focusing in processes and rules
- The know-how to build and grow globally operating startups

Here’s an example of where it’s changing. Rovio — which is located right across the street from our offices — was founded in 2003, made over 50 games and almost went bankrupt before Angry Birds became big.

How did it stay the course? One of the major investors has been a serial entrepreneur who had already successfully built and sold a company (Trema Group, 2006, now Wall Street Systems). For him it probably became more important to see how big Rovio could become, rather than selling out quickly with a hefty profit. This attitude seemed to have spread throughout the company – the entire team wants to create the next big thing from Northern Europe.

This attitude set the bar for their ambition. If they were not going to sell the company, why wouldn’t they say that they’re going to be the biggest entertainment company in the world? You don’t become something like that with a 100 million app downloads – that’s why it makes perfect sense that they didn’t stop when they reached that number. Instead, go for the first billion and expand your business. I think their vision was something along the lines to be in real-time and direct contact with a billion users simultaneously. I don’t think they’ve forgotten this.

And then the company made strategic moves to gain the connections and know-how that they lacked. Rovio wants to get their plush toys out to the US market, and presumably chose Accel as an investor as they knew they had connections to retailers like Walmart. Rovio wants to enter the Chinese market, so they choose Atomico, where Niklas Zennström has experience with Skype of becoming one of the few European IT companies that actually achieved success in China. This know-how is now being handed down to Rovio’s employees, and some of them will switch to another startup at some point and transmit their newly acquired know-how forward.

That’s great, but one Rovio or one Skype is not enough. We can’t simply afford to sit and wait for the next big companies to pop up here in Europe, and at Startup Sauna we have felt the urge to help out our region’s founders and startups to raise their game. It’s the only way to increase their chances, and it’s why we offer our acceleration for free.

Cowboy photograph copyright Shutterstock user Outdoorsman. Angry Bird used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user bfishadow

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That would mean up to 45 million Americans looking for replacement roles in any ten-year span. Yes, my numbers were developed anecdotally from previous experience in combination with information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As an example in 2002 there were roughly 15 million manufacturing roles. When you combine that with operations oriented IT or service oriented roles you can quickly come up to 45 million affected positions.

It gets worse, not better.

The first world has been lucky. We had the last 100 years to help folks through a changing job market in the manufacturing sector, yet we still often failed. Many of the employees during this 100-year stretch felt they could make a good-enough living without a college degree or seeking a path into alternate roles in their company. This “good-enough” mentality is now causing the first world real issues as they try to transition these folks effectively either into early retirement or new jobs.

It’s not just manufacturing. Even computer programming has experienced this cycle of job obsolescence. Consider all the assembler and Cobol programmers whose careers in the 60s and 70s seemed as if they would last forever.

Today’s job market is very obviously different from a century or even three decades ago. Many of today’s positions have a lifespan of less than 10 years. Almost any manufacturing role or traditional IT infrastructure role would fit into this category. This sub-10-year job lifespan already affects millions of positions in the U.S. alone. Interestingly five years from now we’ll look back longingly at the good old days when a job (role) might last 10 years. The accelerating change associated with advancements in technology has increased the speed at which many jobs become obsolete.

Why now is different

Think of the trauma caused in a single-industry town (logging, manufacturing, fishing, etc) when the winds of change (regulations, technology, climate) eliminate that industry in that location. This trauma occurs even though we often see the change coming for a decade and the jobs have been largely the same for 30 or more years already.

Today, that same trauma would be magnified by the fact that most of the jobs would be less than 10 years old and the town will likely have two years or less to react to what the future holds. That assumes, of course, that the town or people in that town are actively paying attention to the future. In order to continue to grow our companies and our economy we must get away from the reactive response to role changes or compensation changes and think more strategically about how we protect our employees.

The role of HR, business and you

If you agree with the risks implied in the above, then there would seem to be no alternative but to rethink how most modern companies recruit, hire, train and retain employees. The employer and employee are going to need to work together to effect this change. HR isn’t always going to understand whether a specific role or function is becoming outdated, so they will have to work with employees and leaders.

The knowledge of “what’s coming” should be translated into your training/retraining programs. Basically you should be training your team to take jobs that don’t exist so they are ready when they do. It also means that reward systems need to be reworked significantly. Current systems tend to emphasize excellence at a particular skill. Instead you should be putting emphasis on how well employees work themselves out of their job. In effect the employee should be creating their own obsolescence.

There are several areas of opportunity in the corporation to help reduce the trauma of this shift:

• When recruiting places new or additional emphasis on skill development capability in the potential recruit
• During hiring, include discussion and planning around the growth of the employee beyond just “I’d like to be a manager someday” or “senior system admin.”
• Training should focus as much on how effectively employees can change as it does on a specific skill set. However, training will also need to include “retraining” of staff as an ongoing part of the employer/employee responsibility.

Governments can also play a role since, it seems logical that they would be interested in helping companies that are working effectively to support employment in the U.S. Some simple suggestions include:

• Labor areas where the traditional rules of benefits are softened, but the rules for training and retraining are increased.
• Tax incentives could be applied in order to push companies and workers to develop better retention and training programs. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that we incent companies or employees to keep doing jobs we can get rid of, just the opposite.

And of course, employees also have a role to play. Instead of whining about how hard it is to find another system admin job or a manufacturing line operator position, take responsibility for developing your career and working with your leadership to be prepared for what’s coming. Keep up your education current through any processes available, from night classes to cross training, industry participation and reading. As employers we need to take more interest in how well our employees are being developed so that they are a greater enabler to our success.

At the end of the day, if we have higher employment our companies sell more, which means more opportunity for all.

Building photo courtesy of Shutterstock user  Vladitto

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

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“The Collapse of Startups in Job Creation” (PDF) by the Hudson Institute’s Tim Kane says startup job creation has collapsed under the Obama administration. The paper, based on the most recent data (Q4 2011) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, says “job creation at new firms was at an all-time low in 2009 of 2.8 million, then fell again a year later by 250,000 jobs” to 2.34 million. “Quarterly figures for startup job creation have continued to weaken,” Kane writes, and “the rate of startup jobs during 2010 and 2011, years that were technically in recovery, are the lowest on record.”

Kane blames the drop on increased business regulation under a Democratic administration (though startup job creation was higher under Clinton than under George W. Bush) and cites the Affordable Care Act as “a sweeping alteration of the regulatory environment that directly changes how employers engage their workforces.”

But is there a less politicized answer to what is going on? Reuters’ Felix Salmon notes that the number of jobs created by small businesses overall has increased since 2010, so what is the particular problem with startups? It’s important to remember they’re not all in tech:

The only thing I can think of here is that for all that we think of startups as being largely high-tech things, in reality a huge number of them are in the construction industry, in one way or another. In a word, subcontractors. And no one’s starting new granite-countertop installation companies right now. But still, startups are a decent proxy for the dynamism of an economy. And these charts don’t bode at all well, on that front.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, the author’s report, Tim Kane, also blames outsourcing:

The venture capital industry expects every startup now to have an international strategy. Not just for sales, but for putting their team together. It’s just too easy for startup companies now to outsource some of their work as efficiently as they can, and if that means hiring people who aren’t Americans and whom they don’t have to pay taxes on and provide health benefits to, than we’re feeling the effects of that as a country.

The Obama administration is taking steps to address the problem. The Startup America Partnership, led by AOL cofounder Steve Case, aims to help young companies across the country grow and gain access to capital. Case is a strong proponent of the Startup Act 2.0, which builds on the JOBS Act that Congress passed in March and aims to reform immigration law for highly skilled immigrants. “By fixing a broken high-skilled immigration system and encouraging the world’s most talented innovators to contribute here in the United States,” Case wrote in the Atlantic this week, “we will once again secure our lead as the world’s most entrepreneurial economy.”

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The cuts aren’t as severe as the 17,000 layoffs Nokia Siemens announced in December, but they represent 7 percent of Alcatel-Lucent’s total employee base. At the company’s earnings call on Thursday, CEO Ben Verwaayen didn’t name specific divisions or regions targeted for pink slips, but he said the cuts would be across the company, including in its home country of France.

Alcatel-Lucent makes both wireline and wireless gear, but it has struggled in particular to make the transition from older 3G mobile technologies to new 4G networks. Alcatel-Lucent has always been dominant in CDMA, but investment in older 2G and 3G technologies has dwindled as carriers look to LTE. While Alcatel-Lucent bridged that generational gap in the U.S. quite easily – landing major pieces of Verizon, AT&T and Sprints’ LTE contracts – it has seen much less success in international markets, ceding market share to its three main rivals.

North America accounts for 39 percent of Alcatel-Lucent’s sales, and those sales were down 8.3 percent in the second quarter to €1.4 billion (U.S. $1.7 billion), contributing to its €254 million loss.

According to a recent ABI Research study, Nokia Siemens is the now world’s leading LTE vendor in terms of new contracts and intellectual property. Ericsson and Huawei, which are battling for the title of largest overall telecom vendor, ranked second and third respectively. Alcatel-Lucent came in fourth in an LTE market that many believe can only support two or three primary equipment makers.

Verwaayen, however, did identify one source of revenue the vendor plans to tap. He said Alcatel-Lucent would create a separate business division to manage its 44,000 patents, which could have substantial value. Alcatel-Lucent still owns Bell Labs, the industrial research giant created by the old AT&T monopoly and the wellspring of many of the world’s most important tech inventions. Bell Labs is a shadow of its former self, having seen its once mammoth applied research budget slashed, but it developed many of the key innovations that went into today’s optical and wireless networks.

Image courtesy of matthi / Shutterstock.com

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I spoke with Derek Ling, the CEO of Tianji, the company’s Chinese arm, to find out more. Based in Beijing, he started building his service 2005 and sold to his French rival two years later. Tianji now comprises the largest part of Viadeo’s business, with 10 million users spread around China. That, he told me, meant that China was an important part of the picture when it came to using the funding.

“We are thinking of using at least a third of the money to invest into China,” he said. “And that’s in three areas; product — to get better and quicker services; in marketing, to ramp up our sales side; and the third part is to look at acquisitions.”

But before you get too excited, Ling says that Viadeo probably won’t look at buying local competitors — largely because there aren’t many who have much scale. Instead, it will look for deals that can boost its sales operation or systems.

“We’re really not looking at acquiring users,” he says. “We’d be looking at existing recruiting companies with big sales forces, that’s one reason, or there are technology plays, when a startup has a technology platform we like.”

The same pattern is likely to be repeated in the other markets where Viadeo is active: use the money to improve sales (it works closely with recruiters to make the service a hiring platform), develop the technology or acquire interesting or useful properties. That covers a lot of territories, including various European markets, Brazil, India and a joint venture in Russia. But expansion in Europe and elsewhere “is not as clearly defined yet,” meaning that cracking the Chinese market could be crucial, says Ling.

“We believe the professional social networking space is about four or five years behind the U.S. — people don’t necessarily use it as a business tool yet,” he told me. “An interesting point of reference is that in 2007, LinkedIn was at 10 million users — and in 2008 it went up to 32 million. We believe we’re at a similar juncture.”

But of course when LinkedIn was at 10 million users, there was no other LinkedIn to stymie its growth — allowing it to expand to the point today when it can claim 150 million users worldwide. Taking on a big beast that already exists won’t be easy: particularly when Reid Hoffman’s got a lot of money in the bank from the company’s IPO, and the business already has users across 200 countries.

‘Interesting competition’

Ling admits that things are going to heat up, whatever happens.

“Reid has been watching the Chinese market for quite a number of years already,” he says. “It’s going to be an interesting competition coming up. But our biggest weapon is that we’re local: no U.S. internet company has succeeded in the Chinese market. We have a headstart on users, and a lock on the elite — like university graduates.”

Plus, he says, China is not a homogenous market — something that many outsiders do not realize.

“We have about 18 percent of our users in the Greater Beijing area, about 11 percent in Shanghai and around 10 percent in Guangdong Province,” he says. “But each province in China is equivalent to a country in Europe — both in terms of size, but also cultural differences.”

One thing that the money won’t be used for, however, is to push the business towards an IPO. After plans to go public last year were shelved, Ling says that Viadeo is focusing on building out — not selling up.

“We’ve made a decision to focus on growth without the distraction of the public market,” he told me. “There’s a lot of growth that needs to take place… so there are no plans to IPO in the near future, but it’s certainly on the horizon.”

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The event, which was started by a group of U.K. entrepreneurs who wanted to woo jobseekers away from corporate gigs in corporate life or finance, will make its next appearance on May 26 and 27 at the Truman Brewery in East London.

That’s right, two days: it’s larger than the one held last October, and now stretches across a whole weekend. It’s also been expanded so that design and product jobs are on offer, as well as engineering.

So far more than 100 startups are confirmed, trying to get what they believe will be around 3,000 attendees into more than 800 positions — not bad when you consider that it started out a year ago as a small event in a local pub, even if it’s only succeeded in filling a little over 150 jobs at the two events so far.

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Yesterday, T-Mobile made the sad announcement that it would be closing seven call centers, laying off thousands of workers, and that more layoff announcements may follow. Normally, we’d not comment on something like this. But I feel this is an exception for one big reason– only a few months ago AT&T promised to preserve these very same call centers and jobs if our merger was approved. We also predicted that if the merger failed, T-Mobile would be forced into major layoffs.

“At that time, the current FCC not only rejected our pledges and predictions, they also questioned our credibility. The FCC argued that the merger would cost jobs, not preserve them, and that rejecting it would save jobs. In short, the FCC said they were right, we were wrong, and did so in an aggressive and adamant way.

“Rarely are a regulatory agency’s predictive judgments proven so wrong so fast. But for the government’s decision, centers now being closed would be staying open, workers now facing layoffs would have job guarantees, and communities facing turmoil would have security. Only a few months later, the truth of who was right is sadly obvious.

“So what’s the lesson here? For one thing, it’s a reminder of why “regulatory humility” should be more than a slogan. The FCC may consider itself an expert agency on telecom, but it is not omniscient. And when it ventures far afield from technical issues, and into judgments about employment or predictions about business decisions, it has often been wildly wrong. The other lesson is even more important, and should be sobering. It is a reminder that in government, as in life, decisions have consequences. One must approach them not as an exercise of power but instead of responsibility, because, as I learned in my years of public service, the price of a bad decision is too often paid by someone else.”

So what is AT&T trying to prove here? That T-Mobile is a struggling company? Of course it is. It wouldn’t have tried to sell out to Ma Bell if its profits were surging and its customer base were booming. But is AT&T actually implying it would kept all 24 of T-Mobile’s call centers open in the face of enormous redundancies?

For AT&T to continue to maintain the fiction that it would somehow of created more jobs if it acquired T-Mobile is ridiculous now that the merger is dead. The Federal Communications Commission; the U.S. Department of Justice; and numerous industry, public policy and consumer groups have all refuted those claims, accusing AT&T of simply making up numbers in a lousy economy to further its consolidation ambitions.

AT&T, it’s time to move on.

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The problem is that the characters of the applicant and company they want to work at usually only come out in the interview stage — and if those characters don’t match, both sides will have wasted time, effort and money in getting there. That’s why a startup called Somewhere is trying a new spin on the recruitment game that puts company culture front-and-center.

The brainchild of Berlin-based Australian entrepreneur Justin McMurray, Somewhere is no traditional job site – it doesn’t provide listings – but rather brings an About.me-style service for talent scouting.

Somewhere lets companies advertise themselves as cool employers, and with many creative and tech firms currently finding it hard to get the right kind of people, it’s an approach that may get, er, somewhere.

“The original motivation to explore this area was driven by my frustration at all the clichés people spout about doing what you love,” McMurray told me. “The problem is that this is so difficult to achieve, and no one tells you how to do this. Which is why we threw ourselves into the challenge of working out how to help people find things to do that they might love.”

Employers can set up a permanent profile describing what they are like and what kind of people they’re looking for, and their page includes a mechanism that not only lets potential employees express interest but also serves as an initial filter to cut down on wasted time.

Somewhere has been quietly testing its employer profiles since the end of February, and this week let potential job-seekers into the beta so they can also create their own “cultural profiles”.

The companies that have been involved so far are mostly Berlin tech startups and creative agencies in London and Sydney. And some have already embedded profile links and buttons into their recruitment pages as the preferred way for applicants to get in touch.

Tweek.tv’s profile provides a good idea of what Somewhere can do for businesses. The page shows pictures of the founders and the office, briefly describes who they’re looking for and what applicants might learn at the company. Then there’s the all-important “apply to meet us” button, which will be able to trigger a customised questionnaire designed to weed out unsuitable candidates.

The service is clearly targeting a certain kind of employer: one that sees company culture as key to its hiring process, for a start, which probably means small-to-midsized firms in the touchy-feely creative, marketing and tech sectors. In other words, a company that doesn’t quite need a dedicated HR department, but that also finds too much of its time and resources taken up in the hiring process.

“Traditional recruitment is too expensive and time-consuming, and doesn’t get it right,” McMurray said. “[Our] opportunity is to change the way companies think about, scout for, screen and build their talent networks. Because this is how they’ll craft company culture, which is increasingly the biggest determinant of a company’s success.”

Things are very early right now. But the real test of Somewhere’s approach will come in April, when the beta starts letting applicants and employers in London, Berlin, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Sydney talk to each other — in what McMurray calls a “cultural marketplace”.

Down the line, McMurray’s talking about allowing greater customisation of the service and building tailor-made pages into company sites.

Somewhere’s still looking for the funding to allow that kind of development but, given the paucity of fresh ideas in today’s recruitment industry, the job site with no listings may be a concept whose time has come.

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