StartWire was founded by Chris Forman, former CEO of AIRS, and Tim McKegney, who was previously EVP at AIRS. It launched this year with the promise of helping job seekers avoid the black hole and connect with a network of trusted friends and business connections for advice and job referrals.

Forman said StarWire would use the funds to grow its development team and speed product enhancements, as well as for marketing.

Bullhorn on a roll

Recruiting software provider Bullhorn reported new bookings and paid user count were both up over 40 percent compared to the same period in 2010. Heavy demand pushed usage to over one billion transactions per month, the company said.

The one billion monthly transactions include about 150,000 new and filled job orders as well more than a million job seeker views. Between the company’s recruitment CRM and social recruiting product lines, over 45,000 users across more than 5,000 companies rely on Bullhorn.

The company also announced this week the release of  Bullhorn Time and Expense. The new module for its ATS and CRM software platform provides online time and expense management and integration with accounting and payroll systems.

iCIMS partners with Payscale

iCIMS, a provider of talent acquisition and management technology, has partnered with PayScale. Now, iCIMS 1,000+ customers will have access to detailed compensation information for 13,000 job titles in all cities in the U.S., Canada, and seven other English-speaking countries. PayScale solutions allow companies to design and implement a compensation strategy tied to business results and ensure competitiveness in what has been a volatile talent market.

New twist on resume search

Urecuitme.com is a new jobs site that skips the posting part of job boarding, instead selling access to its resume database. Recruiters pay a flat fee to search for candidates, then pay up to $300 to contact those on the shortlist.

The business model is pretty much the same as LinkedIn Recruiter or buying only the Monster or CareerBuilder resume database, though all three sites likely have millions more resumes and profiles than does the Atlanta startup. The other differentiator appears to be that candidates also must take an assessment test as part of the registration process.

Google+ stalling?

Could be that Google+ has hit a wall. Or it could just be the plateau effect at work (as in loads of publicity generates lots of traffic, that then drops off, but at a higher level where it was prior to the publicity.)

Whatever the cause, Chitka says that Google+ traffic soared 1,200 percent in the days after its public launch on Sept. 20, then fell by 60 percent. The data analytics company is evidently in the “failure to launch” camp, suggesting in prior posts that the site peaked late in July and has been sliding ever since, public launch and publicity notwithstanding.

Precisely what I was wondering after reading the TechCrunch Europe post about this site. The answer to the first half is straightforward enough. Talentag is the online equivalent of the afterwork social hour; think of it as what LinkedIn would be if it was more like Facebook and less like, well, less like LinkedIn.

Of course that’s not how the site explains it. The answer there is more of a description of what it does. For instance: “Your co-workers and friends can tag you with words or a badge and they can also vouch (for) a particular role you worked together.”

In other words, it’s a way to create a social CV. Talentag connects to your profiles on other social media and will import your work history and friends lists. Then you can connect to them on Talentag and ask them for feedback, get tagged, and, for grins, award and receive badges.

How useful is this to a recruiter? Probably not a whole lot. You can’t use it for sourcing, since searches are limited to your existing inventory of connections from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Your Talentag friends are pulled in from Facebook, which aren’t too useful for those of us who use Facebook strictly for fun. It’s a point TechCrunch makes, too.

Vouching might have some usefulness in keeping candidates honest. But the feedback and tags? Probably not even as useful as the list of references a candidate supplies.

That said, the site may well evolve into something recruiters might find helpful. For instance, corporate recruiters with a Facebook page could create a Talentag profile, import those Facebook friends, and invite them to create their own “social CVs,” as TechCrunch calls them.

That’s just one for instance. Right now, it’s a long way to go. Don’t count it out though. TechCrunch says the founders are building in more utility. They are the same folks, by the way, that launched Emp.ly, the social media job posting service.

(You’ll need a special invite, since it’s in private beta. JIBE is offering access to 100 ERE users. Enter ERE in the invite box.)

The site leverages networking sites Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to show job seekers who they know at companies posting job openings. That description, while accurate, doesn’t do justice to the elegance of the idea.

It’s a referral system that makes it simple for a job seeker to use their network to find out about the company and the job. But it works the other way, too. Recruiters can search the profiles and when they find someone interesting, they pay for access. Unlocking a candidate’s contact info also gives them access to the candidate’s connections at the company.

JIBE is aimed at Gen Y, more of whom will have Facebook profiles than they will LinkedIn. When a job seeker registers with Jibe, the site uses Facebook Connect to pull in the user’s work and education information to populate a candidate profile. Then, for every job on the site, users see who they know there.

They can link their Jibe account to LinkedIn, should they have a profile there, and to Twitter. Joe Essenfeld, Jibe’s CEO who walked me through the program last week at ERE, said other social and business networks will be added as demand grows.

The magic of JIBE is that it’s not attempting to create yet another network. It leverages what people already use and makes the connections more valuable.

As might be expected, JIBE has some fun, and interesting, and even useful bells and whistles. For instance, job postings get automatic rankings based on how often they are viewed. Candidate profiles likewise get ranked so recruiters can see who’s most in demand.

An earlier incarnation called localbacon (as in”bringing home the”) made its debut at TechCrunch50 last September. Its DNA was job board, but the business model was to charge job seekers 99 cents for each application. Just enough to discourage resume blasting, it was hoped, but not enough to stop qualified applicants.

LocalBacon got mixed reviews when it was written up on TechCrunch. And for the reasons you might think: Not enough value for job seekers; Why pay for what can be had for free on the major job boards?; Nothing much in it for employers.

Essenfeld, who spent most of his young career in the food industry, most recently as  COO for a late-night cookie delivery company, Insomnia Cookies, explained that JIBE incorporates a lot of what he and his team learned from localbacon.

“We wanted to have some sort of control on the number of applications that a user can send in a week,” he says. “So we can up with this system of credits. You get some when you join and you can get more by buying them or updating your profile. It’s a way to get people to think about the jobs instead of just shooting out emails.”

localbacon, which is still online, gave the team experience collecting job postings, and polishing and parsing them. They also developed filters, which JIBE uses to ensure that candidate profiles are easily imported into all the leading talent acquisition systems.

Besides announcing the private beta of the site, JIBE also announced it has gotten raised $875,000 in seed capital funding led by Polaris Venture Partners. Also participating in the funding are: Jason Calacanis, Ken and Ben Lerer from Lerer Media Ventrues, Josh and Jared Kushner from Launch Capital, and Zelkova Ventures.

Essenfeld says the funding will be used for further development, and for marketing and sales. He’s going out on the road for the next few weeks visiting college campuses to promote JIBE as a job searching tool for students, especially those seniors looking at a still-tough job market.

For the time being, JIBE is focusing on entry-level jobs and candidates from east of the Mississippi River.

PeopleToucher

Founder Chris Pomeroy is well aware of the snickers over his choice of names. “We know it has some connotations to it, but it just helps spread the word,” he says. And we think the word should spread fast, since this is a tool no hunter should be without.

PeopleToucher vastly simplifies searching LinkedIn. That’s all it does. But it does it so well and so thoroughly that even if Pomeroy charged to use it, we’d recommend it. He’s very clear that his tool is not itself a search engine. Instead, “we just help users put together better searches and organize them for reuse.”

Considering that proviso, you’d think we would get the same results using LinkedIn’s search. We didn’t. A search for a manager, director or VP of purchasing at Boeing produced no results with the LinkedIn search tool. Using PeopleToucher, we came up with 10 listings.

There’s no good reason for such a wide difference in results. But we tried to replicate the PeopleToucher results on LinkedIn using a variety of combinations and just weren’t able to.

Even if you can — and no doubt, many of you are more proficient than we at using LinkedIn’s search — PeopleToucher is simpler and easier to use. “For starters,” says Pomeroy, “There’s simply not enough text input space available to type out a complex search and too many cumbersome drop-down menus.” Plus, like LinkedIn, you can save complex searches for repeat use.

One other feature we like: Pomeroy is very attentive to his audience. His blog  has a tutorial; he answers questions and suggests workarounds for tricky problems.

Keep in mind that PeopleToucher, like LinkedIn itself, only reaches three degrees into your personal network. So the bigger your personal network, the more results. LinkedIn subscribers don’t have the same limitations.

StartUpHire

Recruiting for a startup? No easy task if you’re looking for experienced talent with a pedigree. (Well, it might be easier these days, but stay with us here.) To address that problem comes StartUpHire, itself a startup launched by a group of VC firms, bankers and others.

It launched in semi-stealth in January, and made its public beta announcement Wednesday. Officially, StartUpHire is a job board, though its restrained design and classic features give it an almost refined feel. Everything about the site suggests it means business when it says “Employer participation is restricted to venture capital backed companies which are privately held.”

The site has several nice touches, including the ability to search by investor or VC. A widget makes it possible for a VC to monitor all the jobs being offered by their firms and for a company to have its jobs listed on the company site, even if it doesn’t, yet, have a career center.

One other important point: It’s free for qualifying firms to post openings.

TwitterJobSearch

If you are a regular ERE.net reader or a tech savvy recruiter (Oh, come on. You all aren’t) then you might have an inkling what’s happening at Twitter. Besides those tedious “I’m ordering a venti frappuccino” messages, Twitter is all a tweet with job messages.

We’ve written about JobAngels and TweetMyJobs, which between them are sending out thousands of job messages a day. There are hundreds, maybe more, Tweets coming from individual recruiters, company postings, employees, and who knows who else.

Making sense of this was Twitter’s own search engine. It’s fast, dependable enough, but returns jobs and anything else that happens to match your keywords. Then the clever Brits at Workhound came up with a job search for Twitter. Faster than you can Twitter for help you can search just jobs and get back just jobs. It’ll tell you where they’re from, as in CareerBuilder, or an agency or just folks. You can filter by when they were tweeted, where, and you can link directly to the job, assuming, as is usually, but not always, the case, that the original job listing link was included in the Twitter message.

As we searched through a variety of jobs, it became apparent that Twitter holds the promise of becoming a source of those unadvertised jobs usually filled by personal referral. We saw a tweet from a worker leaving a web job in Santa Monica linking to the company website and another from a worker who just gave notice.

For the jobseeker, this tool and Twitter have some interesting potential.

At ERE’s Fall Expo in Hollywood Beach, Florida, recruiters will meet the newest businesses to launch. Two of the founders will talk about how their respective companies are harnessing the power of video to help recruiters make better hiring choices and save the environment while also saving the hiring company a few dollars.

Greg Rokos, founder of FutureResume.com and its affiliate, GreenJobInterview.com, and Darryn Severyn, founder and CEO of Interactive Applicant, will try to convince recruiters that video resumes and video interviews are effective ways to screen candidates without the cost or carbon expenditure of bringing them onsite.

FutureResume.com is where candidates post a video and standard resume, the latter searchable by the usual means. Then, instead of bringing in a candidate for a first meeting, they can be interviewed online.

Interactive Applicant takes a little different tack, pre-screening applicants via an automated series of questions that candidates can be required to answer via video, audio, text, or any combination. Then the recruiter can review the candidate’s presentation skills before bringing them in.

SnapTalent’s CEO and founder Sumon Sadhu will describe how his company’s online advertising service helps recruiters and hiring managers source better candidates. It’s similar to a keyword marketing campaign but places targeted ads on content sites, rather than on search results pages.

Jeff Stewart, Urgent Career‘s serial entrepreneur founder, will show how linguistic technology can be used to match sales candidates to jobs. That’s different than voice analysis, though there are some similarities. Just how it works and how effective it really is are questions that Stewart will be answering next week.

If the Spring show is any guide, these founders will get questions as tough — maybe tougher, since the audience knows recruiting — as any venture capitalist will ask. Hardly a shy bunch, the Spring ERE audience point-blank asked that crop of company founders and executives how they intended to make money and why an employer should do business with them.

Ben Yoskovitz, founder of Standout Jobs and one of the presenters at the first Startup Forum, told us that since the show he’s learned more about the HR industry than he thought possible. “The panel was a good place for us to start getting feedback, ” he told us recently.

His company provides easy-to-use software for smaller companies to build their own career sites.

Since the spring, Standout Jobs has grown to over 200 customers. While still a free service, that will soon change. An upgrade to the service is also planned. And, Yoskovitz says, now that the intensive testing and learning period is mostly behind the company, promotion of Standout Jobs is the next major effort.

Path 101, a content-intensive community networking site, is still in alpha, which, though growing in depth, is about where it was last Spring. But then, it’s an ambitious effort, which founder Charlie O’Donnell, at the forum, described as a site for job-seekers to research their career options before they apply for jobs. The site itself says it is a place where “Job candidates can figure out what “people like me” are doing with their careers and the site aims to be the first stop for career research.”

At Jobscore, CEO and founder Dan Arkind told us that the last six months have been a learning and testing period. “Not much to report,” he said at first. After a little prodding he said the resume-sharing site has been making inroads into the smaller employers the company is targeting. Especially those in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Jobscore is headquartered.

The company was developed to help smaller businesses source better candidates by sharing resumes and easily post jobs to one or multiple sites. Companies can choose to pay to gain access to the resumes or earn free access by sharing resumes. So far, Arkind said, 96 percent of the customers share.

He has intentionally kept Jobscore low-key. Soon, he said, it will be making a bigger splash. When? “When it’s ready,” Arkind said.

Finally, there’s VisualCV, a site where jobseekers build an online presentation of their experience, background, skills, and more using text, multimedia, and even work samples. It’s an adjunct to the standard resume, not a replacement, at least not yet. Though COO Doug Meadows told us, “What we want to do everyday is wake up and replace the resume.”

We didn’t get to talk to our presenter co-founder Clint Heiden, but Meadows said the company has been “going gangbusters.” VisualCV has been the most visible of all our startups. Cheezhead, alone, has featured the company no less than four times since the Startup Forum in early April. It has a new CEO.  It’s also added new features, most recently a VisualCV Marketplace.

There are now 800 companies signed up with VisualCV, meaning they accepting the VisualCV and have their own posted on the site. Participation in the program is still free; the company is generating revenue from private labelling VisualCV to business groups, associations, alumni organizations and others. The China Business Network uses it to help its thousands of members better connect. Search firm Heidrick and Struggles uses it for its elite group of candidates. A few firms are also using the site to search for candidates, Meadows said, paying a findersfee when a VisualCV member is hired.

What will the next six months bring for these startups and for the four new companies presenting next week? That’s an even tougher question today than it was last Spring because of the economic conditions in the U.S. and around the world. We don’t know how they will adjust, but you can be sure that’s a question our latest crop of presenters will be asked.