Students Launch Job Search Site

If thefacebook.com revolutionized the way students socialize on campuses across the country, a new bevy of undergraduate entrepreneurs hope they have found a similar answer for college job networking.

Yesterday saw the launch of joboozle.com, a career recruiting website that is the brainchild of Eduardo L. Saverin ’05, a co-founder of thefacebook.com. The site aims to help students navigate the chaotic waters of college and post-college employment by consolidating online resources and facilitating communication between students and employers.

Instead of getting poked, though, students may be hired.

Saverin, an Economics concentrator in Eliot House, said he was motivated by his frustration with the job recruitment system to try his own solution, and posed his idea to several friends last spring.

“Essentially, he was tired of the impersonal nature of the whole recruiting process,” said Kwame L. Osseo-Arame ’05, who worked with Saverin to create the site.

Among the other Harvard students working on the project—an endeavor entirely separate from thefacebook.com—are A.J. Solimine ’05 and Christopher M. Hill ’05, along with Andrew Ace of Boston University and Paul Rosania of Dartmouth.

Saverin, who served as president of the Harvard Investment Association (HIA) last year, said his goal is for Job’oozle to serve as an “efficient portal” for students, combining the networking and information-gathering capabilities found elsewhere but which had not been brought together into one site before.

“There’s just isn’t anything out there that meets that demand. It’s all kind of in little pieces,” Saverin said.

While the founders of Job’oozle had been “hashing out” the idea for the site since last May, summer positions at investment firms kept them from being able to develop the idea further until this year.

William Wright-Swadel, director of the Office of Career Services (OCS), the Harvard office that organizes employment recruiting on campus, said yesterday he had not yet heard about the website.

When first-time users log in to Job’oozle, they can set up a profile, link up with companies, and browse half a dozen student forums on topics from “Etiquette” to “Job Offers.”

For now, the company listings are heavy on the finance and consulting sectors, but the creators expect to beef up career options outside these fields in the near future.

Features on the website include an on-line calendar that will keep the harried Harvard senior from confusing a Morgan Stanley interview with an information session for Goldman Sachs, as well as a tool that analyzes and compares grades provided by Job’oozle users. The creators say the academic information is secure, available only to potential employers and others designated by the user.

Solimine said the site’s name came out of a day-long brainstorming session, when he suggested “Job’oozle,” an amalgam of the words “job” and “bamboozle,” but was promptly shot down. While such head-scratchers as Blue Kangaroo and Yellow Snow were also considered, Solimine repeatedly advocated for the name Job’oozle until it won out.

“It’s all about having fun,” Solimine said.