A year or so ago, a good friend from Microsoft told me he was leaving the company, and was pondering a few ideas about what do next. His ideas had one common trait, that he wanted to improve how people got things done, a desire I’ve highlighted in some blog posts before.

Working with a partner, he brainstormed a few ideas, and they focused in on the following use case:

When I post a job to a job board, my inbox gets inundated with resumes. The process of reviewing these is manual and painful, and makes me feel like I’m stuck in the 1990’s. Isn’t there any way to simplify this?

Their answer to that question is here at Jobvention.com, and I think it is pretty impressive (personally, I love apps that streamline tasks that are needlessly complex).

Simplistically, Jobvention enables an easy workflow for a hiring manager to process job candidates. It links together the job posting (from sites like Craigslist) and incoming resumes (from Gmail and Google Apps for Business, currently) together within Jobvention. It also enables bulk upload of resumes, to let you easily process them through Jobvention, and bulk download of any resumes stored in the system for later reference.

When email in your Gmail inbox is synchronized with Jobvention, messages matching the posting are processed, the app links each message to the job posting, and processes all of the resumes, displaying them directly as text within the app. As a result, you don’t have to download them and read them on your desktop, (but you can do so).

From there, candidates can be easily categorized as those you want to thank for their resume but decline, hold for later, or follow up with, according to how well they align with the job posting. Jobvention lets hiring managers send custom email out to categorized candidates, whether to thank them or engage them for follow-up, and shows you the email conversation history from directly within Jobvention (but does not store the messages). See below for a screenshot of Jobvention in action.

 

Candidate resumes can also be kept for later reference if they might be a good fit for another posting down the line.

Today, Jobvention provides the key workflow stages needed to rapidly process potential job candidates. The service is currently free, and iterating pretty rapidly as they continue to refine the service. Personally, I wish I’d had Jobvention when I was hiring developers in Austin long ago, and look forward to seeing how the team moves it forward.