Geek Gestalt

SAN DIEGO--What would happen if you mashed up LinkedIn and Monster.com and threw in a dose of steroids?

A company called Paidinterviews that presented at DemoFall here Tuesday morning thinks it has the answer.

And that, the company said, is its Paidinterviews new job site and candidate recruitment site.

The first side of it is designed for job candidates trying to find a new position.

Initially, they would upload pictures of themselves, previous employment references, examples of their work and other information employers might want to know about them.

Then, they can deploy a series of widgets that allow the candidates to show exactly how they want to be presented on the site. They can define an asking price that is essentially 5 percent of the salary range they'd like and then they can put together a list of benefits and other attributes about a new job they'd like, in order of importance to them, such as salary, health benefits, education reimbursement and the like. They can then drag and drop such attributes into the exact order of importance to them.

At that point, they can turn to the "watercooler," what the company likens to Amazon.com product ratings. Here, candidates can peruse a list of potential positions that meet their criteria and look at ratings of the hiring companies posted by previous and current employees.

And finally, users can join groups centered around professional interests with the idea of helping members of those groups identify potential companies and positions they'd want to pursue.

From the employer's side, Paidinterviews also offers useful tools.

First, hiring companies can see lists of candidates who are interested in their available positions, and the tool ranks those candidates in order of the likelihood of a match, from strongest to weakest.

I'm not in the job market right now, and I have found in the past that job-seeking sites never really do a good job with the journalism industry. But for people in many other industries, I suspect that a tool like this will be, at the least, a good adjunct to more established sites, especially as the site builds a bit of critical mass of users.