This fall we introduced a new product – Jobvite Source, an innovative social recruiting application that helps employers find the right talent – in social networks or on the web. But though we don’t create new recruiting software products every week, we are motivated to innovate daily to solve problems for our customers.

So what inspires our product and engineering teams? The same kind of value system that breeds innovation in any functional area of a company.

1. Listening

Listening to our customers is in our DNA.  Jobvite was started by a founding team who worked very closely with customers and meticulously translated their needs into a clean and functional application. And that’s how we endeavor to continue on

After we released social networking integration in Jobvite Hire earlier this year, customers and prospects applauded how we’d pushed beyond Applicant Tracking System boundaries to address a huge  opportunity – how to make more referral hires in social networks.  While our Jobvite Hire customers immediately started to reap the benefits of our new technology, some potential customers told us they wanted to use our innovations in conjunction with their existing recruiting tools.  So we set out to make a meaningful social recruiting application that would work with any ATS.

For several months we worked closely with users to refine our new product. As a result, we came out with practical innovations to help any company easily connect with the right talent.

2. Continuous, incremental innovation

Our company culture revolves around fostering innovation and promoting internal entrepreneurship. We generate lots of ideas and prototype many of them. We strongly believe that one innovation leads to another and innovation is incremental.

This is exactly what led us to develop our new application, Jobvite Source. We started to brainstorm on how our search and match technologies could be leveraged and extended to the abundant open web that has few hundred million profiles and resumes on Face Book, Twitter, Plaxo, Bing, Google, Jigsaw and more. Soon we had lots of great ideas. When we boiled down and prototyped our ideas, we came to the conclusion that the most exciting  value-add application is in narrowing down thousands of resumes and profiles into less than a few dozen that are extremely relevant to the jobs  an employer is trying to fill.

3. Design simplicity and convergence

We are very particular about simplicity. Perhaps this is the most difficult stage of our product development cycle. We invest in making sure that our designs are simple, elegant and minimalist.  We resist feature bloat because it detracts from usability and adoption, adding only those features that solve business problems for the user. Our product team designs to the best of consumer web 2.0 standards so that our products have an elegant and functional interface that anyone can use productively, immediately.

We also pay a lot of attention to user behavior and how our customers go about doing their day-to-day jobs. As an example, we have heard from our customers that they do web searches to learn more about their candidates. This behavior gave us an idea to build a social profile feature in our sourcing tool. It gathers all the relevant information and feeds from various social and professional networks for candidate.  This 360 degree information is an example of convergence of many data sources intelligently filtered to drastically reduce labor intensive candidate research at multiple sites.

4. Committing to leap forward

Of course, technology is the key enabling factor behind the innovations at Jobvite.  As an example, we believe in real time search technologies. We think that crawlers are obsolete. By the time crawled data is processed and indexed, the information is already stale. In this era of network feeds, information obsolescence happens in seconds. Therefore we agreed that we have to develop and use cutting edge, real-time computing technologies.  Our search and matching technologies are based on real-time information aggregation and indexing, coupled with behavioral matching and machine learning algorithms to narrow down the results into a meaningful set.

Like other inventive organizations, we’re marrying our unique competencies with broader trends to create something relevant and valuable for our customers.