A Silicon Valley Story: JobFlo has gone Google

Posted by Jim Ambras, Founder and CEO of JobFlo

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Jim Ambras, founder and CEO of JobFlo (previously NotchUp). JobFlo helps small to medium-sized businesses recruit top talent through its free social-media recruiting platform. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

JobFlo came into existence to address a problem I’d dealt with for over 14 years—how to find and recruit top talent who may not be actively seeking a job. I wanted to provide employers with a creative new way to reach happily employed people without resorting to the same traditional recruiting methods. This desire has led us to provide employers with a free recruiting platform that taps into the power of social networking sites.

I started JobFlo three years ago knowing we would take full advantage of cloud computing technologies and not be tied to a traditional business model that required servers and lots of IT complexity. I knew our business model was viable and was more concerned with how to set up and run a streamlined, efficient company. Having served as Vice President of Engineering for a bunch of start-ups, I knew setting up an infrastructure for our business ourselves could be really difficult and time-consuming. In previous jobs, I would often spend my days engineering and my nights managing our IT. Starting my own company, my first rule of business was that any communication and collaboration solution we used would not rely on in-house servers.

And with that, all the problems I had had before went away. With Google Apps, IT was one less thing we had to worry about, and it just worked and worked well. We had high email quotas, great spam-filtering, and real-time collaboration. It was really important that we had a good infrastructure for collaboration. As a company with four employees all working from home, the ability to share and work together online was critical.

While we started with Gmail and Google Docs, we have since included the use of many other tools such as Google Voice and apps from the Google Apps Marketplace. We have adopted tools such as FreshBooks for invoicing and MailChimp for email marketing. JobFlo is doing great, and we’ll be integrating even more of Google’s product suite into our business as we continue to grow.