We’re proud of how fast RiseSmart is growing — and of the wonderful reception our service has received from the media and bloggers.

Here are a few excerpts from stories and posts on us to date:

Jeff Altman, the Big Game Hunter –

I wish I had thought of this service for senior level professionals. RiseSmart came up with an idea that I think is simple AND terrific. Their idea is that searching the job boards is horrible. You have to search a lot of them, scroll though useless job spec after useless job spec, and waste a lot of time.

RiseSmart has a simple idea with two prongs–the first is to select the kind of job you are looking for based upon a number of criteria. They search the boards and then have a human being review results and refer them to you. You have responses within 48 hours and then at least weekly after that! Yeah, you have to pay for the service but not a lot.

alarm:clock –

Would we use RiseSmart? Sure. $44 isn’t much if it gives you an edge … If you are at the VP level, you are used to having underlings do the work for you. So you probably are not very comfortable searching for jobs on your own.

Gautam Ghosh –

So would there be takers for RiseSmart’s services? I think so. Senior executives, in my personal experiences, are really not very technology savvy and while jobs have moved to the jobsites, CXO level folks are chary about doing a job hunt through job sites. One CEO I was talking to was so concerned about his privacy that he hadn’t even opened a Linkedin profile.

About.com –

If your time is in short supply and you can afford to spend money on your job search, you might want to consider giving RiseSmart a try…If you think RiseSmart may work for you, but you are not sure, you can find out more about how it works and view a demo video or sign up for a free 3 day trial.

KillerStartups –

RiseSmart is part job board and part career coach. Each member is assigned a “Job Concierge” who takes care of matching member profiles to the most suitable jobs by using an automated search of the job database. With over 1 million jobs in its database, RiseSmart has a lot to offer to C-Level executives looking for that next perfect job.

Job Search Guy Blog –

Risesmart aims for the executive and upper employment demographic by employing a “concierge” to match available $100K+ jobs with your submitted profile … They already claim paying customers and their site page appears to be getting significant traffic with an Alexa ranking of around 495K [now 247K]. If you’re looking for a $100K+ job and don’t want to spend time looking, then check them out.

BORN (Broadcasting Online Recruitment News) –

The rise of smart recruiting … The interesting thing about RiseSmart is the fact that its search engine is human-powered … It has the quality advantages that come with putting humans into the loop … RiseSmart is certainly a company to watch.

Bloggers: If you want to try out RiseSmart’s service for free for purposes of a review of the service (good, bad or indifferent), please e-mail me at sanjaysathe@risesmart.com and we’ll make it happen. Or, if you’d like access to a sample account so you can see exactly what subscribers receive, we can do that do. Just contact us.

Here’s an embedded version of that WPVI-TV report highlighting RiseSmart so everyone can view it:

Reporter Erin O’Hearn of WPVI-TV in Philadelphia provides an overview of niche job sites in this report. We’re pleased, of course, that Erin chose to highlight RiseSmart in her coverage!

The Dallas Business Journal has a nice profile of us in the edition that came out today. Check it out!

We’d like to thank Alison Doyle at About.com for taking the time to review RiseSmart’s services. As she writes in her review, “By using the time-saving RiseSmart web site, people who are looking for that perfect high-level job can do so without having to do all the work themselves.” She encourages her readers to try the three-day trial.

So what are you waiting for? Try it out now.

If you haven’t seen BW Chicago, you should check it out. It’s a brand-new local Business Week publication for the Second City. Who knows, maybe Business Week will spring up in your fair city next?

Oh — and you should especially check it out because RiseSmart is mentioned in the publication’s News & Views section in an item on our executive education sweepstakes with the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. There’s still time to enter, by the way: Do it now!

The buzz is building around RiseSmart, and we appreciate all of you who have helped spread the word — including bloggers in Germany and The Netherlands! Some recent blog posts that mention our company:

• Job sites for high earners (Seeds of Growth)
• RiseSmart looks to take on TheLadders (Recruiting Fly)
• RiseSmart goes YouTube (Magic Pot of Jobs)
• Two new job finder services sites (Job Search Guy Blog)
• Class instead of mass (Startuptrends.de)
• Job sites for “high earners” (ARA weblog)

Thanks to everyone who has taken an interest in us.

I thought I’d share with you the news release we put out today. We’re very excited to begin taking our story to the public. Here it is:

RiseSmart Enables High-End Jobseekers to Search in Style, Transforming the Way Busy Professionals Find Jobs Online

Dallas-Based Startup Assigns Each Member a Personal “Job Concierge” Who Plucks the Most Precise Matches from Company’s Million-Job Database

DALLAS – February 6, 2008 – In most aspects of their lives, $100K+ earners have come to expect a higher standard of service. But when it comes to finding high-paying jobs online, senior-level professionals have had little choice but to scour the Web’s millions of job listings like everyone else. That is, until now.

Bridging the gap between traditional job boards and the personal attention of a career coach, RiseSmart – a new subscription-based site for $100K+ professionals – assigns each member an expert “Job Concierge” who is responsible for matching member profiles with the most relevant job openings. It’s the first high-end job site truly worthy of the high-end jobseeker.

The High-End Job Site That $100K+ Earners Deserve

“Finding the right six-figure job opportunity among the millions of listings online is like searching for a needle in a haystack,” says Sanjay Sathe, RiseSmart founder and CEO. “Most $100K+ earners are too busy to spend countless hours visiting different job boards and poring through the many often-irrelevant positions returned in a typical automated search.”

Other $100K+ job sites, Sathe adds, offer only half-measures to address this problem.

“Other sites claim to have ‘’exclusive’ databases that make searching for $100K+ jobs easier. While this may sound impressive, the reality is that these databases exclude many high-paying jobs their members would want to know about,” Sathe says. “And they still require subscribers to sort manually through automated search results.”

The RiseSmart Process: Taking the Search Out of the Job Search

By contrast, RiseSmart’s process literally “takes the search out of the job search” for senior-level professionals. Here’s how it works:

• Each new member takes five minutes to create an online profile and upload a resume.
• RiseSmart runs an automated search of its million-job database to identify openings that could represent quality matches based on the member’s profile information.
• A RiseSmart Concierge™ – a real human being – carefully compares the member’s search results against the profile and resume, eliminating poor matches and presenting the member with only the most relevant job openings.
• The member simply clicks a link to apply for a job.
• RiseSmart identifies new opportunities weekly for each member. Members can provide feedback to improve future search results.

The RiseSmart Concierge: Your Personal Job-Search Assistant

The RiseSmart Concierge is the centerpiece of RiseSmart’s strategy of building deeper customer relationships than other job sites. Each RiseSmart Concierge is assigned specific member accounts, and is responsible for reviewing members’ resumes and learning their job preferences.

Concierges can also modify future searches based on member feedback – for example, screening out jobs from undesirable companies.

“This is the first site that actually treats executives like executives,” explains Dan Davenport, RiseSmart co-founder and chief financial officer.
“In their work lives, senior-level professionals often have a team of people who report to them, doing the tactical work necessary to achieve the objectives they set. Yet when it comes to searching for jobs online, these professionals are forced to sort through hundreds of irrelevant job listings, just to find the handful they might actually be interested in.

“Finally, these $100K+ earners have a ‘direct report’ to handle this task for them: a RiseSmart Concierge.”

An Idea Whose Time Has Come – as Members Can Attest

Since RiseSmart.com quietly went live in late November, the site has signed up more than 1,800 registered users. Of those who have requested RiseSmart’s free three-day trial, more than 80 percent have gone on to become paying members of the site.

“We’re getting positive – often ecstatic — feedback from our members. There’s been a latent need in the market for an online job site that doesn’t put the jobseeker through so many hoops,” Davenport says. “Our customers are telling us that this is a breath of fresh air for them.”

Early RiseSmart members offer enthusiastic testimonials:

Gary Iyer, a Houston-based CIO consultant for Intellysys, says –

Before RiseSmart, I had been visiting five or six different job boards every week, in addition to corporate sites for several companies I’d had my eye on for C-Level consulting in the U.S. RiseSmart aggregates jobs from all of these sources — then separates the wheat from the chaff so I don’t have to wade through hundreds of automated search results. I’ve been extremely pleased with the service.

Martin White, a senior marketing executive based in Dallas, says –

When I started my job search, I realized there was a huge gap between the numerous open senior marketing positions available across the U.S. and my ability to get to them. RiseSmart bridged this gap by proactively bringing the right jobs to me. I was previously a member of TheLadders, and even though they did have some senior positions on their site, I still had to do all the work to go across a multitude of pages to find the relevant positions. At RiseSmart, I get the relevant opportunities served up to me, based on my preferences.

Joselyn Conti, a marketing director in New Jersey, says –

I used subscription-based job sites before, but I never felt comfortable with them because I kept coming across $100K+ jobs on other job boards. Why didn’t my subscription site have these jobs? After I joined RiseSmart, I didn’t have this problem. I felt confident that if the job I wanted was posted online somewhere, RiseSmart would find it for me. Another thing I liked is that RiseSmart had a salary calculator next to each job result presented, which helped me compare salary ranges for various positions that I was exploring.

Alan Jernigan, a Texas-based sales executive, says –

I like RiseSmart’s approach to customer service. The team shows a real effort to help – which sets the company and its service apart.

Industry Veterans Praise, Participate in Venture

Citing RiseSmart’s potential to transform the way senior professionals search for jobs online, several leading authorities in the job-search and recruitment businesses have joined the company as advisors.

“Given the range of Web sites posting jobs, and the time it takes to aggregate all of these jobs, RiseSmart offers a great way to get access to jobs that are real and targeted.” says Dean Harris, former senior vice president of marketing for HotJobs and now a member of RiseSmart’s advisory board.

Fellow advisory board member Craig Stamm, the former chief financial officer for CareerBuilder.com and Headhunter.net, says: “This new business model is able to save senior professionals time and drive relevance in their search. Instead of looking for jobs across a multitude of Web sites, RiseSmart brings all the relevant jobs to the customer.”

“I’m pleased to be part of a venture that has a chance to change the online job search process in a fundamental way,” adds Bill Rowe II, vice chairman and managing partner of Pearson Partners International, who is also on RiseSmart’s advisory board. “The RiseSmart management team is made up of veteran corporate executives who know firsthand the difficulties with traditional job sites — and have developed an ingenious alternative.”

Service Pricing and Special Discounts

Through a special introductory discount, members can subscribe to RiseSmart Concierge service for $43.95 per month, or $109.95 for a three-month plan. The normal monthly rate is $54.95.

About RiseSmart

Based in Dallas, RiseSmart is a human-powered job search service that prescreens online search results for time-starved managers and executives. The RiseSmart team matches opportunities with jobseekers based on each member’s unique profile, freeing senior-level professionals to focus on networking or the demands of their current jobs. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.RiseSmart.com or its blog at www.risesmart.com/risesmart/blog. To view a demo, visit www.RiseSmart.com/demo.

Advertising Age reports that a new campaign for TheLadders.com “paints category leaders CareerBuilder and Monster as overrun with unattractive commoners.”

Ad Age goes on to say:

TheLadders’ tone is markedly different from that of CareerBuilder and Monster, which have tended to focus on job seekers’ unhappiness at their current workplaces…

The exclusive, country-club attitude befits TheLadders’ business model. Unlike the larger and better-known jobs sites, it costs $180 a year (or $30 a month) to use and restricts membership and listings to “$100k+ people looking for $100k+ jobs.”

While we’re not big fans of the elitist tone of the TheLadders’ ads, we do agree that $100K+ jobseekers are frustrated with most job sites and are looking for something better. Finding a the right six-figure job opportunity among the millions of listings online is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

TheLadders’ solution to this problem is to restrict the number of jobs it makes available to members. Its database typically consists of about 70,000 active job listings.

That solution reduces the number of jobs members must sort through, but it still forces them to search manually through job listings. And it greatly reduces the pool of possible jobs.

At RiseSmart, we think we’ve found a better solution for the $100K+ jobseeker:

• We start with a database of more than a million active job listings — not 70,000.
• Then, we take our members’ profile information and match it against this million-job database to produce a preliminary list of job results.
• Finally, a RiseSmart Concierge — a real human being assigned to each member’s account — plucks only the most precise matches from this list.

That means our members gain the benefit of a more comprehensive search than TheLadders provides, but without having to search at all. You can leave that to your RiseSmart Concierge.

That’s why at RiseSmart we don’t just tell you you’re special — we show you you’re special by offering a level of service unavailable anywhere else.

Since we have been in the process of raising capital for RiseSmart, I could identify with this post from Toby Dayton at Diggings:

Edgeio announced late last week that it was ceasing operations and looking to liquidate its assets. The company, which had recently raised $6M in capital ($3M of which came from Intel), tried to build a business by aggregating classified listings from all over the web.

In explaining the reasons why the business was unsuccessful, CEO Keith Teare stated, “I would say it came down to lack of vision on the part of investors to see the platform as part of the future.”

The arrogance and absurdity of Teare’s statement is dumbfounding.

I won’t be as harsh as Toby. I can certainly understand the frustration of a CEO who still believes strongly in his dream, but who can’t get the investors to come along with him. Ultimately, my guess is that Teare’s emotions simply got the better of him.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, a co-founder of Edgeio, was more philosophical:

This is the way the startup world works. You win some, but you lose most. Edgeio wasn’t meant to be a success.

More background on the rise and fall of Edgeio here.