Houston Startup: JobPlotter Geographic Job Searching INTERVIEW

If you live in a big metro area or one of those areas like Hampton Roads Virginia that’s like nine cities built into one, than a job search can be painful based on the geography alone. Take Houston for example, a quick internet search revealed hundreds of jobs in Houston, most of the ads without addresses. Hmmm, what is someone to do, especially someone that doesn’t drive.

Never fear, a Houston entrepreneur has set out to solve that problem with a very interesting startup that meshes job searching and Google Maps. The startup, called JobPlotter, does exactly what you’d imagine with the background info we’ve provided, it plots available jobs on a Google Map.

Why didn’t you think of that? That’s easy because Paul Chittenden did. After experiencing the pain of looking for a job and then locating the job prospects on a map, in Houston.

In the interview below the break, Chittenden explains how he came about the idea for JobPlotter and how they are integrating job data into a Google Map. Now, JobPlotter users can find jobs, and then find where the job actually is.

What is JobPlotter?

Jobplotter is a job search tool that helps jobseekers find local jobs. We’ve taken a unique approach to job discovery by taking our job openings and plotting them over a Google Maps interface.

In a simpler sense, we’re a map based job search engine helping locals find local jobs.

We were tired of long Houston commutes that took a large chunk of time out of our daily lives. The location based searches used by the major job boards only gave a few results in the area, and many times they specified jobs outside of the search radius to enhance the number of job postings.

I knew that there were thousands of jobs within five miles of my home in my industry, I live in an urban area near the Galleria in Houston, and we needed a way to harvest that data and plot it on the map for our users. It’s a long road to get all of that job data in the system, but we are off to a good start.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Paul Chittenden is the Founder and CEO of Jobplotter. He is a self-described “business guy” and a master in business operations, sales, and marketing.  Jobplotter is his second foray into the job board market. His first company, an oilfield job board failed miserably, but he is utilizing these lessons learned to build something truly remarkable.

Paul is from Houma, Louisiana, and graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (The Ragin Cajuns). His professional background is mainly in the Oil & Gas Industry. After college, he started working offshore on oil rigs and oil platforms for Schlumberger. He then tarted working for GE Oil and Gas internationally in Project Management and Tender Management roles.

Wearing all the hats in a startup is a difficult job, but Jobplotter has a wonderful team of outsourced tech talent based in India (for the prototype build out) as well as Austin (product design and UI) and Houston, Texas (front end and back end programming). He is also surrounded by an excellent group of mentors in the Houston Startup Community.

What problem does JobPlotter solve?

Specifically, we help people find jobs closer to home.

Many workers use public transportation, bike, or even walk to work. For these people, working closer to home is a big deal.  We did a survey on average commute times and over 70% of the people surveyed spent over an hour each day commuting and over 40% spent an hour to hour and a half. Imagine what you could do with an extra hour each day. You could:

Spend more time with your family.
Get some time in the gym.
Ride a bike.
Grab some beers with friends.
Go for a run.
Catch your son’s ballgame.

The possibilities are endless, and we want to help our users find that extra time doing work that they love.

What is your secret sauce?

Traditional location job searches are posted by zip code only and results vary wildly from site to site. We’re able to pinpoint the exact location by street address so that users know exactly where they will be working and how far from home it will be.

We aren’t competing with the major job boards. We are a job search engine that supplements job data with location info.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in the startup process?

Without a Technical Founder, it’s been difficult to build a truly cohesive development team. It’s taken some trial and error, and we’ve had a few missteps in the beginning building the prototype.  Our initial experience with the outsourcers for the prototype was challenging. We had to deal with language barriers, bad coding, and problems with the outsourcers meeting mutually agreed specs.

Luckily, we found a better development team for the prototype, and we have had tremendous luck finding local resources through referrals and recommendations from friends. Our new team is highly capable and a pleasure to work with.

What’s next for JobPlotter?

Product launch! We’ve just finished development on the app, and we are touching up the design and UI before we launch to the public.  We have roughly 75,000 to 100,000 jobs in our database, and we are working with a number of multi-location businesses to display their job postings as well.

We have a number of exciting things in the works for the future, but we’ll have to keep them under wraps for now.

Linkage:

Find out more about JobPlotter here at jobplotter.com

Check out their Facebook page here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” check out these stories from “everywhere else”

This is a must check out link, and below is a must see video: