I am excited to announce the closing of JIBE’s seed round of fundraising led by Polaris Venture Partners.  What’s even more exciting than the round closing is that we now get to put all of our focus on fixing the hiring process by bringing JIBE to employers and job seekers.

I have been fortunate to work with a fantastic team that feels more like a family than co-workers.  In addition to our team, JIBE’s group of investors has already and will no doubt continue to add significant value.  Jason Calacanis and Jay Levy have been extremely supportive from the early stages of the company.  Peter Flint and Jon Steinberg from Polaris have and continue to play an intricate role in helping guide the evolution of JIBE from prototype to constantly evolving our market fit.

Only hours after our financing closed, I had the opportunity to attend the ere expo, which is a national recruiters conference.  At the expo I was able to get direct feedback on our product and market fit as well as pick up some beta clients.  I have to admit, selling to customers is at least 100x better than pitching to investors.  Thanks to David Manaster and the ere team for the introductions that made the conference a worthwhile experience.

Now that we have rolled out our private beta, I am on a personal mission along with the rest of the JIBE team to fix the online hiring process.  Simply put, JIBE is an Employment Networking Platform that connects job seekers and employers through mutual business and personal contacts.  We have no intention of building our own social network, our philosophy is to deeply integrate with the social networks people are already using.  Our private beta, which we launched today is integrated with both Facebook and LinkedIn.  I invite you to watch JIBE evolve from the early and admittedly rough stages into a powerhouse application that will fix the broken hiring process.