We're Up!

Whoo-hoo.

So hey. We're now officially up.

Today our site has officially moved from development to live. What this means is that the core parts of our site are now all running and we have jobs from a number of employers up on the site. More jobs from other employers will be going up between now and February 2nd.

We are still in Beta because with a somewhat compressed development cycle there may be issues still to be worked out. And we will be continuing to add new features and content currently under development.

Be sure to check out our Community section as well. We have content and areas to discuss issues relevent to diverse job candidates as well as settlement resources for those who have recently or are looking to immigrate to Canada.

Less than three weeks of beta left...

Well our beta period is winding down and the full-launch date grows ever closer. Be sure to check out our site and let us know what you think.

We're putting the finishing touches on the community portal aspect of our site which will be rolled-out next week and continuing to make tweaks and changes to the rest of our site based on user experience and feedback.

And just generally getting excited/nervous about our launch. We're tracking well towards it but as with so many things a lot of work to do in a short time period.

Our site is up in Beta

The TalentOyster site is up in Beta. What does that mean? Well it means that almost all of the functionality of the site is present but that (a) we are continuing to modify how pieces of our site look and (b) there are still some quirks in functionality we are finding and working through.

So what kinds of things are we working on exactly? Well, the look and feel stuff is the main area, and improvements are ongoing. But also working on improving the user experience when it comes to things like searching for jobs. For example right now you *can* search for jobs by location but it doesn't work in a user-friendly enough way. So we're working on that. And on our community news portal. And our user-interaction components.

At any rate all pretty busy but you should come check us out. If you find an issue or problem please let us know via our feedback page.

Site Updates

We made some updates to the pre-beta version of our site. There was a bit of a delay in getting these updates posted because there were some minor configuration issues to straighten out.

But all is now well and so up went the site with our new look and feel, hopefully much much closer to the final version. http://www.talentoyster.com/

Over the next few days we'll be merging the work done on the back-end components of the site into the new look and feel so there should be more frequent updates.

Pre-beta site up

Our pre-beta, wireframed site is up. You can see it at http://www.talentoyster.com/ we have now moved onto our production servers and updated our DNS so DNS propagation may still be happening. (Which is a whole bunch of geek speak for you might see our old site still but in another day or two you'll see the newest one).

We will be deploying updates to this site once every two-three days as work progresses on our internal development versions.

The current site is basically just a draft framework with language plugability.

The TalentOyster Blog

So here we have the TalentOyster blog. I guess a good as place as any to start would be to identify what TalentOyster actually is. So without further ado here is an extract from a draft copy of the "about us" page content for our site.

"TalentOyster is something different. TalentOyster is a revolutionary job board driven by community. TalentOyster is a job board that speaks to a diverse population in their own language. TalentOyster transcends the traditional job board experience by engaging members in interactive ways. TalentOyster reflects the belief that we are all enriched through our diversity. TalentOyster is Canadian."

And that about sums it up. So what's this blog about? Well for starters a place for us to post updates on development and our launch schedule and also an alternative source for service updates etc. Going forward though we'll be speaking here to the issues that we are speaking to which in a nutshell means speaking on diversity issues and most specifically diversity recruiting issues.

Last but not least, this blog, like everything else we do, is driven by community interaction. Know a topic that you feel we should be discussing here? Have some feedback on a post, point or issue you read here? Leave us a comment, send us an email or visit our site and let us know what you think.