Interesting post from TechCrunch

This should be an interesting few months for Jobster. Jobster is also hosting an agency conference call next week. Stay tuned.

here is the article from techcrunch : http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/26/more-drama-for-jobster/

Seattle-based Jobster has had a rough time over the last several months. They radically changed their business model and went through a round of layoffs. The company, and CEO Jason Goldberg, has faced criticism for all of these changes.

Now a new storm is brewing over a former employee, Jason Davis. Davis previously sold a recruiting blog to Jobster, and worked with the company for a while. He eventualy left, but apparently had a non-compete in place.

Davis may have violated that non-compete when he started a new blog, RecruitingBlogs.com. Jobster and Davis have been “discussing” the issue behind the scenes, but it all became public today when Jobster sent Davis a cease & desist letter (see here and here as well).

I’ve pinged Goldberg for his side of the story. His response is below.

Hi Mike.

I will make my only public comment on this here to you, as follows:

We at Jobster are actually big fans of the www.recruitingblogs.com website. It’s a great site and offers recruiters an online blogging community that can be very valuable.

Our issue is not with recruitingblogs.com, rather it is with the site’s founder, Jason Davis. Jason Davis sold the www.recruiting.com online recruiting blogging community website to Jobster a little over a year ago. Jason Davis stayed on to run www.recruiting.com until a few months ago – when his one-year contract with Jobster ended. We parted amicably and wish only the best for Jason Davis. As part of his departure from Jobster/recruiting.com, Jason agreed to a fairly standard non-compete.

Jason has now launched www.recruitingblogs.com.

As would be expected, we’ve asked Jason Davis to honor his contractual agreement with Jobster. We’ve also offered/suggested that there is probably a good way for us to work together going forward. When we spoke to Jason Davis last week, we offered for him to come up some ideas on how we might work together. We would like to work this out in a way that benefits everyone.

Today, Jason Davis decided to go public instead.

Our overarching intent at Jobster and with our Recruiting.com website remains to foster online community in the recruiting industry — the more the better. At the same time, Jobster needs to ensure that our employees and contractors uphold their commitments.

I am certain that we can and will arrive at a good outcome for everyone on this.

Jason Goldberg

I’m not familiar with the law in Washington on non compete agreements, but in California its pretty clear - if you sell your company to someone for stock, they’re enforceable. We’ll see how this develops.