Last month, Authentic Jobs had a record month. More job openings were posted during February 2010 than any other month in our four-year history. For me, this is clearly an indication not only that we’re doing something right but that the industry’s economy is rebounding in impressive ways.

This news, however, isn’t shielded from the reality that most of us, myself included, have family members and friends who remain unemployed or under-employed. Some industries have suffered severe layoffs and have been forever changed. I hope those of who are gainfully employed are doing what we can to help the less fortunate get back on their feet.

On a related record-month-coupled-with-reality-check note, Authentic Jobs contributed to 26 new Kiva loans last month. This is the most we’ve ever contributed to at a time, bringing our total to 176 Kiva loans to date. Our contributions to Kiva are a sobering reminder that many individuals and families throughout the world live in dire financial circumstances, and we’re trying to do what we can to help out.

Lastly, if you’ll be at SXSW Interactive this weekend, come find me (Cameron). I’ll have about 20 Authentic Jobs tees on hand, which look roughly like this:

To get one, all you need to do is tell me your AJ story: How did you use the site to find work or to find a new hire? Or better yet, why didn’t the site help you find work or a new hire? I’d love to hear your story regardless.

Thanks for making February a record month, and hope to see you in Austin.

(If you’re curious, the tees are printed on Alternative Apparel’s Perfect Crew, espresso color.)

Hosted by the venerable Dan Benjamin, the show features a variety of discussion about all things internet. Go give the show a listen, or jump straight to episode 2 (where Authentic Jobs is mentioned around the 41-minute mark):

We discuss Flash, HTML5, and the future of the web, Gowalla, Daringfireballwithcomments – was it legal? was it wrong? was it funny? the newsvine acquisition and NOT selling out or giving up the indy spirit, how to not dupe your readers, technology and kids, comments and giving up control, and how creating an identity on the internet can be both good and evil.

Oh, and the Newsvine job opening mentioned by the equally venerable Mike Davidson? It’s right here: Interactive Designer, Newsvine.

If you’re interested in gaining access to our staging environment to review and give feedback on new features and enhancements, please subscribe to our list using the form below. Not everyone will be approved for access, but many will be. (If approved, we’ll follow up soon with an invitation to begin testing.)

Today begins our annual New Year’s Promotion, but this year is different.

We’re calling it the Twenty Ten promotion. It works like this: Post a listing between now and January 22 and you’ll receive 20% off your listing. More importantly, 10% of your purchase will be donated to Charity:Water to help bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

Use promo code TWENTYTEN or any of the codes available from some of our listing partners.

You may also join in and donate to our campaign independent of posting a listing. We’re hoping to raise $5,000, which is enough to fund the development of a freshwater well in one village. (Coincidentally, Charity:Water is seeking a Web Designer / Front-end Developer in New York City.)

Here’s to a fantastic (and cleaner) 2010.

Update: We’re deeply saddened about the recent tragedy in Haiti. We had committed to Charity:Water prior to the incident and feel its cause is certainly still worthy of our efforts. Please join us in donating to the Haiti Earthquake Relief effort, as well.

Update II: Your purchases allowed us to contribute $1,044 to Charity:Water. Thank you. We will continue to keep this campaign active, and we anticipate more news from Charity:Water about their long-term water strategy for Haiti.

First, understand some of the factors at play. It’s become increasingly common for employers to utilize part-time or full-time contractors in their project teams. These contractors typically are not full-time employees and could legitimately be considered “freelancers”. Other employers, especially in the UK, prefer to hire full-time employees on a probational or temp-to-perm basis before signing them on as an official employee. And finally, given the disparity in price between a full-time listing ($250 USD) and a freelance listing ($75 USD), it’s tempting for some employers to use the lower price point of a freelance listing as a means of posting a full-time listing and then suggesting it’s a freelance role. (In some cases, it really is.)

This is not an easy problem to solve, as it’s really up to the employer to determine whether his or her listing should be classified as full-time or freelance. However, Authentic Jobs is responsible for helping employers with this decision, as it does neither the employer nor the job seeker any good when listings are mislabeled.

Aside from spending more time reviewing listings on the site and contacting employers when I feel they’ve mislabeled their listing (which I already do), here’s what I’m proposing:

As this concept shows, we would add a third job type labeled “Contract”. This job type would be a catch-all bucket for positions that fall somewhere between an on-site, long-term, full-time position and an off-site, short-term, freelance gig. The price point for this type of listing would probably fall somewhere between the cost of a full-time listing and that of a freelance listing.

Additionally, we would encourage (and possibly even enforce) certain specifications when posting a listing, such as allowing freelance listings to be posted only with a location of “Anywhere”.

I need to hear from you, hopefully both employers and job seekers: Will this help the two of you to connect better?

Of prominence, and what I’ll discuss now, was the fact that the site had gone two years without any sort of searching and filtering capabilities, aside from filtering by job type (full-time, freelance) and category (design, development). It would rest another two years before search was finally added, present in the design you see now.

But merely adding a search box to the site wasn’t adequate in my mind. It, and the site, in general, needed to offer more. The idea of allowing users to save or export their settings seemed valuable, especially since the search feature would add another layering of filtering.

I fired up Photoshop, and the first iteration was drafted:

Notice many of the elements you see on the site today are present in this first design—search, new categories, and a “Save settings” feature. Originally the idea behind this feature was to cookie the settings within the user’s browser (which we do today automatically). Yet this idea eventually evolved into allowing users to subscribe to receive emails and to create custom RSS feeds based on their settings. And with the rise Twitter’s popularity during the time since the first iteration, adding the option to be notified of matching listings via Twitter direct message was a no-brainer.

What was difficult, however, was bringing all these elements together. Search, tabs for job type, checkboxes for categories, cookied settings, and a subscription feature—not to mention we’ve combined keyword searching and location filtering into a single search box using some special geosauce stuff that we may talk about later.

In the end, overhauling the design of the site seemed almost easier than combining the searching and filtering capabilities into an elegant, easy-to-use interface. The end result is what you see today, carefully refined over many hours by Myles Grant, Ben Bodien, Jon Linczak, and myself:

Overall, I’m very pleased with how things came together. However, you know as well as I that with user interfaces, success is never permanent. The interface must change and adapt as additional knowledge is gained about how users interact with it, as refinements in technology emerge and new services become more popular than others, and so forth. Consequently, I expect the Authentic Jobs interface to become much better than it is today, and I need your help to make that happen.

Here’s how you can help: Share honest, candid feedback about what’s working well and not working well with the searching, filtering, and subscribing features we’ve added to Authentic Jobs. We’ve got a number of enhancements we’re considering, and your feedback will help prioritize and augment the to-do list.

To help spawn some ideas, I’ll start with a few thoughts, some of which have come from the community:

• More relevant matches based on categories you’ve checked (ticked) or unchecked; see this discussion
• Better matching for jobs listed as freelance when they’re actually more like on-site contract work; see this discussion (including the replies)
• The addition some sort of account page on the site that allows you to manage your subscription(s); currently you can do this only through the method you’ve chosen
• Allowing for negation keywords in the search field, e.g. ‘-agency’ or ‘-”social media guru”‘. (We do allow for ‘or’ and ‘||’ already.)
• etc.

So, please speak up. I’m all ears.

(By the way, with all this talk about subscribing, I’d be remiss not to mention the No Retweet Necessary contest one last time. Still a few days and several prizes remaining.)

And, of course, the money-back guarantee still applies.

The prize list, if I may say so myself, is pretty impressive. By using the site to help yourself find work, you’ll automatically be entered to win a 32GB iPod Touch, 16GB iPod nano, Drobo 4-bay Storage Array, Amazon Kindle, Flip MinoHD, Nintendo DS Lite, Zildjian K Crash, CycleOps Fluid 2 Trainer, Sweetriot Cacao Nibs, Bonobos Men’s Pants, and a whole lot more. Some of these prizes have been hand-selected by our listing partners.

You won’t win through frivolous activities such as retweeting, posting a comment, or Facebookery. You’ll win by actually using Authentic Jobs in a way that benefits you. Use the site to set yourself up to find a job or land some freelance work anytime between now and December 4, and you’re automatically entered to win.

Follow the instructions on the contest page to enter.

A special thanks to those who donated prizes for the contest:

• Bonobos, “leading the internet-driven better fitting clothes revolution.” (Twitter: @bonobos)
• Sweetriot, the best-tasting (and healthiest) chocolate snack on the planet. (Twitter: @sweetriot)
• Typekit, a fantastic tool for embedding fonts of your choice in your web projects. (Twitter: @typekit)
• Signalnoise, the incredible work of James White. (Twitter: @SignalnoiseArt)
• Lumadessa, a fresh interpretation of animal life by Josh Brill. (Twitter: @lumadessa)

We’ll randomly select one winner per day over the next 4 weeks. Good luck!

Realigned identity

A number of attempts to realign and revitalize the Authentic Jobs identity led to what you see today: a color scheme that’s both a departure from and medley of the previous identity, and a logo that employs Alejandro Paul’s beautiful Calgary Script to give the company a more humanistic, brandable feel.

While I’m still very much a fan of Silas Dilworth’s Diego typeface, this revised logo provides better opportunities for brand awareness across mediums—print, apparel, mobile apps, and so forth. You’ll see examples of this soon.

Better searching and filtering

Those of you seeking work will appreciate sifting through the available listings with filters for employment type, category, location, company name, and keyword.

1. Search by location, company, keyword, or listing description.
2. New categories include the distinction between Interaction and Graphic Design, and we’ve added Mobile and Management.
3. Twitter, email, and RSS subscriptions allow you to be notified of matching listings whenever and however you choose.

More compelling listings

For employers, we’ve added several new features that allow you to craft your listing in a way that best showcases your company.

• Full-time listings stay active for 60 days instead of 30 days
• Add your company logo for brand exposure
• Format your text with bolding, italics, bullets, and links
• Use twice as much text in your description, how to apply, and perks fields
• Post as a confidential company if you’re not prepared to reveal your company name and website
• Choose from 5 categories of job types, and select up to two for your listing
• Indicate relocation assistance if you offer applicants a relocation package as incentive
• Anonymize your email address using one of ours (e.g. 3192@jobs.authenticjobs.com) and we’ll reduce the amount of applicant spam you receive

Not only have we added all of these new features, but we’ve done it in a way that keeps the listing process as simple and as quick as possible—something that has remained a top priority for us since day one.

100% satisfaction guaranteed, as always

Since 2005, we’ve offered our unconditional money-back guarantee. If you post a job with us and you’re not 100% satisfied with the results from your listing, request a full refund within 30 days after your listing expires. Easy peasy.

Post a job and give it shot. You’ve got nothing to lose, literally.

Still tinkering under the hood

While we’ve done our best to make sure the site is as polished as possible, we still expect (and are aware of) some issues with bugs and user experience. We’ve set up a customer support community on Get Satisfaction. Please help us continue to polish the site by leaving feedback, ideas, complaints, whatever. You’re welcome to post remarks here too, or send us a note.

I love it when a plan comes together. Hope you enjoy the new site.