Eggsprout founders Brian Ma and Hsu Ken Ooi

Every so often I come across some entrepreneur who reminds me why it is so much fun covering this beat. That happened Tuesday when I sat down with the energetic founders of Eggsprout, a Bellevue startup that is trying to transform the way people find jobs online.

It wasn't so much the business. After all, enough people have attempted to revolutionize the job search category over the years(Jobster, anyone?) What caught my attention was the passion and drive exhibited by Brian Ma and Hsu Ken Ooi -- the former University of Washington whizzes -- that are leading Eggsprout.

They're young (all five employees are under the age of 25); smart (Ma graduated early from the UW with a dual degree in computer science and electrical engineering); thrifty (the Bellevue basement where they work has limited heat); and hungry (They are foregoing salaries, surviving on chicken nuggets.)

Furthermore, the Eggsprout team -- which is launching their service today after months of development and less than $10,000 in startup costs  -- are not letting something like the worst economic recession in years stand in their way.

"I think this is the perfect time," said Ma when asked about starting an online jobs site in this climate.

You gotta love a little optimistic thinking. It also doesn't hurt that Oren Etzioni -- the University of Washington computer scientist who came up with Farecast and NetBot --  is advising the startup.

So what are the Eggsprout guys up to?

They've developed an online service that combines elements of LinkedIn, Twitter and Monster.com, creating a place where both job seekers and recruiters can co-exist. It is a social network for job seekers and recruiters, but with a twist.

Everyone on the site is anonymous.

Each job seeker who uploads a resume into the system (personal information such as name, address and email is automatically scrubbed out of the public profile) is assigned with a "hotness" rating that shows how they compare to other people in the field. The "hotness" scale is determined by several attributes, past employment, education, skills and the number of times that recruiters look at the profile.

For example, a product manager could see that his hotness rating is in top quartile in the field when compared to other product managers on Eggsprout. The site also shares information about who was actually contacted for a job and recommends jobs based on a person's interests or searching patterns.

Ma, who most recently worked as a project manager at Zillow.com, said Eggsprout is designed to help people answer questions about their careers and get a better sense of where they need to improve in order to find the dream job. In that regard, the site is similar to Zillow which attempts to provide consumers with more home value information. In other words, hotness factor on Eggsprout equals the Zestimate on Zillow.

But in many ways, the Eggsprout service is most similar to the original idea at TalentSpring, which built a peer-based online voting system where individuals rated the resumes of other job seekers. The Bellevue company has since changed gears, focusing on selling its service to employers, said founder Bryan Starbuck.

Starbuck listed a number of reasons why the initial TalentSpring concept didn't work. But this one is the most cautious note for the Eggsprout founders: Job seekers don't really like rankings, he said.

"We were surprised that job seekers weren’t as interested in learning about their ranking score as we initially assumed," Starbuck said. "We found that ranking scores were a turn-off to the majority of employees, except for a small group of aggressive career focused employees."

Ma, 22, thinks that TalentSpring had things backwards from the beginning.

"It is not the consumers' vote that matters. It is the recruiters' vote that matters," he said. "So, we have flipped it, so now recruiters are voting, recruiters are following and we are capturing recruiters' behavior on the site to come up with your hotness." In other words, Eggsprout mines the search and user behaviors of the recruiter in order to come up with the hotness scores for the job seekers.

Eggsprout is free to use for both job seekers and recruiters. There is no cost to post a job, nor is there a cost to view the truncated resumes posted on the site. The company plans to make money by charging recruiters between $8 and $12 each time they want to contact a candidate. (Prices vary based on the number of contacts they buy.)

Of course, Eggsprout -- pardon the pun -- faces a chicken and egg problem. It will need a critical mass of job seekers and recruiters in order to make it successful.

Ma thinks that recruiters will flock to the system because it is free and allows them to passively follow top candidates, a la Twitter.

For job seekers, Ma said that the hotness scale will drive interest because they will want to know if they are "hot or not."

"Just for Seattle tech people, we are pretty competitive by nature," he said. "It is just interesting to see how hot you are and how in demand you are."

At this point, Eggsprout is only focusing on jobs in the Seattle tech market. It has already begun scraping the tech jobs sections of major employers such as Microsoft, Expedia, Amazon.com and RealNetworks, with about 800 listings on the site.

And what about the name, Eggsprout? 

Ma explains that egg means potential and sprout symbolizes growth, two concepts they are attempting to promote.

At this point, the entrepreneurs plan to continue self-funding the company, working in the unheated basement without salaries. The main costs at this point are regular trips to Costco to fuel up on snacks and other supplies. Ma and Ooi estimate the cash burn rate is about $100 per month.

"We want to go as long as we can without taking money," said Ooi, who serves as chief marketing officer and is the elder statesman at 25 years old. "We actually don't want to take money until we absolutely have to."