Job Seekers » LatinOcean - Digital Marketing Consulting

sitewatch 19/05 – Talent Spring

Companies, crowdsourcing, Job Seekers, recruitment, sitewatch, Talent, technology, Tools 5 Responses »

May 182007

TalentSpring, in beta mode during q2 2007

Founders: Bryan Starbuck, CEO – Andrew Boardman, Development Manager – ex-Microsofties, no recruitment pedigree (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Their bios on the site here

Tagline: wisdom of the crowd brought into the candidate selection processes

How it works: potential candidates enter their profiles, subject to voting on other peoples’ profiles. system algorithms are meant to pick candidates who put crappy scores. recruiters use these scores to spot top talent in their corresponding industries and pay to contact the people they like (recruiters need to enter a JD in the system)

Value prop for job seekers: you resume stands out in front of recruiters because it carries a user-generated score (the merit score)

Value prop for employers/recruiters: easier to spot top talent because of the – you guessed it – Merit score

Comments:Does it sound a bit like jobster to you? I am unsure how the merit score is a good assessor of the quality of the candidate, and if recruiters will rely on the score to make contact/interview decisions. Very early stages though.

Thank you to Kris for the tip

New LinkedIn services aimed at recruiters

Advertising, best practice, crowdsourcing, Job Seekers, linkedin, recruitment, Sourcing, Talent, Tools No Responses »

Apr 222007

LinkedIn Corporation, the world’s largest and most effective professional network, today announced new tools in their Corporate Solutions offering aimed at internal staffing organizations and retained executive search professionals.

Read the entire article at TMCnet

Are you registered with LinkedIn yet?

an employer brand for people that don’t work for you

EVP, Job Seekers, Marketing No Responses »

Mar 272007

I was talking to a couple of friends who were interviewing for tech jobs in the financial services industry (two separate companies). These are firms that are very successful, well known, decent community stand, pay on market – I think; in other words they have a pretty good employer brand, or at least that is my perception of them

Interestingly enough, the interviewing experience for my mates had not been that crash-hot: one was kept waiting for almost an hour in the first meet, the other one had a change of time when he was on his way for the second meet, and both had core members of their interview panels rushing to get on with their day.

My first reaction was to think that they were overreacting. Then, I kind of understood why the interview experience was not aligned with the employer brand perception. More to the point, the brand perception created high expectations about the entire recruitment experience from the word go.

I guess the point is that you as a hiring company (or agency) are going to interview many more people than those you are actually going to employ or make an employment offer. That tells you that there’s stacks of individuals roaming the streets whose only experience with your company was the interview. Therefore, in the interest of preserving your brand as an employer, you may also want to pay attention to your reputation as an interviewer, which in turns means that all your hiring managers and interviewers need to get on board re. your employer brand. Logical huh.

careerXroads sources of hires study – 2006

Job Seekers, reportsandstudies, Sourcing No Responses »

Mar 112007

US-based survey, still, not only interesting to read from a ‘what can happen/is happening in Australia’ viewpoint, but also from an result interpretation perspective, e.g. “is the career website a destination for or a source of applicants?”

here’s the report

… and for the super-busy readers here’s a snapshot of the conclusions

LinkedIn offshoots for job seekers

Job Seekers, linkedin, Tools No Responses »

Mar 072007

* Get people to be part of your LinkedIn network with LinkedIn Fast (see sidebar); makes it easier for people to send you an invite, and you can always reject it if it’s spam

* Doll up your imbedded LinkedIn profile with the Linkedinabox widget, via digital inspiration. A bit better than the original LinkedIn button.

* produce an html resume using your public LinkedIn profile; this plugin for wordpress might be good for job applications, though it may need a bit of fiddling with the page template

All of those proudly brought to me via Google alerts

who’s hiring now (with an apostrophe this time)

Companies, Job Seekers No Responses »

Jan 302007

A due diligence process gone awry due to an apostrophe and a delete-happy finger that killed proper copy instead of a test page, were – respectively – the cause for inaccurate speculation and the reason for the demise of a post detailing my encounter with online employment directory whoshiring.com.au

The post went on to say that there were no apparent traces of vertical search technology on the portal – just links to the websites and job listing areas of both corporates/employers and recruitment agencies.

The question remained as to how, standing alone, the site would make any money beyond straight ads. Having said that, I thought the site would prove to be a useful stop for job seekers and publishers who bothered in having a presence on the Internet.

Thanks Brett for setting me straight, apologies for not being able to post the comment, thanks for the good wishes and good luck catching all that traffic from grammar-picky job hunters

flash review: jibber jobber

Job Seekers 1 Response »

Jan 222007

overview: marketed as a career tool set, Jibber Jobber it is a DIY job search activity tracker, including all the relevant dimensions required to have a fairly complete job hunting picture. It does so by meshing the basic attributes of contact management, networking , document storage, and lead (jobs) tracking

background: Founder Jason Alba is an ex-job seeker after a surprise layoff notice, so this is a service built from the ground up, taking into account the frustrations and needs at the coalface. more background and announcements in the company’s blog

design: nothing fancy, pragmatic and no clutter; only a couple of links that don’t work.

pricing/value: the standard offering is fairly fleshy, fees start at USD$ 9.95 per month. Have a look at the functionality chart for detail

opportunity: career management services have been offered for a while now in a hybrid fashion (e.g. job seekers working in tandem with advisors and web-based modules). Stick a white label on the site and don’t be surprised if a few CM firms take it on to enrich their own offerings; alternatively, this can be presented as a stand alone DIY platform (as originally intended) to corporates who restructure and need to outplace people

challenge: although the service aims at minimising the hassles associated with tracking services, you still have to type in a bit and invest the time in keeping records updated, etc. This seems to me as a worthwhile effort to make; job search is indeed a full time role

emurse goes vertical

Companies, Job Boards, Job Seekers, Tools 1 Response »

Jan 172007

emurse – the company that brought you only the resume builder tool that makes you feel like wanting to use it, as far as i can gather – has announced the launch of their very own vertical search engine. They might be one step closer to enabling users to use their emurse cv’s seamlessly with other apply engines (e.g. from job boards, corporate careers sites, etc); though they still need the cooperation from the target sites.