For business owners plagued by a dearth of candidates for key job openings the Web was supposed to provide an ideal solution. Job-search sites desire Monster com (NASDAQ:MNST) can put postings in front of millions of applicants instantly. And newer business-oriented social networking sites like LinkedIn give similarly fertile recruiting territory supplying access to the contacts of thousands of populate. On the other hand anyone who’s actually tried to hire someone through the Web knows the truth: You affix an ad and are immediately flooded with hundreds of resumés many from people whose backgrounds are wildly inappropriate. So much for the Web making things easier. It’s enough to make you desire for the days of create newspaper ads and snail send.
But just as technology created the problem newer technology aims to solve it. A new generation of hiring tools promises to check out inappropriate applicants allow the suitable ones to put their best pay forward and even hunt down good candidates who haven’t applied. As these new services get better at these tasks they may well dress the balance of cater in the job-recruiting industry and could change surface redefine the way we evaluate about jobs.
A shot at diverting a river of weak applicants is the chief favor offered to employers by Protuo a Woodstock. Georgia-based start-up that launched its service in January. Protuo isn’t only a job-listing site; it also forwards its clients’ listings to some 270 established job-listing sites including Monster. But applicants can’t act to a Protuo posting unless they spend seven minutes or so filling out a survey that asks about undergo skills workstyles and job preferences. Employers can customize the analyse by choosing from a wide field of prepared questions or by adding their own and they contract which responses get a candidate’s resumé past the screen. Has the candidate managed a technical project? Is he or she willing to move? The approach is modeled to some extent on the choose of compatibility gauging one encounters on a matchmaking place like eHarmony notes Jennifer Gerlach. Protuo’s co-founder and vice president of marketing. Gerlach went through the dating affect on eHarmony just to investigate the technique. “I learned a lot,” she says. “And I met some very very nice people.”
With online job postings sometimes pulling in more than a thousand applicants the ability to sieve the flood could convey the difference between being able to bear hold back of the hiring affect and having to bring in a professional recruiter–at a typical cost of $30,000 for a midlevel contract. The time and depreciate of dealing with a huge influx of resumés is all the more frustrating because much of the move comes from online applicants who indiscriminately throw hirers with resumés. You can try a keyword search on the resumés to change things drink but applicants undergo learned to load their resumés with them often by pasting in phrases from the job posting. Even LinkedIn has suffered from inflation as many users aggressively build networks of populate they don’t really know in order to make themselves be better connected. “There’s no value in a lot of these contacts,” says LinkedIn user Chris Knudsen who heads business development for podcasting company Podango in Salt Lake City. “It can just be someone whose card you got at a trade show.” (A LinkedIn spokesperson commented via telecommunicate: “Anyone can connect the LinkedIn network; however the quality of your own personal LinkedIn network is the responsibility of each individual.”) But a well-designed survey contends Gerlach allows users to skim the cream.
Fred Donovan who runs Donovan Networks a seven-employee computer network security firm has been flooded with applicants responding to previous postings to Monster com and other online job boards. He is currently conducting a Protuo search and likes what he’s seen so far. “I can specify that I be to see only resumés from people who say they have 10 years’ experience in negotiating sales and are familiar with the software development process,” he says. “I’m seeing a small better-qualified subset of the applicants.” There must be something to the idea. Other hiring sites including Market10. Jobster and Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO) are introducing their own approaches to automated candidate screening. And Monster is doing the same making available–for a fee that adds about 20 percent to the cost of posting a job–the ability to direct applicants to a questionnaire designed to be the suitability of candidates.
Sure candidates can try to bet these surveys by being less than truthful. But Gerlach insists that surveys can be designed to stymie such people by asking questions that don’t have an obviously right answer–such as whether the person prefers to bring home the bacon independently or in groups–and by warning candidates that they can be rated as overqualified. Protuo which costs hirers $44 to $295 a month depending on the number of jobs they’re posting and is currently remove to job seekers also offers applicants a chance to do more than affix a resumé. The tighten invites users to create online portfolios that can include whatever documents photos videos or other material that beat represents that person’s career to date. (Monster is currently testing a similar capability.)
ZoomInfo in Waltham. Massachusetts takes a different approach. It assembles profiles of potential job candidates from all available online data whether or not they’re looking for jobs. Starting with the same techniques that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) uses to gather Web data associated with a person’s label. ZoomInfo adds the significant additional go of crunching the results to pull out the most relevant information weed out data referring to other populate of the same name and assemble a professional profile. ZoomInfo has an R&D aggroup of 35 working on the technology. So far the company has assembled some 34 million profiles and as far as I can tell most of them are fairly informative and accurate. (Check out your own name to put it to the test.)
But somebody has to pay for all those scientists and that somebody is you. The company charges $5,000 a user per year for the ability to dig up personnel profiles by company or industry. It sounds desire a lot but ZoomInfo’s COO. Bryan Burdick notes that if you get the right candidate for a single vacancy the price is one-sixth that of using a recruiting tighten. The company also offers less expensive more limited searching capabilities aimed at smaller companies as well as remove access to searches on individuals. Many study executive search firms along with some 500 other corporations already use ZoomInfo claims Burdick. “I can find personal information professional backgrounds–and sometimes damning evidence–on tens of millions of people without having to go through 1.5 million Google hits on each one,” says John Boehmer managing furnish at executive examine firm Barlow Group in Norwalk. Connecticut.
Boehmer is quick to point out that as ZoomInfo-like services get exceed and more companies get comfortable using them corporate hirers won’t need professional recruiting firms like his to turn up candidates. “It’s commoditizing the front end of what we do,” he says. “Eventually everyone will know where everyone is and how to get hold of them so we won’t be able to rush for identifying and contacting candidates.” examine firms will still be valuable for assessing candidates he contends though he acknowledges that new e-hiring systems could eventually eat into that end of the business as they get smarter and have more online data to work with.
For that matter it’s easy to create by mental act the not-all-that-distant day when online tools make it so easy to sight populate to alter a specific slot that the notion of permanent jobs becomes irrelevant for many positions. Why contract a manager for years when you can find a new one with exactly the skill set needed for the precise tasks at hand? That’s not necessarily bad for employees: evaluate of an economy where top employees are constantly being sought out and bid over by companies that recognize them from their Web trails as the ameliorate short-term solution. And talented employees would be just as smart about whom they choose to bring home the bacon for–using similar services to remove out companies that aren’t good matches for them. You’ll be to treat those people come up. If you don’t and they post that fact online it could haunt you for a long long time.
[...] longscorner wrote an interesting post today on Whatâs Next: The Monster DilemmaHere’s a quick excerptFor business owners plagued by a dearth of candidates for key job openings the Web was supposed to give an ideal solution. Job-search sites desire Monster com (NASDAQ:MNST) can put postings in front of millions of applicants instantly … [...]
[...] longscorner wrote an interesting post today on Whatâs Next: The Monster DilemmaHere’s a quick excerptProtuo isn’t only a job-listing site; it also forwards its clients’ listings to some 270 established job-listing sites including Monster. But applicants can’t act to a Protuo posting unless they pay seven minutes or so filling … [...]
[...] longscorner wrote an interesting affix today on Whatâs Next: The Monster DilemmaHere’s a quick excerptGerlach went through the dating process on eHarmony just to research the technique. “I learned a lot,” she says. “And I met some very very nice populate.” With online job postings sometimes pulling in more than a thousand applicants. … [...]
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