Workflow, not Economics, is Changing HR

In building Apps for the Enterprise, the main UX consideration should be workflow.  If you don't get that right, it doesn't matter how good your App/product is.  

Something we discounted early but has driven our product development ever since is the importance of thinking about workflow in the UX of our enterprise apps.  

In the HR space, we believe that workflow issues are driving recruitment companies to seek more of the value chain.  We initially thought it was economics but it's process.  As Monster, Evenbase, CareerBuilder...

cont.

Why Understanding Workflow is Key

Candidate Matching - Automating HR

Our co-founder takes a detailed look at many of the issues involved in building algorithms to automate HR processes here:

Will Robot's Replace HR?

https://plus.google.com/u/0/112626948317740826566/posts/F8wEKTRBtbp

The UK's Largest Job Search Engine is now also the Freshest

In response to changes in Google's relevancy algorithms and new customer research, workhound.co.uk has introduced real-time search results to its index of jobs.

Following the trend for more speed in search, like Google Instant, the product makes use of jobs sourced from semantic engines that evaluate more than 120 million sources daily to identify new job openings. 

A big complaint of job seekers is that they're finding jobs that have already been filled. "Many job boards and aggregators tend to hold many old and expired jobs to attract more traffic from search engines," says company CEO, Howard Lee.  "These, obviously, are not useful for job seekers."

Google's implementation of its Panda algorithm also forces search aggregation engines to focus on having newer and more exclusive data.  Most job search engines lost a large percentage of their traffic with the latest changes to Google's relevancy algorithms.

Each working day, there are nearly 40 thousand unique job opportunities on offer through social media. The workhound.co.uk real-time search uses semantic search technology to filter an index these UK-based job offers.

TheSocialCV Teamed Up with The Boolean Strings Network to Host a Global Sourcing Challenge

400 boolean experts from more than 50 countries participated

A real challenge for us at thesocialCV.com is that, unlike our other products, this one sits behind a paid wall. Although this makes cents for us, it makes it harder to get sufficient info from the user logs to get actionable data that we can use to improve the product.
 
We can take best practices from our other products and our own intuition, but nothing works as well as A/B tests and tens of thousands of sessions.

And then, Irina Shamaeva, had a great idea.  Why not partner with the Boolean Strings Network in a global sourcing challenge?  And so, we let over 400 of the world’s best sourcers beat the heck out of the product for a week.  From FTSE 100 company’s to small recruitment consultancies, boolean experts tried their hand at clever challenges crafted by Irina.

One of the things we learned is that some folks actually engage with our product through “view source” instead of the GUI we built.  This is not an intuitive thing to learn and really forces us to think about new ways we should allow recruitment professionals to interrogate the data in our system.  We also saw how individuals incorporate other websites and services into how they interact with our product. In both instances we've been given a real insight into the type of product people are looking for and concrete data on how to help push it there.

The types of challenges were ideal for us to gain product knowledge and also useful for getting new people to really engage with the product.  A sales challenge we have is that individuals will search their own name and maybe see if we have a profile for Elvis and not do any real searches (i.e. service delivery manager in finance in London).

Selfishly, the usability data from this has been incredibly powerful. Having hundreds of boolean experts from many countries beat up on the product, is a great way to see what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and has us adding dozens of new features to our product roadmap. It also gave some insight in how to build this as a Social CRM product.

Big thanks to our panel of judges:

                           

                                 Balazs Paroczay            Martin Lee        Irina Shamaeva                William Fischer

And a special thank you to Irina Shamaeva who pulled this together and also showed some real sourcer chops in how she would have tackled the challenges had she been a competitor.  She’s the real deal.
Find her, friend her and follow her: Twitter, LinkedIn, BrainGainRecruiting,  BooleanStrings

Thanks to all the competitors and a huge congrats to Suzy Tonini  who demonstrated that instead of just relying upon what tools a search engine provides, if you’re clever you can build your own and bend it to your will.  A great write up by Suzy and her winning approach can be found in the comments here.

The Launch of new Facebook Recruitment Platform for the Enterprise

Product Allows Companies to Actively use their Facebook Networks for Recruitment and Referrals

After allowing 400 global recruiters from more than 40 countries to beta test it, thesocialCV.com is launching its new Facebook recruitment dashboard today.  Companies are making considerable investments in building Facebook and Twitter communities. For example, Google has more than 135,000 followers on its @GoogleJobs account. Unfortunately, there's often not enough data to use these communities for recruitment.

TheSocialCV uses sophisticated semantic tools to analyze and aggregate data from more than 350 million social profiles and pairs this with info from a Company's or Recruiter's Facebook network. There are many sites that allow job seekers to see if they have a connection at a company, this product allows recruiters to make better use of their own communities.

"It's clear that Facebook will become a major channel for recruitment but it's also clear that 'profile fatigue' is limiting its adoption," says company CEO, Howard Lee. "Internet users are getting tired of creating, yet another, online identity. From our analysis, most Facebook profiles do not currently have sufficient data to make them actionable for recruitment, by pairing these profiles with our dataset, we're addressing this head on."

Several companies have introduced products that make use of Facebook APIs to allow a job seeker to identify contacts at a company and products like BeKnown and Branchout are trying to address the data sufficiency issue, but the new DashBoard from thesocialCV, makes Facebook a compelling platform for recruitment at present.  

Click here to contact thesocialCV.com

Global Talent Search Challenge

We've added some new features and reworked many of the relevancy algorithms at thesocialCV.com and to celebrate, we're going to let the world's best recruitment professionals tell us everything we got wrong with them. In partnership with Boolean Strings [run by award-winning authority on Boolean, semantic, and deep web search, Irina Shamaeva] we're pleased to announce our Sourcing Challenge.

 

For details and instruction on how to enter click here.

For short video tutorials on thesocialCV.com click here.

We are Hiring: Business Development Executives

Business Development Executives – thesocialCV.com
£Competitive + Generous commission
Soho, London

Want to make your peers jealous? ...Then come and help us change the rules.

As we approach our 1st birthday, thesocialCV.com is looking to expand its commercial team with
energetic, new business people. Social media has changed recruiter behaviour, permanently. With
over 107m profiles from 238 countries, thesocialCV.com is the most comprehensive candidate
source available to recruiters today. We are already working with global recruiters in 11 countries
but we are looking for individuals to focus on core revenue growth in the UK.

Of course there are targets, of course there are KPI’s and of course there’s an experienced manager
to help you settle in. However, success will be determined by your;

• Creativity – If at first you don’t succeed, come at it from a different angle

• Hunger – Constantly motivated to close that next client

• Initiative – There’s no time like the present, just try it, what’s the worst they can say?

• Thick skin – not everyone’s going to like you, you just need to ensure more do than don’t.

You will have had experience of turning new business into established clients and relish the chance
to make a difference. You may be a recruitment consultant looking to move media side or working
at a job board wondering how to fast –track your career. Either way, you want to be at the start of
something game changing and help to build a multi-million £business.

We offer a great package with uncapped commission, a truly innovative working environment and
the opportunity to be part of an award winning team.

Oh, and you’d be based here.

If you think you have got the right credentials then contact us for full details and an initial discussion:
@JCCooney or jon@workdigital.co.uk or DD: 020 7316 9206

Some soundbites:

thesocialCV.com launches: http://www.recruiter.co.uk/thesocialcvcom-launches/1009343.article
thesocialCV.com launches CV analysis tool FreshUp: http://www.recruiter.co.uk/thesocialcvcom-launches-cv-analysis-tool-freshup/1011809.article

Should a Small Enterprise Take a Portfolio Approach to R&D

by Bill Fischer, co-founder WorkDigital Ltd.

The Panda algorithm change in Google Search quickly demonstrated, what many already had an intuitive sense of, that a business that had a dependency on Google was one that was not in control of its destiny.

Our company, after seeing small algorithmic changes and strategic shifts at Google (for example their real-estate classified advertising tests in Australia), started to move our R&D investment to products that were non-dependent upon Google. We started this process a couple of years ago and if we hadn't, a weak economy and Google's latest changes, could have proved terminal to our company. Fortunately, the R&D we did, has turned into several new products that are currently driving most of our revenue growth.

SEO is stil important to our company and we've recently rebuilt some of our products in response to changes to Google and Bing. But, when we were completely at the mercy of the smallest changes to their search algorithms, it was difficult to take a longer-term view of the business we were building. A substantial number of companies and business models are predicated upon a certain level of organic traffic. The economics for our Workhound.co.uk product and for most job aggregator products, doesn't pencil out nearly as well without organic traffic. Even buying traffic via SEM, puts a company in the arbitrage game, where organic traffic to a competitor can quickly wreck the model.

It may seem a stretch to refer to a search algorithmic change like Panda as a Black Swan event especially since it is an algorithm in constant flux. But, since the business impacts can be terminal, it's probably worth thinking about in that fashion. Nassim Taleb has definitely informed our thinking on these types of issues and I highly recommend his latest interview with EconTalk which provides a great introduction to the subject matter of his next book and some evolved thinking from his previous works.

Test Lab: Social Contact Dashboard

Another week, another new feature. Check out this brief video from thesocialCV test lab demonstrating the new Social Contact Dashboard.

• manage all your online networks from within thesocialCV.com

• easily follow, friend and connect with new candidates

• integration with Facebook, Twitter, email, Plaxo, etc.

Test Lab: Near Operators

Check out a brief demo of how, why and when to use Near Operators when sourcing candidates, from thesocialCV test lab.

105 Million Candidates and counting...

105 Million is a pretty big number and quite news worthy, as evidenced by recent headlines;

• LimeWire settles with RIAA for $105 Million
• 105 Million People in the US have Diabetes or Prediabetes
• Italy to receive 105 Million euros from the EU to safeguard Pompeii
• Man Charged in $105 Million Ponzi Scheme

Well, today thesocialCV.com joins those elustrious headlines with one of our own, we have 105 Million Candidates!

Is it possible to map the global workforce? TheSocialCV thinks so. It's taken more than four years of development and required running more than 10 billion online records through a semantic processing engine but thesocialCV has now indexed more than 100 million professional profiles and has mapped more than 200 million professional interactions.

Click image to download PDF.

Sneak Preview of FreshUp

Quest Search and Selection

"We understand the part social media plays in finding and understanding unique candidates. Quest is an innovator and ahead of the rest when it comes to sourcing. thesocialCV.com is the only product that allows us to search through a multitude of social media sites quickly and accurately, resulting in a good variety and balance of candidates to put forward".

Simon Whittington - MD - Quest Search and Selection

New Changes to TalentRank

by @williamfischer

It's taken us a long time and many iterations to develop the right algorithms for sorting candidates. As a company that is mapping the global human capital pool of billions of individuals, we're constantly adding more signals to our TalentRank algorithm. Nuance is everything when trying to winnow 100 million candidates down to the right 20.

One of the conclusions based on user testing is that we should offer several solutions and let the recruiter decide which approach delivers the best candidates for them. This is why we will allow recruiters to sort candidates to use our aggregated algorithms that look at dozens dimensions, but also allow them to sort specifically on the dimensions that are of most import to them.

In practice, what does this look like. Let's look at John Sumser @johnsumser vs. Felix Wetzel @felixwetzel vs. Bill Boorman @billboorman. Our system has given them very similar professional engagement scores.

read more >>

TwitJobSearch Partners with EmptyLemon

TwitJobSearch is happy to announce it's new partnership with EmptyLemon. EmptyLemon is a specialist IT job board that puts employers in direct contact with job seeking IT professionals.

"In our push to put IT job seekers in direct contact with employers and their vacancies, we are naturally turning to Twitter to promote our opportunities and careers information. We are looking forward to working with TwitJobSearch to engage with this audience" says Andy Stevens, Marketing Manager at EmptyLemon.

TwitJobSearch's primary focus is on getting the right job seeker to the right job vacancy in as few steps as possible and we believe that EmptyLemon's commitment to only hosting jobs from direct employers helps us to achieve that.

“Through it's semantic technology and advanced search algorithms, TwitJobSearch.com is built to display the most relevant jobs first, and then allow jobseekers to quickly access the application, in one click where possible. Working with companies like EmptyLemon, who aim to reduce the steps jobseekers need take to apply, is a perfect fit.” commented Katie Canton, Product Manager at TwitJobSearch.

Through their alliance with TwitJobSearch, EmptyLemon will be able to accelerate and streamline the amount of time and resources their clients dedicate to recruiting employees. Other organisations working with TwitJobSearch include: RBS, adidas, Quest, ChangeBoard, The Telegraph and Incisive Media.

Follow EmptyLemon on twitter

Follow TwitJobSearch on twitter