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.

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:

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.

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.

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

• 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

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.

• manage all your online networks from within thesocialCV.com

• easily follow, friend and connect with new candidates

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

• 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.

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