Seattle based TalentSpring launches today with a unique product that has the potential to disrupt the online resume marketplace.
Headed by former Windows Live Development Leader Bryan Starbuck and Andrew Boardman, TalentSpring brings the ideals behind social voting sites such as Digg to the resume marketplace. But it would be unfair to compare the service to Digg and its army of clones; it’s just difficult to compare it to anything else.
Like traditional resume marketplaces, TalentSpring is database of resumes from those seeking work or looking for new employment opportunities. Where as tradition resume marketplaces are generally search driven databases, categorized by user submissions based on location, experience etc, TalentSpring uses a ranking system to rate resumes so that top resumes float to the top of TalentSpring whilst lesser resumes drop.
Resumes are ranked by other job seekers. Upon signing up and submitting your resume, to have your details included on TalentSpring you must score 12 sets of other candidates in your own professional area.
The voting system is a one resume or another proposition x 12. Users are presented two resumes side by side and must mark which candidate they feel is better suited for a position in that particular field.
I asked Bryan Starbuck why only 12 and not more? TalentSpring has extensively tested the system with employers, recruiting firms and job seekers. They found that 12 was an idea number. It allows TalentSpring to gain a broad enough scope of user submitted data to adequately rank candidates without making the review task too long for the end user.
As a recruiter there is nothing worse than receiving 300 resumes in the mail and the same again on email for an advertised position. Days are wasted filtering through candidates trying to formulate a shortlist for interview. TalentSpring aims to bypass most of that for recruiters by only delivering superior candidates for a position. The ranking system is combined with an in-depth filtering system that limit candidates based on the wants of both the recruiter and the job seeker. For example, if a job seeker is only looking for jobs that pay $100,000 and above they can only be contacted by recruiters with job opportunities in that category.
Starbuck compares TalentSpring to Zillow.com and FareCast.com. All use advanced mathematics and data mining, read data from two sides of a transaction and aggregate/ calculate valuations by looking at a holistic view of the entire market.
Costs for the service are highly competitive, starting at $195 for a single position with various unlimited use packages also available.
TalentSpring as a service is going to appeal to a broad range of people in recruiting positions. I may be biased in my review as I’ve been in positions previously that involved recruitment, so I know the pain involved in recruiting people. If TalentSpring gains traction and builds up a decent range of resumes, it’s a service I would happily use myself and I believe others are likely to use it as well.
Sounds like fun, and also a great way to induce user participation.
This idea stands out in the very crowded online recruitment marketplace and that is very hard to do. Nice!
Ha, when do we get a site where job seekers can rate the job *offers*?
mark, you really have good idea…go for it…if it clicks like digg….it is going to be very big
regarding talentspring, it sounds interesting…but how do you motivate ppl to participate in voting…once ppl find job, they do not even look at job related sites!!!
I can see a huge conflict of interest occuring.
If the candidate knows that the best resume’s are going to float to the top, why will they rate the other candidates highly? Surely the nature of competition will mean that they give the other candidates lower marks so that their details are higher up the list.
I dont believe this will be as effective as it sounds. Good idea but i dont beleie it will revolutionise the market.
bala, your resume is not included until you complete the 12x rating exercise, so the motivation is simple, you don’t get listed until you vote!
Our breakthrough is that we solved bad votes. We do that by:
1. We only let them vote on two other candidates. This is a game theory way to not let them benefit themselves.
2. Second, if they vote incorrectly (They vote left is better, when right is better), then we know they vote incorrectly and throw away the votes. We do that by highly redundant votes. People who don’t vote with the community average have their votes thrown away.
3. We do “swarming” when there is conflict. This adds extra votes when strange behavior is happening. This is where the math self balances.
I’m with Stu, although they work around it to an extent by making you compare 2 CV/résumés (and not just vote on each individual CV/résumé) whats to stop people from voting up the “lesser” CV/résumé – just to trash someone that might be better than them?
I’m also sceptical as to whether I would want all my CV/résumé information to be viewed by 12 random people in my industry/area. Once you get to a certain point your education history and experience become more intricate than a fingerprint, allowing you to be IDd even if name etc is anonymous – and I probably don’t want a colleague (or even boss!) to know I just registered my CV/résumé online – and am therefore looking for a new job…
Not sure how I feel about this. How motivated are people going to be to vote on other resumes? There is no incentive to vote “well”. I imagine most people will compare quantitative statistics, like years of experience, study, etc., rather than looking at each candidate in depth. If that is the case then a simple filter would do a better job.
I’ve done a little bit of hiring myself. I’ve found that I couldn’t really gauge how good a candidate was from their resume. When you are not even experienced in the field you are looking at candidates for then how are you meant to make a good decision. Isn’t that why we have HR people?
Hi Josh,
We have a big incentive for voting well — and a disincentive for voting incorrectly. Correct voters can receive an “A” voting score. Incorrect voters (outside of a reasonable range) will receive an “F” voting score.
Employers will be very wary of you if your score shows that you vote incredibly poorly.
We don’t believe in the 1-page resume. This puts the onus on the candidate to add everything they have done that separates them from the most entry level in the industry. The sum of these accomplishments keeps raising them in the ranked list.
Their homepage includes over 50 javascript calls (I think it’s 62) to the same Google Analytics tracking code. Their login page has 4 calls. Are they trying to inflate their visitors numbers, a programming glitch or an attempt to count AJAX requests?
technically, I’m having all kinds of issues navigating the UI and getting around, perhaps the servers are wacky from a TC induced traffic surge.. ?
Conceptually, I think it’s tough to ask users to vote as if “you were a hiring manager and could only bring one of the candidates in for an intervew”
Hiring managers are typically recruiting for a specific role, so the value of each accomplishment is going to be relative. Each accomplishment is going to be measured differently according to context of the job requirements at hand.
Nice to see something different, but how many times would a person visit the site?
Hi Bryan,
First of all, I think this is a great way to solve the ranking problem. LinkedIn does it to a certain extent with the business network and referral mechanism. But this one has the scope to scale easily (once you have a critical mass of resumes and employers)
A few questions:
1. Dont you think 12 resumes is too much? During your initial phase, you want quick user adoption. You want the process as painless as possible for users to register and upload their resume. With so many job sites available, why should users go to yet another resume website which also insists you spend another 30-45min rating other resumes (more frustrating if the other resumes happen to be better than yours).
2. As with any ranking system, (assuming the ranking works) this favors those who are “good”. A significant number of job seekers are average or below average (if you fit a bell curve). So for those guys this database can be a strict no-no.
-Vamsi.
Interesting, will it work though? I mean, who am I to say whether candidate “A” or “B” is more qualified for the job?
Rex
It’s time folks realize that social applications don’t apply to every life situation.
Interacting w/ a prospective employer as a candiate for one of their positions is one time where you DON’T want to be social.
I have no interest in promoting other candidates while searching for a job for ME.
> Interesting, will it work though? I mean, who am I to say whether candidate “A” or “B” is more qualified for the job?
This doesn’t end up being a problem. We pick “Job Categories” that are very narrow, such as “RN Nurse for Pediatrics”. Then candidate “A” and “B” both indicated that they want to be in that job category.
Since you chose to be in the “RN Nurse for Pediatrics”, then you can judge them also.
You don’t need to evaluate them for a particular job. The employer will pick to browse resumes in the narrow job category that matches their job.
Full info on Blog.TalentSpring.com.
Extensive testing ! (about the 12 number).
What a load of crap – spouted out to sound good. Rather I bet they pulled the number out of there you know what. Not saying that’s bad, you have to start somewhere. And not saying 12’s bad, sounds like a good number to me.
But I doubt the arrived at that number thru extensive testing crap.
Brilliant,
I’m curious about how you deal with the first impression effect (similar to what happens in interviews).
If the first data element you see side by side in the two resumes are
Harvard BS vs DeAnza Jr College, you’re likely to click the Harvard guy, even if the rest of the resume is overwhelmingly favorable for the DeAnza guy.
Man, not sure why I am so negative today, bad nights sleep ?
Ok, the site is super slow, understandable as they have been TC’d.
The SnapPreview, still shows not available, but the site now shows beta, so they JUST opened up (since the last SnapPreview scan at least).
WTF list ?
They show me logged in as Delta-17 … really ? like a marine strike force or something.
Not sure what the add/remove are supposed to do under filters, they look clickable but they are not.
I go to “for employers”, and this is it…”Looking to hire great people? You’ve come to the right place.”
There is so much sliding/fading ajax goodness it’s puke-worthy.
But the best is “we use mathmatical wizadry” to compute the merit score. Now, the folks that are offering weather insurance, I believe they have some mathmatical wizadry and models and stuff. This has got to be just a basic equation at best.
Ok, last straw here…there is a step in the sign up where you choose who can look at your resume … it looks like this.
Work Profile is viewable by:
Anyone
* Show Work Profile
* Hide Name & Email
Paying* Recruiters only (Recommended):
* Hide Work Profile from everyone except for paying recruiters
* Hide name & email from everyone except paying recruiters
Screen Recruiters:
* Hide Work Profile from everyone unless approved
* Hide Name & Email from everyone unless approved
* Recruiters will request access, and you approve/deny on a case-by-case basis
Paying recruiters is recommended ! Hmm, wonder why ? Cause it’s good for you guys. Just give it a few months and someone will come along and make one of these that is free for recruiters (yep, your worst nightmare).
uh, there’s one overarching issue with the entire site: it’s filled with a whole buncha job seekers swimming with one another inside a giant echo chamber in which mutual admiration is the ticket to visibility.
real companies looking for real talent either pursue passive prospects (via any one of a number of channels, from search firms to web sites and open searches or proprietary research) or they go to where the volume is and let their own recruiters – the sames one hired for their recruiting savvy – make such determinations (as in ‘is this dude qualified’) – for example, if you saw the resume of the dude who created bsd (the os) next to bryan the founder, you’d likely go ‘ooh, brian, big company, heady title etc’ and pick him when in fact you’ve made the wrong choice for top technical talent based on actual commercial impact and inventive capacity…though that may also really depend on the role (of course, just an example, and not picking on you specifically brian, just trying to make a point)…
honestly, this feels like a way to rework and rethink the bottom of the feeding pool – possibly an awesome approach for mass volume staffers (like walmart, tmobile, krogers et al – the big headcount/lowlevel stuff) – but for senior level roles? no way.
think about it: do you want top talent referring top talent (a major source of hires) or actually selecting it for you from outside your company with no knowledge of incentives or any such associations? that latter choice presents too much risk, too much cloudy reasoning…
BUT what would be a a great idea (imho) is to allow a company/recruiter/etc to round up prospects and ideal targets (e.g. they search and find 200 prospects) and then put those 200 in front of the audience as a commissioned review of some sort, allowing others (your site users) to review and rate – and they can set the numbers for collective reasoning (e.g. not 12, but they may want 30 or 40 in agreement as a supporting argument) from which they can winnow the field…
just a thought. got a lot of opinions on the folks who have tried to automate this selection game in the past, so feel free to ping me if you’d like to chat. and yes, i’ve worked with some very large companies on this particular issue for very senior level talent strategy programs, might be interesting to talk to you about the ‘calibration’ game…
I am looking forward to see how it works!
Good idea.
(Duncan, just a friendly suggestion… please proof-read your post)
Having been the lead developer for the Netscape rewrite as well as the CEO of Emurse.com (a resume company), I’m very curious to see how well this works.
We jokingly talked about combining the two, but its fun to see someone actually try it. The big concerns I think right off the bat are a) is there enough incentive to vote on other peoples resumes, and b) how large is the incentive for me to cheat? Those are two factors that have to be strongly considered and balanced when trying to build any sort of social voting platform.
Kudos to TalentSpring for trying something new — we’ll all be watching, I’m sure!
Best,
Alex Rudloff
Emurse.com
I’m amazed that anyone would pay to use this service. As a recruiter I’m only interested in comparing the candidate to the position and not to another candidate. Each individual stands on his/her own merit, skills and experience in relation to the position. What value is it that resume A is subjectively “better” than Resume B especially when it is unknown who is doing the ranking?
Companies don’t hire resumes they hire people.
Professional recruiters are skilled in finding great candidates who may appear sometimes as diamonds (resumes) in the rough.
I don’t like this idea and have pretty much stopped using online job/resume services.
Much more interesting and useful than this is Emurse, a resume management site. Emurse is something you’d actually use seriously, whereas TalentSpring is something you’d play with.
You can’t alway trust CEO
====================
When you father or founded a new company. You can’t always trust CEOs experience. Some maybe dishonst & some may ask you to look for more risky capital or ask you to look for more money. Some may lie about school they go to.
Be careful how you hire them. Don’t let these guys become the next shadown web 2.0 Enron.
Also, make sure your CEOs don’t vacation too much, spending money, and walk away with hardworking project.
1.) you get busted by SEC
2.) you company will fail
3.) stockholders will lose money and blame on you.
4.) people will get extreme piss off if you company goes bankruptcy.
5.) you can’t bring back your company.
Becareful with executive frauds.
There are sincere people who will take the trouble to rank the CVs and there are the rest of us who will randomly click one or the other to get through the grueling sign-up process.
They could (and maybe are) timing the responses to filter out the ones that click too fast.
Was anyone else turned off when they noticed “Managment” (sic) was misspelled?
I think they should use their own site to find a better proofreader.
Wisdom of the crowd – over crowded – plus this is a very niche` idea….
– Get another idea ;
– was this a million eyeballs idea? then monetize (You cant get a million)
– Where is the business model? (Hope you didnt quit your day job)
This makes no sense for me. Two sets of questions:
Why would I ever post a resume only to get criticized in public by completely anonymous folks? How would this help me?
Why would I spend time criticizing others’ resumes as a job candidate (unless I knew the person or unless I wanted to get ideas from really good examples)? How would this help me in furthering my career? How is this worth my time?
I applaud these folks for trying, but too many people are jumping into the Web 2.0 “I’m an entrepreneur and can make a web community based on a misguided concept” craze.
I suppose this is more interesting than some of the other stuff that’s been launching lately, but I have to agree with most of the posters who express some skepticism. I’m not sure that this is a market where the “Wisdom of the Crowd” is going to be more effective. A resume is just one part of a hiring decision and in a lot of cases, the person with the most impressive resume isn’t the right person for the job. I highly doubt that this is going to disrupt the marketplace.
ah, another lame idea.
simple, overdone concept + social networking feature = profit! does anyone realize that “social” web sites require an actual community of users to succeed? no self-respecting HR department will use this, nor will any self-respecting job-seeker waste time with this.
This may find the best resumes, but a good resume isn’t the same as a good hire. How is this going to find the best people?
What’s a “resume marketplace”? Oh… you mean résumé!
They misspelled “management.” That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Bound to Fail – This service will just encourage more people to embellish their resumes. I have interviewed quite a few software developers over the years and at least 80% of them embellish their resumes to the point that it I feel embarassed for them. If they have even heard of a technology, they have years of experience with it. This kind of service will just encourage that kind of behavior.
Is there a mechanism for ongoing evaluation? For example, if someone uploads their resume and it gets voted down, does the applicant have any ability to revise their resume and “ask for a recount”? Or are they stuck with the negative rating regardless?
I also share the concern of others here that this is going to promote resume padding and reinforce a style over substance decision-making process.
Resume coaches will love it, though.
seems like a sorry excuse for a social networking startup
Need a job, order my seminar – Thriving in a Global Economy
The word “BETA” is in such large font you’d think it’s part of the site name “TALENTSPRINGBETA”.
Just going to the site and you get a “Already logged in” displayed under the page header.
I like that there is a category of jobs that fit under “Managers of Programmers” !
I guess this is to be expected from the Web 2.0 applications are are in a perpetual state of BETA. Thank you Google.
Do I really want to spend my time looking at résumés from the ubertalented (better than me) folks or the talentless hacks (there are bound to be many) and then watch myself fall somewhere through the cracks in the middle?
Isn’t rejection by the workplaces enough?
Do I need to chance MORE abuse??
who are the clowns who designed this site?? The site doesn’t even load and when it does, it just plain sucks! Why? Because the page layout makes no sense, some monkey went crazy with Scriptaculous. I would yank the site, put in a landing page and go back to the drawing board. While Jobster doesn’t have the so cool voting idea, it has awesome web design. TalentSpring looks like it was designed by high school kids. They also have the nerve to compare it to Zillow and FareCast. Both those sites are in a different league. and whats up with lame marketing terms like “Talent Spring Merit Score” and comparing it to FICO! If FICO was based on my buddy rating me , I would be maxing out credit cards and going to vegas every weekend. Some klutz obviously thought it would be a cool marketing term sipping his triple shot extra hot non fat cappuccino. Social networking is like an epidemic that everyone wants to cash on. Sorry but try as you might, Jobster and TalentSpring can only go so far with the social networking idea. It can only work for sites like myspace, facebook and twitter(common theme there is target audience 10-30 years). Shut down TalentSpring now!
Having problems in FF, it is slow and does not tell you exactly what to do. Maybe have a different landing page instead of going straight to results I do not want.
Good idea
I like their domain name.
Jack Recruiter as a fellow employer I agree fully. Some categories are just impossible to vote on. Are people voting on others qualifications? Who are competing job seekers to know about qualifications for the job that I have?
An interesting idea and one that would probably would weed out the best from a huge selection of candidates. My only concern is about the privacy of the jobseeker. Will people want to submit their resume and have anyone using the internet being able to look at their details and contacts. I’m a recruiter myself and I use resume databases in Monster and HOTELScareers.com but at least the jobseeker knows their resume will only be seen by HR employees and headhunters.
Interesting take on the rating system. Aside from privacy concerns, it seems that this svc would simply increase the level of mediocrity among resumes.
I doubt highly qualified candidates would want to reveal their pedigree and competitive edge for public scrutiny. This leaves perhaps a large segment of folks w/avg credentials rating each other.
Unlike Digg, HotorNot where you can’t take back your submission nor improve upon it, this svc would simply facilitate plagiarism on a mass scale where everyone starts to experience the ‘lake wobegone effect’ where everyoe is above avg and good looking.