I ran across TalentSpring some months ago and have been scratching my head ever since… Now, I understand the concept because TalentSpring smartly hired Common Craft to explain their product through videos In Plain English. Where I get lost is TalentSpring’s Secret Sauce “matching technology” and how it could provide employers quality candidates…

Secret Sauce?
TalentSpring’s secret sauce is a peer voting system which, in a sense, forces users to score peer resumes upon upload or change of their own resume.

The questions…
Why would job seekers sit around and rate their peers? What’s their motivation? And if they are rating resumes who says they have a good enough understanding of their specific industry to do so? Are they really qualified enough to rate me? Are users going to take the time to seriously review and vote on their peers? And finally…. Does a social scoring system really make sense here?

TalentSpring’s videos also talk about the real problems inherent in the online recruiting space, which makes me even more anxious to see if this social driven job matching system provides answers to them.

Personally, I like the social or peer matching concept although I’m still struggling with practicality or what I like to call the “WILL IT WORK?” factor…

Notable: I believe TalentSpring is the first “matching system” that didn’t compare themselves to eHarmony…

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FINALLY! After being called back to active military duty, moving down to Fort Benning into an apartment and getting wifi-ed we have the second installment of the Chad N Cheezhead Show.

Show Topics:
1) Video Resumes (VisualCV)
2) TRAFFIC… Does it really matter?
3) Ignore PR vs Damage Control PR…
4) HotJobs finally moves to Relevancy, yea the guys owned by Yahoo!, them…
5) Joel’s ERE Highlights
6) Social Median (Joel really misses JGo you can hear it in his voice)

It’s only about 25 minutes versus the first show which was an hour.. Enjoy!

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Is anyone else sick of all the “job matching” companies positioning themselves as the “eHarmony for jobs“? I mean are there really only 29 dimensions of a person that can be categorized and matched or are we following the same carrot on the end of a different stick?

Seriously, if you need help mining resumes, finding talent, give Shally or Jim Stroud a call and stop trying to make a love connection with your openings…

Really, 29 dimensions? Geeesh!?!

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Hat tip

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I’ve had a question running around in my head for well over a year now… What job sites use Google as their core traffic provider? So I thought I’d take some time perform some research, using Hitwise, and then it prompted yet another question… What job sites use Indeed as their core traffic provider?

So I took some time and gathered the following one week worth of data from Hitwise (week ending 3/8/2008) and thought I’d share… ENJOY!

Google provides:
80% of JobSearchUSA’s traffic
79% of JuJu’s traffic
73% of Jobs.net’s traffic - (CareerBuilder feeder)
61% of JobBankUSA’s traffic
50% of Flipdog’s traffic (Monster feeder)
48% of DiversityJobs.com’s traffic
46% of Simplyhired’s traffic
27% of Medzilla’s traffic and last but not least…
23% of Indeed’s traffic is provided by Google.

Indeed provides:
60% of JobKite’s traffic
57% of Jobkabob’s traffic
50% of AJE’s traffic
43% of FederalGovernmentJobs.us’s traffic
38% of AllRetailJobs.com’s traffic
35% of HospitalJobsOnline’s traffic
34% of Beyond.com’s traffic
26% of JobsInLogistics‘ traffic
21% of Dice’s traffic and
21% of ComputerJobs.com’s

I also found this to be notable: TopJobsUSA receives 24% of their traffic from Google and 25% traffic from Job.com.

Stepping back and taking a look at the big picture Google provides 12% of the traffic to the entire Employment & Training Category and Indeed provides 5%, which is actually pretty amazing.

Pretty incredible, although who are the winners and who are the losers in this scenario? Can recruiting be done more efficiently in today’s market by leveraging less, albeit more powerful properties? If some job sites are not diversifying their traffic wouldn’t it be easier for hiring companies to go straight to the prime source of the traffic instead of a middle man (ummm.. errrrr) person?

The message:
Grow, evolve, and diversify before it’s too late…

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