Peer Matching… Elevate Yourself?
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…
Comments(4)
Hi Chad,
TalentSpring focuses on the problem that in-house or contingent recruiters have that:
1. They can get 10,000+ resumes from job boards from a keyword search. (”C++” or “marketing AND online”)
2. Recruiters only have time to read 200 or less resumes (=3 hours of reading resumes)
3. The 10,000 aren’t sorted, so the best 200 aren’t at the TOP.
4. The impact is that the recruiter often can’t immediately fill their interview with the industry’s best available matching people, even if those resumes are sitting in the job boards.
TalentSpring does this with two ways:
MATCHING TECHNOLOGY: This gets the list down to “qualified” or “relevant” resumes. If the recruiter searches for “Engine developer for the Game Industry for XBox 3D games”, we can find the resumes that match. Even if the resume doesn’t include those words (which we do via data mining).
SORTING BY SCOREs (aka Ranking): This is to get the Highest Caliber employees to the top. This matches the needs in the industry. Some industries find Masters and PhDs are desired sorting to the TOP (those TOP 200). Some industries value employees coming from high brand employers in their industry. Others value many years experience.
We find MATCHING is 80% of the value, which is fully automated. We find that RANKING is about 20% of the value. (Wouldn’t you want the list of resumes sorted by number of years of relevant experience along with relevant educational experience to your industry?)
We have 90% of our resumes finished with the voting process. This means we don’t have a problem with the voting. We only need a small number of people voting, because we have automated voting. The main thing is that the automated voting is calibrated and trained on the manual voting by high quality candidates. Our technology discards votes from people who aren’t matching consistently with others in that industry.
TalentSpring’s new designs as of a month ago making the process fun for job seekers. Our new site for job seekers almost acts like a game. They win $100 or $20 if they score within the top 10% of the industry (the exact amount depends where in the TOP 10% they are).
This uses a fun feedback loop as people get feedback on their resume and career. It’s quick for people to try our system and see their scores with a very quick Linked-In profile import.
-Bryan
Dang Bryan, that was longer than my post!
OK, a couple of strategic compliance questions for clarity…
How are companies, using TalentSpring, going to report your algorithm to the OFCCP and EEOC ensuring they are not employing broad-based discriminatory practices?
Many platforms have had to strip the rankings from their systems for compliance reasons. How will your rankings fair when audited by these agencies?
Have you performed any glass ceiling audits with F100 compliance officers?
Thanks – Chad
I would agree w/ Chad. The questions of how to rank people without getting sideways w/ (1) the candidates and (2) the compliance group at the client is complex.
Chad, on the discrimination front wouldn’t it suffice if the client can show the search process (ie fields, weightings) they used? Asking them to be accountable for their recruiting partner’s ’sauce’ is not likely … as isn’t TalentSprings vote system just another version of the typical grey matter process of classical recruiters (sorting and picking which to submit based on their experience?).
We are working with a fortune 50 company and they included their OFCCP compliance person in our meetings. It is possible to recruit early in the recruiting pipeline against “Profiles” without compliance issues. This is at the prospecting stage.
MATCHING TECHNOLOGY vs RANKING
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Our Matching Technology is separate from the Ranking. We will be able to turn off ranking for companies that can’t or don’t want recruiting against profiles. Our Matching Technology is still very valuable without ranking because it provides recruiters with more exacting search than keyword search.
ADDITIONAL OFCCP SUPPORT
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We will be building additional OFCCP support in the future.
CANDIDATE BENEFITS
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Job seekers benefit as long as they score in the TOP 50% of any one of the “job category” mapped to their resume. We target mapping 10 job categories to their resume, so they will rank in the TOP 50% in about 5 (on average).
For the job categoies where a job seeker ranks in the TOP 50%, we include their resume in the TOP TALENT ALERT email to recruiters hiring for that job category.