Recruiting in 2.0 World
Recruiting is not the same anymore, atleast it should not be the same anymore but are you keeping up with the changing landscape. In a 2.0 world, sourcing possibilities increase exponentially.
Shooting for the Stars - Staffitnow Featured in MidwestBusiness.com
If you shoot for the stars and hit the moon, it's OK. But you have to shoot for something.
This is feature written on Staffitnow in the MidWestBusiness.com
CHICAGO -- If you’re a technology entrepreneur, you are shooting for something. But how can you tell if you’re shooting for the stars rather than, say, your own foot? For insight, let’s look at one Chicago-area company that aspires to become an interstellar rocket.
The company is StaffITnow. It was founded by Naveen Bala and Siva Ramamurthy in May, 2005, but the two have been working on their technology since 2002. They bill the company as the “eHarmony® for the job market�. If accurate, that’s a strong claim, because eHarmony itself certainly looks like a rocket.
In fact, eHarmony seems on the verge of joining online innovators like eBay and Google in transforming a fragmented and mostly latent market into a blockbuster that they dominate. It has become the must-use online dating service because of their “scientifically-designed compatibility matching system� that uses 29 factors to quickly narrow thousands of romantic possibilities to the best matches. The company claims credit for 90 marriages every day.
By comparing itself to eHarmony, StaffITnow is saying that it quickly narrows thousands of job and candidate possibilities to the best matches. Sounds important, but is it really shooting for the stars? Let’s peel the onion a bit to examine some similarities between eHarmony and StaffITnow.
First, consider some gross demographics. In the U.S., about 140 million people have been married, and about 150 million people are in the workforce. Not only are the magnitudes comparable, but they highlight that both eHarmony and StaffITnow are focused on improving two of life’s fundamental issues, usually a good foundation for a business.
Next, reflect on the problems you’ve had finding great dates and a wonderful spouse. Then reflect on the problems you’ve had finding a wonderful job or hiring great employees. It would be hard to say that one is more difficult than the other, and both activities are highly inefficient, time-consuming and painful. Again, a good foundation for a business.
Now consider the fragmented, low-tech, online “pinup� boards that have been the only services you could turn to for help in solving your dating or job problems. Both services rely on crude keyword matching, usually leaving you with almost no matches, out of date matches, or so many undifferentiated selections that you’re overwhelmed. Ineffective competition is another good business-building foundation.
In summary, both eHarmony and StaffITnow have huge potential customer bases with very painful problems that competitors cannot solve as well as breakthrough technology-based solutions that offer compelling customer value. Certainly sounds like great launching pads for an interstellar venture.
StaffITnow’s technology is an example of powerful find-the-needle-in-the-haystack search engines that intelligently filter, rank and prioritize limitless possibilities based on relevance to the searcher. It employs sophisticated technologies (e.g., natural language processing, artificial intelligence, pattern matching) that can read, understand and analyze job descriptions and resumes in any format, and do so quickly, easily and cheaply. Their service is being successfully used by about 50 pilot customers. Nice initial liftoff.
Interestingly, although their technology is a platform that can be used for the entire job market, StaffITnow’s founders wisely chose to launch their business at the information technology job niche, about which they know a lot from personal experience.
In fact, serving the job market for IT professionals alone will be a great business. There are about 3 million IT jobs in the U.S., and annual turnover, always notoriously high, has been estimated by one analyst at up to 20%, which would mean 600,000 job openings per year. Because so many jobs are open and because they typically have very specific technical specifications (which change constantly with the dynamics of information technology), it is very difficult to find good candidates.
In addition, finding good candidates is further complicated by highly fragmented and inefficient IT recruiting, which is conducted by recruiters from employing firms as well as from about 20,000 job agencies. One result is that a single job is often posted many times, and StaffITnow documents 18,000 IT job postings every single day (which it collects from several hundred sources). At prices prevailing on the pinup boards, IT jobs represents about a $1 billion market niche.
Not only is StaffITnow initially targeting a single job market segment, it will be focusing more specifically on its most attractive niche, recruiters who labor trying to fill a minimum of 50 IT job openings annually. It’s one thing to find one good match for life, it’s many magnitudes harder trying to find 50 good matches every year. So perhaps the better comparison is that StaffITnow is like eHarmony on steroids.
We have only touched on a couple elements of StaffITnow’s promising business model, so the company’s progress may merit revisits in future columns. For example, most of its technology has been developed by its India-based unit, which sits in the second largest IT job market in the world and will serve as the launching pad for StaffITnow’s first international market launch.
Stay tuned, earthlings.
Posted by Naveen Bala Posted at 11:53AM Mar 13, 2007 by Naveen Bala
Marketing Your Candidates
Market Your Candidates without Hot Lists
Staffitnow provides a very efficient forum to market your candidates and generate leads for placements. The B2B module enables you to register your candidates (person on your payroll or have an agreement for representing the candidate) with Staffitnow.
Until now Marketing your candidates means emailing Hot Lists or anonymizing your candidate names and load them onto job boards.
The Staffitnow B2B module not only gives you more control but also expand your potential clientele. When you register your candidate, only "your" contact information is visible to others. Your candidates automatically comes up in their search and match results and they give you a call.
You can manage your consultant status, his/her preference, expected rate etc any time you want.
The B2B module also provides something no job board can, access to business opportunities anywhere on the web. Your registered candidate is automatically matched to over 2.4 million jobs posted anywhere on the web. You are presented with a list of jobs your candidate is qualified.
Instead of going to multiple jobs fishing for opportunities, you can do it from place. You can even choose to have this list on your desktop updated on a daily basis.
There is a never a charge for maketing your candidates
Start Marketing Your Candidates"
Posted by Naveen Bala Posted at 11:38AM Mar 13, 2007 by Naveen Bala
Why Job Marketing & How is it Better than Job Posting
Traffic to major job boards are going down. Candidates are spending more time on blogs and social networking sites. How does a recruiting solution target these candidates?
Job posting on traditional job boards, is like putting a "For Sale" stake in front of your house that is in a cul de sac off a road that is off the main road.
How many people do you think will see it? Even if your house is on the main road how many do you think will be qualified?
Now imagine that your "For Sale" is visible to only people who drive in red cars. You post in a job board, now you need to wait to see how many people in red cars pass by and find you.Is passive posting the most effective way to find qualified people?
At Staffitnow, we do not think so. We believe, a sourcing solution should be able to target and actively market your job to qualified candidates.
We know that in a web 2.0 world, candidates are everywhere - blog sites, networking sites, groups and forums. So posting your jobs on a single board, doesn't really serve the purpose.
Nearly all job boards offer only passive posting, your jobs will only be visible to the daily traffic to the site. This means only active job seekers are aware of the opportunities. You miss out on semi-active and passive candidates. Thus considerably reducing your chances of finding the best match.
Staffitnow's job marketing solution is designed for today's scenario. It takes your job to where the candidates are, instead of the other way around.
Staffitnow Job Marketing Solution Encompasses:
Marketing on Job Sites
StaffTnow advertises your job to over 100 job sites, sites that are relevant to your job. Do a Google search for "staffitnow", and see the potential places your job can go to.Marketing on Individual Blogs
We have partnerships with individual bloggers to display relevant jobs on their sites. StaffITnow has selected blogs that cater to a specific topic and market jobs relevant to those topics.RSS Marketing
StaffItnow markets the job through RSS reaching qualified candidates. Qualified candidates have subsribed to the feed that is specific to a skill and/or location. Your job reaches people who have the skill you want. We have over 200,000 feeds going out daily.Visibility Through Groups and Forums
We are present at most of the important topic specific groups and forums, where candidates of a particular skill set are also likely to be found.Use of Job Aggregators
We use job aggregators like odinJobs.com, simplyhired.com, indeed.com, googlebase, MSN Expo and 100 other sites to significantly increase the chances of the job reaching the right person.Single Ranked List of Applicants
Our solution doesn't stop with marketing. All responses are collected and ranked according to job and profile fit. Sparing the recruiter profitless hours of browsing through e-mails.Start Job Marketing Now"
Posted by Naveen Bala Posted at 11:25AM Mar 13, 2007 by Naveen Bala
StaffITNow Press Release
NEW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & WEB 2.0 DEVELOPMENTS
CHANGE THE TECHOLOGY CAREER MARKETPLACE
ATLANTA, GA., November 2006—Staff It Now, an innovative job sourcing and job marketing solution, has created an unique artificial intelligence program. This program, when combined with blogging and other Web 2.0 developments, will enable technology-based employers and better qualified candidates to effectively find each other.
The technology is named Odin after the chief god in Norse mythology. Odin was god of the hunt, and this intelligent matching was created specifically to improve the job recruitment process for both the recruiter and the job hunter. Odin provides more advanced searching. Where as current technology uses keywords, Odin uses an advanced language processing mode to actually read the employers’ requirements and the candidates’ resumes, just as a person would. Odin differentiates between primary and secondary skills, sifts and picks relevant data and then matches the candidates to requirements. Odin then ranks the results from most suited and presents it in a single-screen, user-friendly automated dashboard. This results in an accurate match for both employer and job seeker.
The creator of Odin, Naveen Bala, has over ten years of experience architecting intelligent decision support systems. He has worked with data optimization for IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center, i2 and Forest Products. The Staff It Now team also includes co-founder and Operations Manager Siva Ramamurthy (formerly of Intellisys, State Farm, Applied Materials and Workscape) and J. Carl Williams III, Chief Marketing Executive.
Staff It Now offers access packages for recruiters and companies of all sizes. Service packages range in price from the $25 Job Marketing Package to the location-based unlimited-use Platinum Package. Partnership programs are also available and those prices range as well.
Visit the Staff It Now website at www.staffitnow.com
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If you would like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Naveen Bala, please contact Carl Williams at 770-783-1401 or cwilliams@staffitnow.com.
Posted by Carl Williams Posted at 04:32PM Feb 08, 2007 by Carl Williams
How To Find Talented Tech Employees
How To Find Talented Tech Employees
Finding and recruiting top tech talent is a top priority for all companies and organizations from Fortune 100 to the smallest start-ups. We are all aware of the shift to outsourcing overseas, but many companies can't afford to do so or they need their talent here in an corporate office to add to strategy and implement tactics. With the development of the Internet, newspapers are now basically an obsolete form of advertising quality job positions. However, even the great online behemoths like Monster and Careerbuilder have quickly become rather ineffective and very expensive. The normal online job boards are not targeted or proactively helping organizations find the much needed talent to take their business to next level.
This trend can actually be a good trend, especially for small and mid-size enterprises. The playing field is becoming even in finding talent. Today Fortune 1000 companies as well as small businesses have the ability to recruit talent with equal ease because of the second generation of web applications, known as Web 2.0. According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004 refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. The Web 2.0 world allows businesses to share information and communicate directly to potential employees.
Web 2.0 allows much easier communications. The real exchange of information allows talent to learn and establish expertise as well as gain creditability publicly. Everyone loves to give their opinion. Heck thats the basis of AM talk radio. Everyone also loves to talk about their favorite subject: themselves. Blogging allows them to do both. Tech experts visit tech blogs to keep up with their field and interact with other experts in blogs. Eventually, many of these experts may set up their very own blog.
Unlike job boards, Web 2.0 is fun! The best talent already have a job so they are not actively looking for a job. But most know that job security is rare and they may be downsized without much notice. They need to be aware of the job market and they may not be working in their ideal job or for the ideal company. They enjoy participating in the web 2.0 world. Blogs, forums, newsgroups, rss feeds, and other new methods communications give professionals something to look forward to when they come online.
Finally, there are key methods to leverage recruiting efforts and web 2.0 applications. One company specializing in helping hiring managers and recruiters find top talent in technology is Staff It Now. Staff It Now gathers resumes and job descriptions from around the net and active markets job opportunities to specific targeted groups. For example, if you need to hire someone that knows Oracle like the back of their hand, Staff It Now will market and advertise the job opportunity in several blogs dealing with Oracle programming. The site also give you an unique technology service to accurately match and prioritize resumes to job descriptions. Staff It Now brings together everything you need to find great tech professionals.
In conclusion, the static job boards and job posting sites are not getting the quantity nor the quality they use to just five or six years ago. The rapid growth of Web 2.0 and the changing global economy will force HR recruiters, headhunters, hiring managers, and small business owners to change the way they recruit talented employees. In fact, it may force them to recruit faster, more effective, and more efficiently.
Posted by Carl Williams Posted at 04:30PM Feb 08, 2007 by Carl Williams
New Technology Helps Organizations Accurately Match Job Descriptions To Resumes.
New Technology Helps Organizations Accurately Match Job Descriptions To Resumes.
I do not envy HR people and recruiters. People who have to make decisions on screening, interviewing, and hiring others usually do not have enough hours in a day. They may advertise in local newspapers and become overwhelmed with resumes, most of which are not qualified for the job. These professionals use a lot of hit or miss tactics to achieve very exact and precise goals. Nowadays, people whose jobs is to ultimately hire others use job boards such as Monster, Careerbuilder, and HotJobs to post their job description. The problem is that they are totally relying on the right person discovering the position before it is lost in the shuffle within the next 5-7 days. Slim chance.
What is the answer to this dilemma? Odin is the answer to this mystery. Odin is a proprietary engine of staffITnow. In Norse mythology, Odin is the god of knowledge and skill. In job-hunt terminology, Odin is a resume match engine that ensures you the right candidates. Odin, is a new, one of a kind matching engine designed to find you the right candidate. Odin helps saves tons of time and money by more accurately matching resumes to job descriptions than using keywords. Keyword based matching is ineffective and Odin is a much more effective method. Odin is available at only one company and that is Staff It Now.
First of all, keyword matching sucks. Recognizing the limitation of keyword searches, not to mention the frustrations of all concerned, Staff It Now has developed Odin. Perhaps you don't have to deal with keywords daily in the capacity of going through stacks of resumes. But you probably have used Google or another search engine and you didn't find exactly what you were seeking. You have spent several minutes for no results.
Next, the matching technology available at www.staffitnow.com, Odin, matches in an improved way. It does it by using a language processing mode that actually reads your job requirement when you add it on staffITnow.com. It identifies the primary and secondary skills and matches it with candidates of the same skill set.
For example, a recruiter of an IT corporation is looking for a professional with 3 years of experience on database projects. When a qualified, available and interested candidate puts their resume online and searches for a job, Odin places that job right on top of the results. The system will also automatically send an email to the qualified candidate to peak and measure their interest.
So how does this technology help in the recruiting and hiring process? Odin can play a significant role in job sourcing & recruiting. Instead of spending hours attempting to sort through resumes that are poorly written or not qualified for the job position, recruiters and HR professionals are able to generate a list of potential job candidates that is prioritized by the most qualified individuals. This matching allows you to contact the best person first, which increases the likelihood of making a placement or hiring the right professional.
To conclude, Staff It Now aim at being the ultimate sourcing solution. Thanks to Odin, the company's web site can sift through thousands of resumes and requirements from multiple online sources and reduce it to meaningful and efficient results for both employers and job seekers. This means significant time and money savings for all involved parties.
Posted by Carl Williams Posted at 04:27PM Feb 08, 2007 by Carl Williams