I'm proud to introduce ERE's latest service for recruiters, Vendor Watch. 

Vendor Watch is an experiment in developing a new kind of database of recruiting industry vendors, combining the best of crowd-sourced intelligence and an editorial filter to fact-check and select the most relevant information.  If we've done our job well, it will become the place to find the most succint, up-to-date, relevant information on vendor.

The best way to explain what we have done is to just show you, so check out this profile for CareerBuilder.  It has a rich pool of data on the company and their products, starting with a company overview, product overviews, and and basic contact information.  Profiles also include a list of the company's executive staff, along with estimate of just how large it is, both in terms of revenue and employees.

Better yet, we have the most recent headlines major headlines about the company, selected from around the web.  In choosing the articles to display, we were completely neutral as to the source.  In this case, you will see a company press release that we felt was sufficiently newsworthy to include, a blog post about CareerBuilder's possible plans for a relationship with Facebook, and an article from the mainstream media about how competitor TheLadder's ad campaign takes a direct shot at CareerBuilder's services.  We've added a brief summary of each and linked directly to the source in each case.  What you will not see are the dozens of company press releases that we considered fluff, or the large number of articles that mention CareerBuilder in passing,but did not really add anything new to the body of knowledge. (Yes, I know that there are more than three articles of note about CareerBuilder, but give me a break - its only day one!)

In short, this is a one-stop-shop for information on the vendors in the recruiting industry.

This is all a work in progress, and we are still adding new profiles, new articles, and updating the existing information every day.

We will be relying on the ERE community and the recruitosphere for much of the information in the profiles and for suggestions for new companies to add to Vendor Watch. On the right side of each profile, there is a tool to submit updates, which our editor will then review for relevancy before making the changes go live on the profile. If you've written a good blog post about a vendor, or read an article that you think should be included, let us know!

Feedback, as always, is welcome - just email me at david(at)ere.net or post your thoughts in the comments.