Last time we did this, we focused on startups. We’re going to branch out a bit and include some new services/tools that aren’t just startups.
More below, including two launches we see as most significant: Bright, and Ascendify.
Bright Idea
Launching today: Bright.com. Its team has spent 18 months in stealth mode, with a group of wonks working on a better way to screen candidates, analyzing “8.6 million job seekers, more than 2.1 million job descriptions, and over 2.8 million resumes.”
What they came up is this, in short: Bright gets people to enter a resume into its site. A candidate — rather than searching for jobs, like on a typical job board — then gets a list of jobs for which they’re a fit, ranked using a “Bright score” on a 1-100 scale, developed by the Bright scientists. From there, the candidate can apply for a job. A recruiter can see who’s a fit, too, and can, for a price, unlock people.
Unlock: OK, here’s how that works. I see a job at Pfizer. I decide not to apply. The recruiter sees that I looked at the listing, am ranked a high fit on the Bright 1-100 scale, but just didn’t pull the trigger. As mentioned, for a fee, they can “unlock” me — contact me — rather than losing me because I bailed.
Bright, which raised $6 million from angel investors, has 20 employees, 15 of them engineers. “A deep, deep, deep, technology company” — one with with more of a technology background than HR/recruiting background, says CEO Steve Goodman.
Cloud Forming
Fresh off his sale of AllCountyJobs, Chris Russell is working with an investor/partner on a new startup, CareerCloud. They’re putting $150,000 of their own money in the site. Russell says there’ll be three main tools when it launches: 1) a subscription-based tool for recruiters to “find” talent; 2) a free tool for job seekers to “stand out”; and, 3) the mobile applications Jobspeek and the Hidden Jobs App rebranded as part of CareerCloud. Expect it around mid-October starting with the U.S. and Canada.
New Community
After a year of quiet work in beta, a company called Ascendify is launching at next week’s SHRM annual conference in Atlanta, out of San Francisco. It builds “private-label, back-end talent communities for enterprise corporations, university career centers, and government unemployment offices.”
A large management consulting company that has received ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards in the past is doing a pilot of the program. Ascendify is building a community for the company, which probably take a couple of months or more, and will be tested using only a segment of the company’s job-seeker populace.
Ascendify has 12 employees, about half of them technical people, but now including sales. Founder Matt Hendrickson, who was behind ResumeMaker.com, has thus far funded the company through private funds and investments from people he knows, and will be seeking more money soon. He sees the company having roughly 110 competitors.
See this for more info.
Social Career
“You know all the right people for all right jobs,” a video about the new socialcareer.com says. “You might as well get paid for it.” The site offers money for referrals. More than some other new sites, humans are involved, so it’s almost like a cross between a real, live recruiter, and technology. Founder and CEO Marc Silber has managed an executive search firm in the life sciences field, the industry where many of the initial jobs are likely to come from.
Wiley’s Wonky Website
The 200-year-old book publisher Wiley has launched a job network. It figured it had a highly educated journal-reading audience — about 65% with master’s degrees, people spending about 4-5 minutes monthly on the site — and occasional inquiries about whether it knew someone good for so-and-so job, so why not try its hand at a job board. It’s about $300 for a one-off post, with various other of your typical job board sales: featured listings, banner ads, and so on.
Even More News From Bullhorn
As if it wasn’t news enough that Bullhorn got bought by an investment firm last week, the company this week unveiled a few big upgrades to its product line. Doing the reveal at its annual user conference today with something like 300 recruiters in attendance., Bullhorn beefed up its business intelligence capabilities with new reports and improved integration with analytics partner InsightSquared. The company also added more mobile functionality so that on-the-go recruiters can do more of what used to have to be done on a desktop on their smartphone.
