A Chat With CareerBuilder, and Other Recruiting/HR Technology News

A few tidbits from the recruiting grapevine:

I figured it’d take just a few days after the Monster news before CareerBuilder contacted me and reminded me they’re alive and well, what they’re up to, and so on. It ended up being more like a few hours. As it turned out, CEO Matt Ferguson was super classy about not wanting to put down his long-time rival. But, CareerBuilder is happy to talk about what we’ve said for years, which is that it has of course worked hard to become more than just a job board (in fairness, Monster has done some of that too). CareerBuilder, Ferguson says, has made a long list of acquisitions (like Textkernel, Broadbean, and Aurico). Like Monster, and like Dice’s parent, it has its own aggregator for searching for job candidates online and building profiles on them; it’s called Recruitment Edge, has more than 1,000 companies using it, with some updates planned for next week. It also has a talent-network feature; online learning; new college-recruiting products; and an interesting recent release of a job-seeker tool telling candidates about their competition.
Speaking of the CareerBuilder aggregation tools, I’m not enamored with the buzzword-saturated description on its “about” page, but NetIn (previously Godlist), out of San Francisco, is a new site for finding potential employees. Search for, let’s say, Ruby programmers, and the results include not just the experience and education of various candidates, but also an aggregation of their tweets, and open source projects. Most interesting is an “available for hire” field, showing whether the person may be ready to make a move or not.
The new Ooqio provides people a score based on whether others would want to work with them again (the company name is derived from the acronym of “only one question”). Potential employer uses are explained here.
“New technologies match job-hunting teachers with schools looking for someone just like them.”
There’s a new site for hiring nurses: RampUp.
The new PathBoost is a “360-degree job immersion experience that includes real-life on-the-job scenarios, thought-provoking questions, aptitude assessment, and documentary style mini-films.” Made by the parent company of Strayer University, it’s aimed at high-volume employers with a lot of front-line employees — retail, hospitality, financial services, automotive.
I was recently shooting the HR/recruiting breeze with Nov Omana, a technology consultant, and asked him what he’s seeing out there that’s piquing his interest. His answer, in part, was actually a new offering from Oracle. The company’s “workforce reputation” product (see image above) uses a person’s posts on social media, q-and-a sites, or an intranet, and measures what they’re like to work with. Do they want to sit with their headphones on, focused on their computer? Are they big connectors? Do they post rarely on Slack, but when they do, others are very interested in what they have to say? The new product could be used by companies to learn more about potential employees. So far, says Gretchen Alarcon, Oracle’s VP of human capital management strategy, early interest is coming from companies wanting to use the tool internally. A company might find that someone taking on a promotion, for example, could use improvement in one area identified through their workforce reputation, and get coaching in that topic as they take on the new role.