A Smashing Idea for Your Next Company Event

No long introductions here. No thought leadership. Just a collection of the more interesting odds and ends we get in the mail or stumble upon ourselves.

On to the first item.

A team building(?) idea

Looking for a team building (or should that be team destroying?) activity this summer?

For the former, look elsewhere.

For the latter, now you’ve come to the right place. Book a date in your local rage room. These places go by different names, but the product is the same: You get to smash stuff to bits. The most famous of these is the Anger Room in Dallas. For $25 (and up) you get to let loose. Corporate events are welcome.

Closer to the other end of the emotional spectrum for team activities is bowling. That once ubiquitous activity is looking to roll up participation by encouraging you to “Plan a Striking Summer Outing.” It might be just the thing to help you hang on to those millennials you so desperately courted.

Bits & Bytes from the Vendors

Ratedly

There are plenty of tools and services out there for businesses to monitor and manage their online reputation. Most — maybe all — are focused on customer reviews. Ratedly monitors employee review sites. It’s a new app for Apple products that tracks what your employees and former employees — most of them anonymous — are saying about the company on sites like Glassdoor, Twitter and more. The app is free, but the service is $150 a month. Not chump change, but oh, so much better than finding out about a negative review from the great, hot candidate sitting across from you in a final interview round.

ReLinkLabs

Just what this startup out of Denmark does is hard to figure out from its website. Its PR impressively describes it as a “recruitment data store.” That means, we are told, ReLink “leverages data science, machine learning and recommendation algorithms in order to aggregate and make sense of publicly available data about candidates and employees.” After a bit of Googling and puzzling through the ReLink website, it turns out that the new product is an API that works with TA systems, aggregating data on job candidates to create detailed profiles and match them to jobs and vice versa. Another entrant joining Entelo, DHI’s Open Web, Monster’s TalentBin, Gild, and others in this increasingly crowded field.

Waggl

San Diego began Waggl-ing last year and liked it enough that it’s expanding use of the platform. What, you ask, is a Waggl? If we described Waggl as an employee engagement and feedback platform, it would be true enough, but it wouldn’t be enough. Waggl combines feedback — anonymous or not — with crowdsourcing suggestions and a wisdom of the masses approach to choosing the best ones. San Diego used it last year to collect ideas from small businesses on how to improve the environment for start-ups. Now, the expanded Wagglin-ing will give the city’s 10,000+ employees a way to share ideas, feedback and opinions in a comprehensive way. Who else uses Waggl? Stanford University, McKesson, and — can I say ironically? — Glassdoor.

Short takes

Monster acquired Jobr, the mobile job and candidate communication app. Jobr has that popular Tinder interface, swiping right or left to collect or discard job postings.
JobFindah is the new job board du jour, with a particular emphasis on disabilities, veterans, and women.
There’s also FairyGodBoss, a career site entirely for women that besides job postings, has reviews and ratings of companies covering pay comparisons, women-focused benefits, and the like.
And on the topic du jour, employment branding, a new software company called FirmPlay says it’ll help companies build branding content, spread the word via social media, and use current employees as advocates in the process.