Two new tools have debuted recently. One will help with your sourcing research and the other promotes the passive candidate who may be overlooked by tech recruiters seeking fresh candidates.
Dice.com, the IT job board, introduced a new search result report that allows recruiters to toggle between the results that meet their criteria and other candidates who also match the criteria, but who haven’t been active on the site for a year.
Tom Silver, senior VP North America of parent company Dice Holdings, said the thought of offering additional results came about because more than half the searches on Dice are for candidates who have been active in the last 90 days. In their quest for fresh job seekers, recruiters were missing candidates with equally good skills.
“So,” says Silver, “We wanted to make it easier to see older candidates. We’re just trying to prompt recruiters to look at the entire database.”
Recruiters now get the results they asked for, as well as a tab that allows them to see candidates who first submitted a resume more than a year ago and haven’t been back since. The passive candidate results have all been filtered by Dice to make sure the email addresses are still current.
Why pick a year instead of six months? For the same reason eggs are sold by the dozen and reunions are celebrated in 5- and 10-year increments. “When you talk to people you hear they want to go a year back,” Silver explains. “It’s a natural calendar thing.”
Dice’s new feature is a curious twist on the usual recruiter pursuit of the passive candidate, a subject that’s come in for some ethical give and take in this economy.
Job boards typically don’t see a lot of searches for candidates a year or more old. Job board sourcing is almost by definition a search for candidates who can fill a req now, so limiting results to 60 or 90 days is fairly typical. Job board denizens are, by definition, active job seekers. Thus aged resumes are inventory that is just not all that valuable, one reason the big boards encourage candidates to regularly update their profiles and resumes.
By offering up vintage candidates who now may have another year or more of experience and maybe even stronger skills, Dice is encouraging recruiters to look at job boards a little differently — as a rich repository of passive candidates, which may be why there is no current plan to offer up fresh resumes to recruiters searching for older ones.
It’s actually quite a clever approach: Give recruiters exactly what they want, but tease them with easy access to vintage candidates they wouldn’t otherwise see. A value-add that may raise the value of aging inventory, and benefit once-active candidates.
What do recruiters who have tried it say about the new feature? It’s “yummy,” Silver told me. Seriously.
Tracked
This new site is not so much tool as resource. It got a positive review by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch the other day. He described the newly out of stealth site as “LinkedIn meets Yahoo Finance, on lots of steroids.”
At its center, Tracked.com is a financial information site, so it gives you all the usual data elements you would expect. It’s what comes next that makes Tracked more valuable. Besides the public companies, Tracked has bits and pieces on many private companies, too. The more public the private company, the more data available.
The LinkedIn analogy comes from the executives and key personnel that are part of a company profile. Tracked’s depth on them, however, doesn’t match what LinkedIn or ZoomInfo offer — not yet, anyway. But as it layers on a network and a commenting capability, its content sources reach beyond what you are likely to find searching the public databases.
And keep in mind, Tracked.com is free.
To get the full value out of Tracked, you need to register and establish an account. Then you get to create tracking lists of companies, people, industries, and the like. This is an important difference from Yahoo Finance, which, while useful for top news, doesn’t offer near the depth of Tracked.com.
Tracked.com isn’t likely to replace your usual research sites any time soon. But its founder Mike Yavonditte has broad experience in the interactive world. In 2007 he sold ad service Quigo.com to AOL and a year later began work on Tracked.com. His progress and plans for the financial service so impressed Union Square Ventures, the New York City VC firm, that it kicked in heartily to the $11.5 million Tracked has so far raised.