New Referral Communities, New Matching Site, New Games, and More in Today’s Roundup

Here’s a collection of odds and ends about startups, new features, and other bits and bytes of useful info.

You may remember CodeEval from a year ago, and from an update we did when part of its service became free. The company has opened up its database for searching by employers. So if you want to look up one of the thousands of developers who’ve solved programming challenges, you can view their solutions, and contact info. It’s $500 a month, though you can search free to see how many matches you get, before spending the money to get identifying information.
CareerBuilder says the staffing industry is in for a strong few months as companies ramp-up their temporary hiring. A survey commissioned by the careers publisher found 36 percent of companies plan to hire temp or contract workers this year. The first quarter may well be the easiest, as 27 percent of companies say they’ll be adding temp staff in the first three months of the year.

Speaking of matchmaking, would you believe there’s another new site aimed at matching employer and employee online profiles? This one’s called StreetID, and it’s focused on financial careers.

SelectMinds has announced something called “Referral Communities.” Basically this is an addition to SelectMinds’ product which we have mentioned before, called TalentVine. Referral Communities allows referred job candidates to get into a talent community if they’re not ready to apply for a job or not ready to send in a resume; with the old system, the person your employees referred would need to go through the full Taleo application process. Clients like eBay and McGraw-Hill can use the system to “drip market” to job candidates who have been referred employees have referred.
Google is always looking for the best and the brightest coming out of colleges and universities around the world. To encourage interest (and this extends all the way to high schoolers), it has Google Student Blog. It’s about as soft a sell as you’ll see. Of course, career information is among the potpourri of offerings. Next week begins a series of video chats (on Googe+ Hangouts, naturally) with lead engineering recruiter Jeff Moore. He just wrapped up a Recruiter Tips & Tricks series. You can use Hangouts for your own recruiting chats.

Anthony Knierim, who works for Aon Hewitt’s outsourcing business and used to be with Accenture’s outsourcing business, is starting a company called RadMatter, which he says is a “social gaming place” launching this quarter. It’s going to do a free or low-cost beta with 10 companies (it already has five “yesses” and one “maybe”; he told us some of the beta companies and they are well-known). He says a couple of them are “gaga” over the tool, which will first focus on games to engage college or early-career job candidates. Companies will buy licenses that will allow them to host 5, 10, or 30 challenges annually. Venture capitalists are approaching RadMatter, Kneirim says, but right now it’s holding off on giving up control to a big VC firm, particularly to a firm, he says, that doesn’t understand the recruiting industry and might not realize how big gaming, challenges, and similar assessments can be in attracting people. RadMatter also will offer two-hour workshops for business leaders on the power of games and on best practices with games in the workplace and in recruiting, for about $7,500 for up to 12 participants (and is doing an abbreviated one this January 23 in Milwaukee for more than 30 C-level executives). In addition, it’ll offer three-week, $75,000 “culture audits” for companies on “readiness and recommendations for engaging Millenials.”