Monster is taking its branded, 6Sense semantic search into the cloud in a clever and innovative application that will not only make life simpler for recruiters, but suggests the company is thinking beyond the classic post-and-search job board business model.
SeeMore is Monster’s newest 6Sense product. Introduced late last week during a group demo for bloggers, consultants, and HR tech writers, SeeMore applies the 6Sense search power to candidate databases stored in the cloud, producing a ranked list of qualified prospects.
That brief description, however, hardly does it justice. More broadly, SeeMore makes sense of the thousands of resumes that lurk in every ATS. Instead of writing impossibly long Boolean strings, or entering a bunch of keywords and getting back hundreds of results, 6Sense knows, for instance, that an audit manager must have certain skills and experience.
Power Resume users already know that with that job title and a few other parameters — years of experience for instance — 6Sense will scour Monster’s database for qualifying candidates. You won’t get CFO resumes just because there’s a keyword match. (If you haven’t tried Power Search, you can read about it here.)
Speaking to Fast Company, Monster’s CIO and head of product Darko Dejanovic said “traditional search technologies couldn’t determine if, for example, a candidate had Oracle software experience, previously worked at Oracle, or played an oracle in a university theater troupe. SeeMore brings the power of our 6Sense search to the cloud environment and applies it to talent pools beyond Monster.”
SeeMore clients can upload their entire database into the cloud, search it, search Monster, or other uploaded database to source candidates.
It’s slick and easy to use. Candidates from the various DBs can be merged into a single database or sorted into folders. SeeMore’s analytics are nimble enough to track candidates in just about as many different ways as you can think of.
Monster’s senior director of product management, Javid Muhammedali did the demo. Muhammedali showed a few useful analytics, pulling up the candidates for a sales engineer job to show where they came from, then another view showing how many candidates of all types are coming from competitor companies and what skills they have.
I said at the start of this post that SeeMore is more than a useful recruiting tool, and it is. Muhammedali pointed out how SeeMore can sort through an employer’s workforce (assuming it had been uploaded to the cloud) to find in-house candidates. That same 6Sense technology can also be used to identify staff with specific skills, or find those with a certain background, or even help spot shortcomings in the talent inventory.
SeeMore allows you to, well, see more than you would with a typical ATS and even with rudimentary workforce management tools. It’s certainly not going to replace an HCM, but it certainly can enhance one. Monster may not have started out building SeeMore as a planning tool, but by foraying into cloud-computing, it’s venturing outside its proprietary walls.
That’s why I said SeeMore is evidence that Monster is at least thinking of a future beyond the traditional job board revenue model. SeeMore can be used to search Monster’s resume database, but you don’t have to. Pull resumes from anywhere and once in the cloud, 6Sense will search them.
The starting price is $20,000 for an annual, one-seat contract. Not inexpensive, but still within the reach of mid-sized employers, and a bargain if it turns up just one or two of those diamonds buried amongst those resumes every candidate is promised will be kept on file.
Muhammedali, at the beginning of the demo, called SeeMore “a transformation of the 6Sense technology.” He was speaking of the move to the cloud, but he could just as easily have been meaning a transformation, a small one to be sure, but a step away from the walled garden.
