A little of what’s new, from a “matching” site, to video, to job boards, a tool to find passive candidates, a place to review employers in Australia … and a look at what might happen if LinkedIn and eHarmony had a baby.
Let’s start with Jobdreaming. In short, here’s how it works. A candidate (U.S. only for now) puts in the type of job they want (let’s say a design job making $50,000 within a certain number of miles radius of a given zip code). An employer — right now for free — sends in a job listing to Jobdreaming. It gets sent to candidates who match, along with a question of the employer’s choice. The candidate is still anonymous at this point. But, if the candidate is interested, they can express interest, and answer the question. The employer receives the contact information on the candidate, as well as the answer to the question the employer posed.
Jobdreaming has under 10 employees and is funded by two VC firms. In response to my question asking how this is different than the laundry list of matching sites we’ve chronicled on ERE, the company mentions simplicity. Instead of starting with a specific job description and trying to match a long list of personal traits with it, this begins with the “what do you want to be when you grow up?” concept.
If Entelo sounds familiar, I’m not surprised. The company started about a year ago and began a private beta about six months ago. It launches today but already has 40 paying customers.
Entelo wants to differentiate itself from TalentBin and other competitors by focusing not just on passive candidates but on what I guess you could call passive candidates who are more willing than others to take a new job. Its founder says that companies spend a lot of energy on candidates who don’t respond to their InMails or other messages, and Entelo helps whittle the pool down.
Entelo indexes data from around the Internet — sites such as Stack Overflow, Quora, or Twitter — to build profiles of people (like you see pictured). It’s particularly interested, as I mentioned, in showing whether someone may be getting ancy at their jobs. If your company’s stock just went down, the company CEO quit, or it announced layoffs, you may be more receptive to a recruiter’s advances, and a recruiter will get an email alert letting them know this could be the ripe time to approach you.
A great example is the candidate who recently changed their location on Twitter from Boston to Los Angeles. It triggered an “alert” to an Entelo user who found out the candidate could be becoming a more active job seeker, even though they hadn’t yet changed, for example, their LinkedIn profile’s location, or given many other clues. The Entelo customer hired the person three weeks later.
Entelo’s Jon Bischke says that he’s aware of a couple of dozen people who’ve have been hired through Entelo. Users pay $500 a month or $5,000 a year, and are mainly fast-growth companies looking for people like engineers, data scientists, product managers, and other IT-related employees. Entelo is likely to try to move into different job functions and company types in the future. Funded by venture capitalists and located in San Francisco’s Mission District, it has seven employees.
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