Meet Findera, a people search engine that officially launched in October 2018, offering a free recruiting solution for employers to find talent on a global level. In addition to searching through profiles, employers can post jobs for free as well.
“We’re drawing from our past experience at Microsoft, Netflix, Visa, Yahoo, and elsewhere to create the professional search engine we’ve always wanted,” says the company’s FAQ page. “Our goal is to help you create and nurture mutually beneficial professional relationships.”
The company specifically helps recruiters find talent for project-based work or full-time opportunities. Using graph search technology, Findera allows users to comb through over 140 million professionals with multiple, specific filters to find the ideal match for their purposes in one single search.
The San Francisco-based startup was featured in something called The Funnel Report.
“Findera empowers all business professionals, including recruiters, business owners, consultants, business development, and sales professionals, regardless of the size of their company and their budgets,” said co-founder and COO Christophe Daligault. “[Findera is] a fresh alternative to time-consuming social networks and costly specialized services.”
Findera searches professional profiles, websites, documents, and news sources all at once. The engine works in a similar fashion to the platform LinkedIn. However, unlike LinkedIn, Findera is not a social media platform and there is no cost to use it.
Where do the profiles come from?
Findera says it searches tens of millions of websites, news sources, and documents on the Internet to gather public information. It also acquires databases which are sometimes used by the sales and marketing departments of large enterprises. In the process of gathering profile data, it says it analyzes, processes, and validates public information to remove incorrect, duplicate, and stale data.
Additionally, if you chose to create an account with findera and sign-in using a Google or Microsoft account, it may use some of your contacts information, or email and calendar metadata to deliver “advanced benefits.” These benefits include the ability to see who has viewed your profile, filter results based on the people you know, and view common contacts between you and a person you may not know yet. Over time, Findera says, its technology can remember users’ preferences and help users maintain the “desired frequency of communications or meetings with your most important business relationships.”
Employers can search the Findera database of professionals by filters such as location, position, industry, company, time in position, time at company, department, and revenue. An example search could include finding professionals who have worked at Apple or have experience in companies with over $50 million in revenue.
“At any given time, one third of all professionals are either looking for people or hoping to be found,” said Daligault. “People who have jobs to offer can now find and directly reach the right candidates to accelerate the hiring process, regardless of the size of their company and budget.”
Taking the service for a spin, there are a lot of profiles available. However, much of the information I found wasn’t incredibly useful, because the information was so sparse. This is in contrast to a paid tool like Hiring Solved or Entelo, which provides a lot of information.
Also, I had to login with my Google or Microsoft account in order to access candidate email addresses. I’ll add it’s not very clear how candidates see the jobs that are posted, since visitors can’t do a job search query.
Ultimately, Findera feels a little half-baked at the moment. Free doesn’t automatically make something good. And free doesn’t guarantee usage. From where I sit, the company has a long way to go to be relevant in today’s recruiting landscape.
