It’s a big day for Dice today. The IT specialty site officially opens its Dice Talent Network, while its parent company, Dice Holdings, reports its second quarter financial performance.
Analysts, reported by Yahoo Finance, expect the job board company to report earnings per share in the range of 5 to 7 cents a share, with the consensus at a nickle. Besides its flagship IT site, Dice also owns a few other boards, among them eFinancialCareers and ClearanceJobs and a company that produces job fairs.
The numbers will be the lead item on the financial conference call with analysts, but you can be certain that CEO Scot Melland is going to showcase the Talent Network release.
The network is a major step to integrating social recruiting into a job board environment. Like Facebook or LinkedIn, the Dice Talent Network program builds off a company profile that can be richly populated with external content, photos, even video. Recruiters can create their own profile page and invite potential candidates to connect with them.
It made sense for Dice to do this, Melland told me a few weeks ago, because of the nature of the visitors to the sites. (A similar service was rolled-out on ClearanceJobs.com in June.)
Most are employed, he explained. They come to the sites for the editorial content, the discussion groups, and to keep up with the kinds of jobs and companies that are hiring. Unlike a generic job board, Melland insists that a substantial number of visitors to Dice and ClearanceJobs are not actively seeking a new job, but are receptive to opportunities.
The new talent network has tools and features for them, and for employers and recruiters. Candidates or potential candidates can control access to their resume, choosing to focus only on certain companies, getting job and content updates delivered directly.
Employers and recruiters can build connections with these candidates, inviting them to join their network. They can chat with them, send email, and send them jobs.
Dice has been promoting its talent networks since launching the Cleared Jobs Network on the ClearanceJobs site. The video here is one of several for recruiters and job seekers on Dice’s YouTube channel explaining what the network is and how it works.
The launch of the talent network, says Melland, marks a “shift from a transactional (experience) to being much more of a relationship building.” Even so, he says neither the Talent Network nor the Cleared Network will replace job posting and resume sourcing. Consistent with the company’s understanding of just what social media is — “We define social media as any web-based tool or service that facilitates conversations and networks,” Melland says — “it’s another tool recruiters can use.”