Read This News Roundup or We’ll Decode Your Face

We needed to unwind after watching the new, no-holds-barred recruiting video out of China, so we put together a little roundup of recent news and other tidbits.

Here goes:

• Do you remember that startup called Opening? It’s changing its focus to … facial coding. Opening is working with customers to measure people’s emotions, and ultimately hoping to expand facial coding’s use in recruiting (“reading” a candidate); workplace communication; employee engagement (measuring more accurately someone’s reaction to a speaker, trainer, sales pitch, or presentation) and litigation.
• Gladeo, a new non-profit, has launched to “to inspire and helping young people discover, navigate, and achieve their dream careers.” It’s emphasizing diversity, and multimedia content; one of the founders has a background in film.
• Forbes gave EmployUs a lot of ink.
• The U.S. government launched a new site about veteran hiring.
• As usual, Indeed loves the annual SilkRoad source of hire report.
• Quietly over the past year, LinkedIn has rolled out a new feature called ProFinder. Its task is to simply match employers to freelancers. Modeled after popular websites TaskRabbit, HourlyNerd, Gigwalk, Fiverr, Freelancer, and Upwork, ProFinder is LinkedIn’s first dabble in the contingent workspace. Users can select a category of service, or answer a series of questions to determine their need. ProFinder then selects five vetted users for the employer to review. After five proposals, ProFinder requires an upgraded LinkedIn Premium Business Plus account to continue to respond to project requests. ProFinder is currently available in large markets throughout the U.S.
• Indeed has launched a “50 top companies to work for” list (remember we said Indeed is broadening its offerings and the way it thinks of itself?) based on reviews of employees’ experiences at Fortune 500 companies. The top five: Salesforce; Southwest Airlines; Anadarko Petroleum; Pioneer Natural Resources; Philip Morris.
• “Technical recruiting platform Triplebyte launches engineer genome project.”
• Needham Analyst Scott Berg, in a new report, says “SmartRecruiters is the hot new ATS vendor, but iCIMS is reaching dominant level.” And artificial intelligence, he says, “could be the next frontier in recruiting software. Untapt and Pymetric were two particular vendors we found most interesting and what we believe could be early disrupters in HR.”
• There’s a new ATS.