Company Poised to Introduce Semantic-Search Technology to $10 Billion Talent Acquisition Industry

Seattle-based TalentSpring, Inc. announces that its open funding round, where it secured $1.6 Million in investment from Second Avenue Partners and private investors, is now closed. The funding has enabled TalentSpring to bring its revolutionary semantic-search technology to the $10 Billion talent acquisition industry. After two and half years in development, TalentSpring is currently piloting its SaaS talent sourcing service to more than 50 medium- and large-sized organizations and expects to release to the market in May 2009. The service empowers recruiters and hiring managers to automatically search social networking sites, job boards, and corporate applicant tracking systems (ATS) to find the best matched job candidates for open positions.

“We’re solving a huge problem for recruiters by automating the candidate sourcing process of manually reading and ranking resumes,” says Bryan Starbuck, CEO and Founder of TalentSpring. “TalentSpring’s technology will allow every recruiter to become an expert candidate sourcer and will save organizations substantial amounts of money.” Starbuck explains, “Today, recruiters have to read through an average of 200 resumes to find one good candidate. Not to mention, it is not uncommon for a recruiter to read 2,000 resumes to actually fill a position. The task is so time consuming that the best candidates for a position are often overlooked because recruiters simply don’t have time to find them. Or by the time they’re found, they’ve been hired by a competitor.”

By employing semantic-search technology to candidate sourcing, TalentSpring find resumes that are similarly matched to the attributes listed on the job requisition. This process greatly increases the pool of potential high-quality candidates and is a major innovation over today’s Boolean search method which only finds candidates whose resumes contain the exact Boolean logic and keyword(s) the recruiter used.

If a candidate’s resume doesn’t have the exact keywords used in the search, it is discarded before ever being read by a recruiter. The result is that organizations are not able to take advantage of the large available labor pool to find the best matched candidates for their positions.

For more information on TalentSpring, please visit www.talentspring.com

Matt Lafata, HRchitect

Time: 4:30pm – 6pm

Where: Axios Law & TalentSpring’s shared offices
1525 Fourth Ave
Suite 800
Seattle, WA 98101

Been really busy the past two days, but didn’t want to leave my dedicated readers without a blog post. Yesterday was CRAZY busy. A house inspection, several calls with some startup guys, the awesome npost event, and then more startup work until late into the night.

Tired? Yes. Excited? Definitely.

There’s nothing more exciting then to realize that there are so many other people trying to chase their dreams as well and the npost event last night brought that all to the forefront. I signed up without thinking much about it, but I connected and re-connected with more people there then I would’ve in an entire month. I was amazed at how many people I actually knew from random places before and enjoyed myself way more then I expected. Among the great people I chatted with:

• COO of Home Savvi - I’ve been wanting to chat with this guy for a while. Super smart
  
• Some Zillow buddies who left to start FridgeDoor Inc – no site to link to, but excited to see what they’re up to
• Another Zillow buddy and his great gang from Giraffe Labs – great idea btw
• Old acquiantance of mine from college from TalentSpring
• Several analytics people from Zaaz
• A crazy smart PR guy who did some things for TeachStreet- I was hoping to see more of my Zillow buddies there at the event from TeachStreet, but they must’ve been crazy tired after a whirlwind of success with their recent launch.
• A ton of other random startups that will make this list too long…
• And of course, Mr. Nate Kaiser himself and his incredible wife

Big thanks to Nate for putting the event together. Great event, great host, and great community. Excited to be working amongst such pleasant and smart people.

Leggo di questo progetto, TalentSpring, appena lanciato da una società di Seattle, che si colloca nel panorama del recruiting on-line con un approccio innovativo.
Da quanto ho capito non è un sito di annunci di lavoro, ma una banca data di curricula, associati a categorie granularmente definite: ad esempio Computer/Internet > Programmer > Language > Java.
La novità è che i curricula sono pre-valutati dagli stessi utenti: per poter inserire il mio curriculum io devo valutarne altri 12, appartenenti alla stessa categoria in cui mi sto candidando. I curricula da valutare mi vengono presentati a coppie e, per ogni coppia io devo indicare quello “migliore”.
Il senso di tutto questo dovrebbe essere quello di fornire un servizio a chi deve assumere, che normalmente riceve centinaia di risposte ad un annuncio per una determinata posizione, mentre in questo modo potrebbe attingere alle figure più qualificate presenti sul mercato.
Diverse sono le questioni che vengono in mente:
- il conflitto di interesse. Perchè dovrei votare positivamente un mio diretto concorrente con caratteristiche migliori delle mie? Gli ideatori del servizio rispondono che il sistema traccia i voti palesemente errati o comunque distanti dalla media dei voti e penalizza di conseguenza l’utente che li ha espressi;
- la privacy. Desidero che la mia comunità professionale sappia che sto cercando di cambiare lavoro? (anche se i cv fossero anonimi, spesso dalla sequenza delle esperienze formative e professionali non è difficile risalire alla persona, specie in un ambito professionale molto definito);
- la competenza. Davvero tutti possono giudicare sensatamente un curriculum, tra l’altro in generale e non in relazione ad una specifica posizione all’interno di una specifica azienda?

Oltre a queste domande mi sovviene un interrogativo più generale, legato se vogliamo al concetto di intelligenza collettiva: non è che dare valore assoluto ai voti dei più porti ad un appiattimento del giudizio? E che rimangano in minoranza e quindi esclusi non solo gli stupidi, ma anche gli “illuminati”, che vedono oltre ciò che la media riesce a comprendere?