Shrinking Market? Shrink the Web (part 2)

If you've visited this blog before you may have read the post about the software product that I think effectively brings back ad chasing - Shrinking Market? Shrink the Web (part 1). That covered off how the millions of web pages devoted to job ads can be made manageable.

Job ad side covered, this post deals with the other side of the fence - the now huge amount of candidate CVs sitting on job board CV databases. Monster alone has in excess of 5 million profiles - who would have believed this 10 years ago!?! Anyone that has ever spent time wading through these (and yes boolean searches help..) will tell you it ain't any fun. Time consuming, yes. Good use of time, I'm not convinced. In today's market, any time that isn't either on the phone or meeting face to face doesn't feel too productive to me... The proof of the pudding in terms of just how time consuming this is? The existence of firms that allow recruiters to outsource "CV mining" from job board databases.

I would challenge anyone who thinks that "only desperate" or "unplaceable" candidates put their CVs on job board databases to cross reference their fees for the last 6 months against the likes of TotalJobs, Monster and a few niche boards in their specific markets. I suspect anyone with that opinion may get a surprise at just how many of those placed candidates are on there.

So why aren't more clients getting their staff direct? Same reason some recruiters are outsourcing CV mining.

Information overload - it just isn't particularly easy to manage all those CVs. Who is active, how up to date is the CV, how many other jobs they up for? All the classics that a half decent recruiter will sort out in their sleep.

This part of resourcing is ripe for "shrinking" - and there's quite a few firms that are offering software to do this. In fact, this part of the market is getting crowded rather quickly.

In the US, it looks like AIRS Sourcepoint and Talent Drive's TalentFilter dominate the market. Both of these businesses are now looking at the UK market.

On the face of it, these products are great - a real time (and therefore money) saver. Time to go out and buy then? Not so fast, there's quite a bit to these products - and from what I hear this market is in danger of getting more than a little crowded very quickly...

Before putting pen to paper on any of these, I'd consider a few key areas - how many job boards are covered, how the results are screened and just how easy are they to use (ie do they need complex search strings or can you just upload a job spec and the system does the rest?) Basic stuff really but if the boards that work best for you aren't there then why bother? Also if the parsing/ screening isn't up to scratch then you're in danger of going full circle and just having too many CVs to look thru. If either of these two are the case then I'd steer clear... If they're right for your business then its worth a look...

Last point on this? AIRS and Talent Drive aren't going to have the market to themselves for too long.... I hear Broadbean are very close to launching a product in this market. The only product I've seen used is the Talent Drive product (and the functionality there is very good.... it includes results from sites like LinkedIn as well as job boards) I'm not best placed to say which is best, that said - given one of the criteria I'd have for selection is coverage of job boards I would hazard a guess that if the Broadbean product gets its parsing right (if/when launched) it could be hard to beat....