Talent Spring - new platform for Digg-styled resume posting

Posted on May 19, 2007
Filed Under Online Tools, Venture News |

The online job search market, estimated at about $6 billion and dominated by 500 pound gorrillas such as Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Yahoo’s HotJobs, leaves enough space for newcomers. SimplyHired and Jobster has already captured their share of pie by providing new job search and job posting tools. SimplyHired automated job posting by scanning data in standard XML format. Jobster introduced video resume. Small but very lucrative share of high tech job postings migrated to job boards of influential blogs like Techcrunch, Gigaom and Venturebeat. If you want to open job board on you blog, you don’t have to develop it in-house from scratch anymore - yo can use turnkey platforms of Edgeio and Jobthread.

Now Seattle-based TalentSpring has jumped the job search wagon with Digg-styled resume posting. Resume is rated by peers, job candidates with low scores fall to the bottom of the stack while winners rise to the top. Employers are ready to pay an annual subscription fee of $6,000 for unlimited access to the site or pay $200 to fill just one position for the benefit of quickly finding the right candidate.

I wonder if TalentSpring will also give birth to Digg-styled mafia of influential and corrupted users controlling top of the page?

Update May 24, 2007

Here is some very professional and thorough clarification on misconceptions about how TalentSpring works.

Andrew Boardman has also addressed particular misconception in our posting.

Misconception #2: TalentSpring Uses Digg-Style Voting
A lot of excellent sites out there do their ranking by letting users cast a vote on an item, thumbs up or thumbs down, and items will bubble or or sink down based on those votes. I think this is why people believe resumes on TalentSpring would become a popularity contest. We don’t do it that way, you don’t say whether you like or dislike something, instead you compare two that should be comparable and say which one is better (even if marginally). More importantly, users do not choose who they vote on, we have algorithms that calculate which votes are needed to properly order the job categories, and we do random sampling so users cannot game the system to make sure they get to vote on who they want to.

While I’m not uterly convinced in value of peer voting, I’m sincerely grateful for this clarification - it helped me to understand better how TalentSpring works.

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