Today we have news of new launches, a new ATS, and a couple of gossipy items that crossed our desk.
PERSONAVITA
Whoever first said job seeking was a full-time job probably had no idea just how much overtime 21st-century job seekers would have to put in. You have to brush up your resume — once you decide what kind of resume it is you want, and how many different ones you need.
Then, no sooner does the conscientious job seeker post it to Monster, CareerBuilder, and wherever else they think is right and just, they get told how no one ever gets hired that way. Instead, you have to network. So off goes conscientious job seeker to LinkedIn, Spoke, and to their personal contact list to announce they are in transition, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Meanwhile, they discover that networking is good, but you need to build a personal brand, too. And that means a Facebook page, a personal profile to supplement the resume, maybe their own web page, and, of course, the now-de-rigueur blog to market themselves.
No wonder the number of discouraged workers climbs every month.
Now comes PersonaVita, if not to solve the problem, at least to salve it. Launched today, the site is pitched as a way to “capture your experiences, validate your contributions, and draw from your social, professional, and academic achievements to create a personal brand online.”
You get started in PersonaVita by creating what the founders call an Experience wiki.This has the flavor of a 360 feedback survey, but without, presumably, any negatives. Instead of simply offering up the usual resume assertion about an achievement, you get to describe a project or an experience. Others add flavor and texture to it in a way that not only enhances your reputation but offers help and insight for the greater world.
The wiki and supplementary material, including, if you insist, a traditional resume, form your portfolio, which you can open up to recruiters, or, should you be filling your time consulting, to clients or anyone, for that matter.
The basic service is free; an upgrade runs $6.95 a month. Coming soon is an enterprise version for corporations to deploy.
NEWTON
This San Francisco-based online software company opened its doors in January and released this month an online ATS. The company founders hail from the tech staffing arena, and say the product (also called Newton) will appeal to smaller companies that need to manage candidates and reqs, not software.
“Our idea was to tackle recruiting software by focusing on the users of software, not features,” the founders say on the website. “This means we have become probably overly obsessed with designing easy to use software.”
What we could see tells us that it probably won’t take much training time to figure out how to use it. However, what the site doesn’t do is talk about the kind of features even smaller recruiters do value. So we can’t say how inbound resumes are handled or whether the system includes a way to publish reqs to the company career site and elsewhere.
However, the press release announcing the introduction says: “Newton also includes other perks such as expert support to help companies set up the system, import existing resumes, and create a custom careers site.”
Cost is under $2,000 annually.
ZAPOINT
Not a traditional recruiting vendor, Zapoint has a foot in the job seeker world and another, bigger foot in corporate human capital management. Its “LifeChart” is a new take on the resume. It develops a candidate profile by integrating standard resume content with additional jobseeker content and measures the results against organizational progression and career ladder information.
If that sounds a little vague, it is, because Zapoint really is best demoed than described.
The company, which has been around since 2007, now unveils SkillsMapper. It does what it sounds like: offers a company-wide map of relevant (and futurely-relevant, a word we just made up) skills required and skills possessed by the staff.
Here’s what the company says about SkillsMapper:
“By leveraging Zapoint’s LifeChart technology, SkillsMapper gives enterprises the ability to benchmark skills by employee, department, and across the company. It offers employees a way to track their own skills in conjunction with others in the organization; for managers, SkillsMapper enables comparison of individual and group skills, measurement of competencies against corporate objectives, and the establishment of a skills inventory that can be drawn upon when needed.”
JOBSTER
This long-troubled viral referral turned job board and sort of social network site is shifting away from the Jobster name to become Recruiting.com. Jobster bought the domain from Jason Davis (now of RecruitingBlogs.com) in 2006 when it had lots of money .
The two sites have different looks. Recruiting.com is focused on reaching businesses and pitching its tools and services. Jobster.com, which the new “About Us” section says is now a division of Recruiting.com, is essentially a consumer job board.
Founded by former White House staffer Jason Goldberg, Jobster raised more than $55 million in venture capital and burned through most of it in less than four years.
FINAL NOTE
That’s not a company name, but our own way of ending this post. Here’s a bit of PR gobblespeak, which comes directly from a pitch letter we received a few weeks ago. The name of the company has been removed, but we can say it came from a software vendor most of you have heard of. We think it’s really a cryptogram, so let us know if you crack the code:
“(Company) has always approached its natively integrated, wholly organic product suite from the strategic perspective that the PERFORMANCE is a key differentiator to understanding and helping business perform better via General Management On Demand, the category we created.”