They call it My Perfect Gig, but you may be tempted to think of it as My Best Gettable Candidate. You’ll be forgiven if you do because after you strip away all the hype from all the matching sites that are sprouting like rainy season mushrooms, the matches they come up with and the candidates who get hired only occasionally fit every job spec to a T.
“We’re creating a common language,” explains Chris Hill. “It helps makes sense of job reqs and makes it possible for recruiters to have a dialog with hiring managers.”
Hill is My Perfect Gig’s SVP of marketing and product management. The site is MyPerfectGig.com, launched in October 2007 by founders Mark Dane and Charlie Jutkiewicz, both founders of BrassRing now owned by Kenexa.
Last week, in advance of today’s official unveiling ofMyPerfectGig.com after months in public beta, Hill gave us a tour of the company’s capabilities. To call it a job matching site is technically correct, but too limiting. What impressed us most wasn’t the fact the system can take the requirements in a job req and find candidates with matching skills. Instead, it’s the intelligence and market data that the SourceView product makes available.
Here’s the example Hill used in the demo:
A req comes in for a computer design engineer with a master’s degree and skills in RTL and Verilog. Without having to know what those skills are the recruiter runs the req through SourceView to discover that in the entire United States there are only about 35,000 design engineers and of those fewer than 1percent have a master’s and know RTL and Verilog. Another view tells the recruiter how many reqs asking for the same qualifications are currently online across the country, in the state or even right in the same metro area.
As Hill drilled through the analysis it was quickly obvious that if our hiring manager was insistent on a design engineer with all those credentials, it was going to be a long search.
The pool grew quickly as qualifications were dropped from the “must have” side of the ledger. Now what if we knew the other skills design engineers had who listed Verilog knowledge on their resume?
SourceView does. And it can display these skills in a tag cloud manner, meaning the relative size of the name of each skill indicates how often design engineers mention it as a skill. Select a few of those in place of the Verilog skill and the candidate pool expands even further.
The value of SourceView should be obvious.
“What matters to recruiters is they have a way to talk to hiring managers,” says Hill. “MPG (MyPerfectGig) gives them that.”
In our example, the recruiter and the hiring manager can knowledgeably discuss the job req. Should there be no match or willing candidate in the MyPerfectGig database (we’ll get to that in a moment)recruiter and hiring manager can discuss just how critical each qualifications and what substitutions may be acceptable. The hiring manager knows what they need; the recruiter has the data to help the manager understand the challenge.
“It’s a much more informed discussion,” Hill points out.
The data on the worker supply comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percentage of workers in the category that have specific skills comes from MPG’s sampling of resumes. And the number of jobs posted online, which includes where the jobs are and the name of the company doing the hiring, comes from an automated searching of industry job sites.
Because of the amount of data My Perfect Gig collects for each job in its inventory, the service is limited right now to the computer manufacturing industry. Hill says MPG is already expanding its offerings into the medical devices and computer manufacturing related industries before branching into biotech and finance.
What about the candidate side?
For starters, it’s an invitation-only network. Professionals in the field who make the cut upload a resume if they choose, which is parsed and automatically populates their personal profile page. They can choose to be private, anonymous or public (though public in the sense that only other invitees and client companies can see the profile). Participants can enhance their profile or not. Their skills and resume go through the same kind of analysis as a job req and they can use the results to see how much in demand their skills are and where the most jobs are. By adding skills and enhancing their experience in a “What If” scenario, participants can see how it changes their career outlook.
“We’re giving real value to the members of the network whether or not they are looking for a job or would even consider one,” Hill explains.
When a match is made, both the company and the candidate decide whether to go further. If they do, My Perfect Gig puts the two together and they take it from there.
The company is already working with Raytheon, Teradyne, Broadcom and a few other big names in the computer manufacturing industry. Several more, Hill tells us, are waiting in the wings.
My Perfect Gig’s SourceView is available by subscription starting at $50,000 annually.
With today’s move out of beta, My Perfect Gig is launching a major corporate advertising campaign and an email campaign that Hill says will invite some 250,000 computer industry professionals to join the network.