Today, talent-focused big data comes to small business. While in France, big data comes to big employers.
Both developments involve Monster’s cloud-based semantic search, SeeMore. Both are big news for the company, representing in the first instance a market push into the long tail of employers, while in the second, a broadening of its service offerings into non-English speaking Europe. But otherwise, the developments are unconnected.
Somewhat more than a year after Monster first launched SeeMore, Monster is now offering the service to companies with as few as 50 workers. It’s not a stripped down version, Javid Muhammedali, Monster’s director, Product Management, assured me. “We didn’t slim down the feature set.”
What the developers did do was to make some adjustments so employers without a technical staff could begin to use SeeMore right after they sign up. For instance, instead of using APIs, the SMB version of SeeMore is email-based. Send one resume, or Zip up hundreds.
Now, a moment to explain SeeMore, and why even employers with only a few dozen workers should at least consider giving it a try. First, SeeMore operates in the cloud, which means the data it stores is always available, anywhere there’s an Internet connection
Since it was initially designed as a talent acquisition tool, that data is typically candidate resumes. In that sense, SeeMore looks a lot like a basic ATS. However, SeeMore incorporates Monster’s 6Sense technology, which makes it a powerful tool for finding candidates who match, far more precisely than any keyword search can, just the combination of skills and experience a hiring manager wants. It’s a semantic search, so if you are looking for a geneticist for your coffee plantation, you won’t be delivered a bunch of Java programmers.
With almost any job posting getting hundreds of applications these days, SeeMore can cover its monthly fee — rates start in the hundreds of dollars — just in the time it saves hiring managers from having to start through every one of them. SeeMore’s 6Sense ranks the resumes — in already the database and those coming in response to a posting — against the qualifications and requirements.
Consider this: It can actually improve the quality of hire simply because SeeMore does rank candidates. Hiring managers — or generalists doing the recruiting — overwhelmed by 200, 300, or more applications, may simply not be able to keep up or keep straight all the candidates.
For that matter, as Muhammedali observed, if you discover you already have candidates with the talents and background you want, you can skip the job posting altogether and save the fee.
Besides handling all the inbound applications, one of the other uses smart HR professionals have discovered is that SeeMore can help with internal talent management. Upload the resumes of your existing personnel, and they, too, become searchable and accessible. You can use SeeMore to identify everyone with critical skills, making it easy to see where your bench is thin. Or use it to spot internal candidates with the skills needed to move into new positions.
Candidates and employees can be accessed in any number of ways, and sorted into folders. If you want to build a relationship with a pipeline of promising candidates, SeeMore will export your list into a file that can be easily merged into a personalized Outlook email.
Because SeeMore for SMBs wasn’t dumbed down, it retains the useful reporting capabilities of the enterprise version. Thus, at a glance, you can see how many accounting candidates with tax expertise who also reside locally are in your database.
“It’s an underserved market,” says Muhammedali. SMBs “need these tools. They just don’t have many options” for managing data. The product’s sweet spot — the target market — he added, are employers between 50 and 250 employees. Larger employers who don’t need any special integration, say with an existing ATS or talent management program, can also use the SMB version.
This new version of SeeMore is available only in English for Australia, Canada, the U.K. and U.S. Until today, that was true of the enterprise version as well. Now, Monster launched a French version. In the coming months, German and Dutch language versions of SeeMore will be introduced.