The first company we’ve invited to show off its product at the future-of-talent-acquisition conference in San Diego was Mya. I’m moderating a conference session where several startups I selected out of hundreds will demonstrate what they’ve developed.
Number two is Clinch, out of Dublin, Ireland. It resides in the hot branding-marketing-advertising sector of talent acquisition, but with a twist. Clinch does provide a product related to talent pipelines, helping companies build and communicate to a list of passive job seekers. But some talent communities just ask for a job seeker’s email address, and maybe a first and last name, and job seekers can start receiving communications from employers. With others, they’ll ask for a candidate’s skills and interests.
What Clinch is trying to do for companies is rely not on what people say, but what they do. It’s not depending on people searching for jobs; in fact, the company says that “the best search is no search.”
The idea is to see what what a candidate views and clicks on throughout a career site, particularly a microsite or landing page. Companies can see with a heat map what is interesting people; adjust their content accordingly; get a complete activity report on a candidate; and, based on people’s behavior, suggest to recruiters the candidates for a job once a job’s put into a talent acquisition system.
As Clinch says: “Each candidate record shows a complete history of their activity on the site — what they did even before we knew who it was.”
It’s the kind of stuff that a few years ago would have sounded like a futuristic “nice to have,” but it’s here. More in San Diego.