Your LinkedIn profile and resume may soon disappear or diminish in importance when it comes to recruiters finding you and approaching you with a great job offer. There’s something called Big Data that may supplant any other approach to matching the perfect job with you.
Gild is among several new companies that scour the web for your presence. Part programmer, bot and recruiter, Gild and the like develop specific algorithms for particular jobs and corporate cultures. Then, they trawl the net looking for candidates. They don’t stop at the usual places, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. They may include those networks, but they dig much deeper into your behavior online. And, they examine the feedback you get from other people who matter professionally.
For example, a start-up in Silicon Valley with less budget than its rivals have for paying programmers hired Gild to find an opinionated, inventive and productive, self-taught programmer who failed to go to college but wrote code available on public sites that attracted other users to use it on their websites. Tall order but they found the guy. He’d been way below the poverty line without a job and now is the first of ten employees living it up (okay, in front of a screen) with a 6-figure salary. With the company growing to 40 or more, his social skills might stunt his career there, but he got the toe hold he needed to perhaps go start-up on his own.
Searching the web for signs of good, prospective employees isn’t just for tech companies in need of programmers. More and more, you are the detritus of your web surfing, and even more: a representation of yourself made by the comments, interactions, contributions, and expressions of emotion you provide by showing up in the public square that is the Internet.
It’s not just what you write, but how you write it that matters to employers using these bots to find the real you. And, it’s your peers’ reactions that might matter more than anything else. Do people respond favorably to you: do you influence their choices or as Seth Godin characterizes it: do you lead your tribes on any area of significance?
RemarkableHire focuses almost solely on how your online contributions are rated by others.
Entelo functions a bit like eHarmony does for potential lovers. Entelo uses 70 variables to evaluate if you might be ready for a career change – even before you know it.
Sure, these companies bring you in or Skype with you to make sure you really are a person with the right abilities, opinions and requisite social interaction skills. But, what’s really interesting about this new trend is that they know you really well before they ask you: “What’s your greatest weakness?” In fact, interviews might be more about: do you know yourself as well as they know you? Because, like ardent fans of Bradley Cooper: algorithms have scoured the net to uncover and then, interpret and imagine who you really are.
What does this boil down to? Get busy on the web in all the right places. Show up on your industry sites, create and contribute to virtual projects created by volunteers, and document what you do and know. That is: don’t just update your LinkedIn profile: do your thing in all the right places. Get up on crowdsourcing sites, including DesignCrowd and even Kickstarter to show off your ability to engage, impress and lead.
