The most desirable candidates for a job are often those who are already working and not actively looking, says recruiter Samantha Whitney-Ulane.
Now a tech startup says it has a way to ferret out candidates who aren’t regularly looking through job want ads.
Elyion Technologies uses Web crawlers to comb through .net, .org and .com Web sites, press releases, new stories and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings to create profiles of millions of people in all kinds of industries, including the technology sector. The company just recently added the .ca suffix to the list of sites it searches. It plans to release the service in Canada this summer.
For US$1,000 a month, companies can search Eliyon’s vast database for potential recruits and can do searches using criteria such as job titles, cities, companies and industry. Companies use the services to find everything from middle managers to vice-presidents, said Jonathan Stern, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Eliyon.
Traditional job searches limit the number of fields in which companies can search for candidates, Stern said. At any time, about 14 per cent of the workforce is looking for a job, he said, which means 86 per cent aren’t looking.
“It’s up to you if you want to ignore 86 per cent of candidates.”
Whitney-Ulane, a managing director at Chicago-based recruitment firm Whitney Group, said Eliyon I a fabulous resource. She’s been using the service for six months and says it’s helped her place everything from managers to a partner in a consulting firm to divisional vice-presidents. She’s also used the service to find and place middle- and upper-management technology workers.
“It’s one of the most unique kinds of repackaging of Web content that I’ve really seen.”
Traditional recruitment methods are a very reactive way of identifying people.
“In an executive search the most desirable candidate is someone who’s currently employed and happy in their position. And so we’d have to go out in the marketplace to find those people,” Whitney-Ulane said.
Using word of mouth to find those candidates means limiting yourself to one source, she added.
“I think a resource like Eliyon Technologies helps us to more effectively broaden out the networks we already have in place.”
Eliyon’s Web crawlers have an uncanny ability to pull together data from various sources, said Mark Ehr, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo.
It does an adequate job of making sure that a profile it pulls together using various sources all apply to one person, he said.
In terms of Web farming, “it does the best job of anything I’ve seen,” he said. This type of technology can have a lot of other applications, Ehr said.
Though word of mouth is probably the best way to find candidates, Eliyon’s solution can help managers avoid the deluge of resum
