Let's face it: online job hunting hasn't changed much in the last decade. The pace of innovation that started in 1994 with a local web site called The Monster Board, has slowed to a crawl. The industry Monster.com pioneered is well on its way into a consolidation phase, and what at first seemed to be a fundamental transformation of an industry, has become little more than another step in the job hunting process. As a hiring manager, the job boards have such high noise to value ratio that their impact on my hiring process is virtually negligible. For this reason, I always like to keep my eye out for the second generation of online job hunting services, such as the local talentGraphz.
talentGraphz, a job hunting site for Boston high tech professionals, is the brain child of Tom Summit, a Massachusetts recruiter who I first met when he placed me at FireFly back in the mid-1990s. Tom also is the founder of the networking group North Shore Web Geeks, and writes BUZZ in the HUB, a local blog that covers startups and emerging technologies.
What separates talentGraphz from the typical job board is its local startup focus, and recognition that it's all about who you know. Simple, right? Well, there was a time when the first generation job boards made finding a job seem as basic as using a search engine and clicking a submit button. But in truth, while technology can support and even accelerate the job hunting process, it cannot eliminate the fundamentals of hiring.
The name talentGraphz comes from a unique feature of the site: the talent graph. A talent graph is sort of a genealogical family tree for companies. For example, the graphic at the top shows the talent graph for the local startup Nasuni, and tells us that Nasuni is related to five companies: Signma and North Bridge (current investors), Archivas (previous company started by the co-founders), and Boston Consulting Group (not sure I know the source for this one). Each node in a talent graph is clickable, taking you to a page that provides detailed information about the company, including news, jobs, and of course, another talent graph.
While talentGraphz provides an exhaustive list of local jobs, the site encourages the job-hunter to focus on the company, not the job. You can search companies based on location, industry, and even stage of funding. You also can add companies to a watch list in order to allow you to easily track jobs, news, and other information. If a job-hunter finds a company he or she would like to work at, they can apply independent of whether the company has openings and have talentGraphz communicate with the company as their online recruiter.
The site is based on a pay for success model in which companies can pay a fee for each candidate they hire from talentGraphz ($5K per candidate), or an annual subscription fee based on the number of job postings (reduces per candidate fee to $2.5K).
So if you are a high-tech professional in the Boston area and are looking for your next job, you can support a local company and pioneer the next-generation of job hunting tools by taking a look at talentGraphz.