TalentBin

booleanstrings Uncategorized 3 Comments

TalentBin is one example of a sourcing product that has a potential to become the Dream Software.

(Please note: it’s a paid product; I am not affiliated with this – or any – vendor).

I have been using it for for sourcing for Brain Gain Recruiting and also spoke in some detail with its founder Peter Kazanjy.

Here’s, in brief, my view of the service. It has great back-end; can use some UI polishing; and would be invaluable if export is added). To add more detail:

  • They have a growing database of information, accumulated by crawling social profiles, such as Google-Plus. This includes sites with social profiles specific to software development industry: Github, StackOverflow, and MeetUp.
  • Their search is implemented using the powerful Lucene search engine. This lets them implement predefined quires for the “guided search”, as well as give the advanced user the freedom to create their own searches.
  • Their User Interface (see a screen shot above) could be improved, especially for a beginner user, by doing adjustments in terminology and minor adjustments in the flow of events.

Here’s in brief, what the search functionality is like.

A “resume” in the TB speak is a social/ “distributed” profile. A “job description” serves as a “folder” where some profiles can be “starred” and later reviewed. Some profiles can be rejected, and hidden from further coming up, if the search is refined. While the user is working with the current folder, s/he is free to modify the search to their liking. Each search result shows the link, the name, a headline, and info from one “key” profile (say, at the profile at github).

(I have just learned from Peter that TB pulls information – a headline and a “resume” – from Github that can only be extracted via the API, i.e. can’t be found X-raying Github.)

While reviewing a result, the user can also bring up other crawled profiles with the same person’s name. Though “merged” profiles would make it even more like “dream software”, this works for me. (Merging is an extremely difficult task, I think.)

Here are my current wishes for TB that, I think, will make it killer software. Implement:

  1. An “Export-to-Excel” function for the starred profiles. I’d like to see the person’s name, tagline, perhaps some keywords, and the link to the main profile included. Links to other potential profiles would make it even better, even if “merging” is not implemented.
  2. Ways to sort the search results. Right now the order is defined by an internal relevance algorithm and makes it hard to look beyond the first hundred results or so.
  3. Crawl LinkedIn – which is “the” site many of us use. On the other hand, a dynamic X-ray of LinkedIn with a person’s name and a keyword would work fine for now and shouldn’t be difficult to implement.

In conclusion, if you have a sourcing budget, I do recommend checking TalentBin out. I wish them the best of luck in growing their business.

Comments 3

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