Dice Open Web Is Out of Beta

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As a Dice subscriber, I couldn’t miss the note from Dice CEO Shravan Goli “Dice’s Open Web is coming out of Beta”.

Dice’s Open Web technology is one of the pioneers among people aggregators, the new generation sourcing tools, initially developed as theSocialCV. (See more tools in the people aggregator category listed on the Tools page.) Dice certainly showed innovative ways of thinking, being the first job board to acquire a profile aggregation tool and to integrate with it.

I have run a few experimental searches and here is what it was like.

1) The traditional Dice resumes are now showing the “Open web” part, that is associated with the majority of them.

While, if we have a full resume with the contact information, it’s not a problem to find several profiles, the new Dice UI saves some of that sourcing legwork and shows links to social profiles and a preview of the professional info right in the resume view:

Clearly, this is useful.

2) If you have a Dice account with Open Web access and are logged in, you can take advantage of the Chrome add-on while you browse the Social web outside of Dice. Several other people aggregators (Entelo, Talentbin, and Gild, to name a few) have similar add-ons.

Here’s what it looks like. From this example you may notice that the Dice Open Web repository has some profiles in its collection as well that are not in the IT field in its narrow definition.

Of course, seeing info in the pop-up window is a hit-or-miss, depending whether Dice has the given profile among the aggregated data, but it is useful info when it’s there.

3) Then, of course, there’s search within the aggregated profile database itself. The search UI is now integrated between the resumes and the Open web.

If you try the Open web for the first time, you may see some “false positives” in the results. Don’t let this discourage you; that is to be expected of any people aggregator.   The expectations for searching in an aggregated profiles database (Dice’s or any other) should be different from searching in a resume database. The volume is larger, but it’s a more challenging task to glue pieces of distributed profiles together and to allow to search among them, compared to working with a resume DB. (With Google searches you can find even more, but it’s even harder to control the search!) If some good results are found with little effort, we are in luck.

I have noticed that the location search has greatly improved in Dice Open Web, compared to the last time I used it. It’s certainly critical in the geographical areas like my own; around Berkeley anything over 10 miles is a tough commute.

 

Bottom line, Dice is a promise of an integrated recruiting environment, where searching in the resume database and on the open web coexist and are nicely integrated.

Starting in 2014 the Open Web add-on is becoming paid; if fact, if you call them today, that would already be the case. That is perfectly reasonable since the Open Web adds searching power. Best of luck to Dice on educating its existing users on the advantages of the Open web and acquiring new users in the New Year.

 

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