Anybody who has had to sift through hundreds of resumes at a time or placed a job advert that’s gone unfilled for months will know that the recruitment process isn’t always as efficient as it could be. It’s not surprising then that many startups have tried to bring recruitment kicking and screaming into the Internet age – from various job sites to the professional social networking giant LinkedIn.
However, Labels.io, which launches out of Beta today, thinks that most of these efforts still place too much emphasis on the traditional resume, a format that is outdated with its tendency to list countless “key accomplishments” and one that encourages “dull corporate speak”, says founder Octavian Popescu. Instead, professionals are defined by three simple criteria: previous employers, skills and personality, he says, which is precisely the format that Labels.io standardises on.
Job seekers sign up and create an online profile in which they write a passage about themselves (‘personal pitch’) and then add tags that list their current and previous employers, skills and location. This structured meta data is then what powers Labels.io’s real-time search engine for recruiters allowing them to drill down or expand their search by adding or removing criteria in the form of those tags or labels.
There’s also a paid-for option to place a job advert, giving recruiters more control over how they find and target potential recruits. But because this is also powered by the structured data behind the ‘labels’ concept, the idea is that candicates don’t have to search for and apply to a job as such but that the job openings themselves find them. In addition to matching job openings with suitable professionals based on skills, Labels.io also takes into account “social popularity” and several other factors, says Popescu.
Interestingly, the social popularity algorithm factors in things like the number of incoming links to a user’s Labels.io profile, number of Google links to their “external links” (assuming that the more people link to a user’s portfolio/project/blog, the better their reputation in their respective industry). In the future it will also factor in the number of Twitter followers a user has and the number of RTs and mentions they garner, a bit like PeerIndex or Klout.
To-date, Labels.io is self-funded to the tune of $10k and has amassed 400 registered profiles since it opened in public Beta in February.