What Are You Really Like At Your Job? ViewsOnYou Intends To Find Out

There’s a “Recommend Me” feature on LinkedIn which I’m sure many readers of TechCrunch will be aware of, having been asked multiple times for references by their contacts. But what if you took that concept and created a data-oriented approach? That’s the angle the bootstrapped startup ViewsOnYou is taking, and it’s aiming it at companies that want to find out much more about you, beyond what your CV might say.

The problem with recruitment these days is that recruiters need more than paper credentials, and now often rely more on people’s “soft skills,” such as creativity, ingenuity, and resilience. So to address this, ViewsOnYou consists of 23 sliding scales covering a broad spectrum of the kinds of things employers and headhunters look for.

Admittedly this has been tried in different ways. TalentBin (formally Honestly.com) is a startup that aggregates a person’s social profile to build up a picture of them, and already has corporate customers including Intuit, Groupon, and Yahoo. And BranchOut and BraveNewTalent are attacking this from different angles.

But unlike an app like BranchOut, which is about networking and displaying a CV, ViewsOnYou more about displaying what you are like. You can try it out on me.

The ability for a user to match their ViewsOnYou 360 profile with the culture of an organisation lets them see how well they fit. The idea is you find out what your top traits are, and whether you are a better match with Google or Facebook, HSBC or Goldman Sachs, KPMG or McKinsey.

Heaven forbid that we end up seeing how Google compares to Facebook as an employer – but that’s ViewsOnYou’s potential.

The business model is employer branding (advertising). And there is an incentive for employers to get their employees onto the platform so they can work out where they are strong and weak, and also benchmark what they do.

The startup was founded by tech entrepreneur Ab Banerjee, a non-exec director of PeerIndex and a former Founder and CEO of RAW Communications.