Social Media Recruiting

I’ve been on a bit of a Job Matching kick lately. After my initial reviews of Climber.com and Jobfox.com I became interested in what else was out there and who I would consider to be the leader in this small, but growing, space. At some point I’ll be taking a look at the “Employer” side of these sites, but for now I’m most interested in the job seeker experience. Over the next couple weeks I’ll be reviewing Itsbig.com, Trovix.com and today, Vitruva.com.

I was a little intrigued by the name of this company so I did a little digging and found out that it’s based on the iconic drawing made popular by Leonardo da Vinci – “Vitruvian Man”.

On their website, Vitruva explains it like this: “Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting is a study of the proportions of the man and his relationship to the universe as a whole. Vitruva’s use of the name symbolizes our mission to free people of tedious job searching, by finding the best fit between the proportions (qualifications and preferences) of a job seeker and a job opportunity.”

Not sure I love the name but, in this business, technology talks. I mean…what the heck is a Twitter? Doesn’t matter, it’s a disruptive technology and people love it. Let’s see if I love Vitruva…

The main thing I noticed about this site is that they are claiming to simplify and speed up the candidate profiling process, which is typically long and intricate with other sites. This was music to my ears after logging some serious minutes on Climber and Jobfox.

The sign-up process starts out with a simple question – Public or Private – and some basic contact information, which I had to verify by retrieving an auto-generated email. Once I got the email, I clicked on a link and it took me to my dashboard within Vitruva. I selected “My Profile” and got right to work.

The profiling feature here was pretty smart. It didn’t look like much at first but as you answered each drop-down question, it triggered a new one, which surprisingly was relevant to all the other questions. There was also a little status bar across the top that let me know how far into the process I was and when I would be done. Big plus on that.

It took me only 8 minutes to complete my profile! A marked improvement over the other sites I reviewed. There were no psychological assessments or other frills that I had on Climber/Jobfox, but that wasn’t the original promise. The promise was a fast sign-up and an accurate job match. So how did it work?

When I finished my profile, I clicked on the moment of truth button and I got an error. I was in touch with the CEO who informed me that I got caught in the middle of some coding changes. Sure enough, the problem was resolved on it’s own when I logged in again, unfortunately though, there were no job matches for me….an issue that I had with Climber & JobFox as well with only 1 match each. I’m beginning to think I’m unemployable

I tried to make my profile as general as possible without too many location, travel, and salary requirements to increase my chances but my strategy backfired. I’ll keep an eye on my results to see if anything changes over the next few weeks.

Incidently there was a really cool feature that would allow you to populate your profile with your LinkedIn information. I always love a company that allows me to leverage the time I spent filling out general information on another site. I didn’t use this feature because I didn’t see it until it was too late, but in retro…it’s a great idea.

Another interesting feature is their ability to allow you to create multiple profiles. So if you’re not quite sure what you want to be when you grow up, you can be matched to multiple opportunities in different job categories. Maybe I should change my profile to be a JAVA programmer…then maybe I’ll get some matches. The only problem is, the closest I get to programming JAVA is when I program my coffee maker to turn on at 6 in the morning.

There was a Career Center section of the site in My Dashboard that I explored but didn’t find to be all that interesting or helpful. It was a collection of employment-related resources ie blogs, news, articles, etc matched to me based on my profile. Maybe I’m just overly sensitive to information overload but it seemed like a lot of information that is on just about any other career web site. I know all web sites want to be “sticky” and all that, but I’d recommend focusing more time on trying to provide more job matches and less time on information matches.

Overall, I think Vitruva delivered on 50% of their promise…it WAS a fast/easy sign-up but the job matches (for me) just didn’t happen. I would imagine if I was a part of an “in-demand” job category, the results would improve; however, the key thing to remember for all of the companies in this space is that they will be measured on their ability to deliver relevant job matches for their users across all categories – unless they focus on just one – like MyPerfectGig . Their success will hinge on whether or not they can sign up companies to provide the jobs available for matching. No jobs – No matches – No matches – No hires – No hires – No clients – No clients – No revenue.

The simplicity of this site provides an advantage over the other job matching sites as candidates become more pressed for time and they don’t want to invest 30+ minutes in filling out a job matching profile. As a recruiter too, it’s hard for me to be on too many sites at once so I can see myself picking maybe one of these companies and using it exclusively to try its Candidate Matching technology. I’ll need to test drive them from the other side of the desk first, but more on that later…stay tuned.