- February 4, 2009
- 16 Comments
CareerBuilder.com’s Applicant Explorer: Searching Beyond the Resume
What’s that? You would rather be stuck in a room with Christian Bale yelling obscenities your way than spend several frustrated hours doing Internet searches to get the scoop on your prime candidate pick? But Christian Bale is so handsome! You’re not alone.
The dish: Announcing a sneak peek into CareerBuilder.com’s new Applicant Explorer tool. Within seconds, a snapshot of information available on the Web appears next to your current favorite candidate’s resume. You immediately see the most useful and valuable information out there about that candidate, by doing less work than you are today.
The gist: Now, you can get a comprehensive collection of a candidate’s Web footprint from within CareerBuilder.com’s Resume Database. This complimentary (yes, we said FREE) feature gives you access to relevant information about the candidate you’re courting, generated from a variety of sources:
- Social networking sites
- Professional and personal blogs
- Personal and corporate Web sites
- Press releases
- Discussion and forum postings
- Articles and news stories published online
Also known as: The deep-dish pizza of CareerBuilder.com Free Tools. Saucy, multi-layered, and oozing with all kinds of tasty toppings.
Why? Applicant Explorer gives you information about a candidate well beyond his or her resume. Take screening to a new level by uncovering that public yet hard-to-find information about candidates — in less time than it takes you to say “Job Offer.” You will no longer be tempted to throw that computer out the window. You may even – dare we say it – start enjoying your candidate searches.
How to get it: If you’re a subscriber to our Resume Database, you already have access — you just need to activate it.
Simple steps to access:
- A user with manager rights on your CareerBuilder.com account must log in initially to activate your Applicant Explorer functionality.
- Go to “My CareerBuilder and select “My Accounts” under “My Account Info.”
- Select “Account Users” and then check the Applicant Explorer check box.
- To start getting results, simply click into a resume. To the left of the resume, you will see Applicant Explorer details. From there, click into the details for deeper results.
- Results are divided into “matched results” and “expanded results.” Matched results include professional and social networking sites. Expanded results include forums, personal or company blogs, and work done for previous companies.
Pairs best with: CareerBuilder.com Resume Database access, an open mind, and a desire for a new and more intelligent way to search.
Why job seekers love it: Job seekers are evolving along with employers and utilizing new tools every day to connect in the online space. As candidates leave their mark in various online places, they continue to define and refine their personal brand. A candidate’s professional image is a part of that personal brand, and Applicant Explorer is allowing these two worlds to more easily meet, for the first time.
Why you need it: Applicant Explorer isn’t about digging for dirt on candidates. It is, rather, about finding out what candidates are truly like, and getting a well-rounded picture of the person you may hire. A traditional resume only gives you a limited amount of info; much of what you really want to know involves what’s not on that single-page document.
Seeking out a mechanical engineer? Forums that a candidate has participated in are pulled into search results, so you can check out an in-depth industry question they may have asked, or read their thoughtful answer to someone else. Get an idea of a candidate’s interests and knowledge outside of the formal interview setting.
Satisfy your appetite: Start getting real and practical results that you may be missing from a resume.
Hiring a designer? Applicant Explorer allows you to quickly and easily see past projects and examples of a candidate’s work to get a sense of that candidate’s talent beyond what he or she was able to send you.
Big tip: Applicant Explorer reflects the direction toward which job seeker/employer behavior is moving, even if many of us don’t see it clearly quite yet. This is your chance to be a part of that change.
- Have a response? Join the discussion.
- Categories: Contest, Employee Attraction, Free Tools You Can Use, Survey Results
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Awesome job Greg. So proud of you.
I really don’t like the Applicant Explorer. It seems to bring up random information about a person which may not be relevant to their work at all. Searching forums and personal websites potentially revels a person private opinions, their religion, political views, and their interactions with friends. Some of which a person deserves to have an expectation of privacy for.
If a person wants to reveal there Brightfuse profile then they can include it in the website field careerbuilder provides.
“Hiring a designer?” Any webdesigner that really wants a job will include samples.
Hi Amy,
This is an exciting new tool for careerbuilder. It seems to be similar in nature to Linkedin’s applications offering.
Yet the obvious difference is the fact that it immediately helps hiring managers perform their online due diligence. In addition it will signal to a hiring manager any valuable information that could help set that candidate apart from the competition.
This tool should be another example, in the growing paradigm shift, of how job search is changing. If job seekers understand that tools like this are available, they are certain to understand the shift that is taking place: deliver your value first before the resume.
This is a great tool and further evidence that job seekers must proactively deliver their message of value, expertise, and experience.
The resume is no longer the #1 marketing tool for job seekers.
Dean Guadagni
Business Director
Inner Architect
Hi Chad,
My name is Greg Brass, and I’m the product developer for Applicant Explorer. I appreciate and certainly understand your concerns about the privacy issue, and I wanted to respond and hopefully give you some insight into Applicant Explorer. With AE, companies invest a great deal of time and money in finding the best candidates. AE provides a tool to aggregate public information from around the Internet to paint a clearer picture of who a candidate truly is. It provides a soft background check of publicly available information about a candidate. Applicant Explorer only looks at a candidate that has openly expressed interest in telling prospective employers that they are looking for a new job. We fully respect the privacy settings of a person’s networking profiles, and the external links that Applicant Explorer finds are all ones that are available via any major search engine.
Applicant Explorer provides a way for candidates to display their qualifications beyond the traditional resume. It allows employers to see the creativity, accomplishments, awards, references, professionalism, and other factors that differentiate them from other candidates.
AE differs from any of the “people search engines” in the fact that we search and match based on a candidate’s entire resume and not just a name. In this way, we can more accurately match the candidate to other web references, ranging from blog postings that better display a mastery of a technical skill set, to a true cross-section of a graphic designer’s entire portfolio (as that graphic designer may only list one or two work examples on a resume). If you have other questions, I’m happy to help.
Thanks,
Greg Brass
Director, Profile Search
CareerBuilder
Dean, thanks for your insightful comments. You bring up a lot of great points, and you are right — job search is changing, and along with that, employers’ mentality must change to keep up. The great part of this is that job seekers can use this to their advantage; Applicant Explorer can actually serve as a tool for them to showcase themselves and their work on the Web. Job seekers’ tools are evolving beyond resumes, indeed.
[...] the paradigm shift in job search, Careerbuilder.com recently rolled out a new feature called the Applicant Explorer on their blog TheHiringSite.com. What is The Hiring Site blog? According to [...]
[...] Applicant Explorer is a new feature in beta from Careerbuilder with implications for anyone trying to use the site to find a new job. The new feature explains that it searches out a candidate’s digital footprint from forums, blogs, social networking site(ie MySpace & Linkedin) as well as online new articles. [...]
I think this is fantastic if it works! I have tried a number of searches on candidates that I know and have not had any success with the explorer.
[...] a more complete picture of that person you’re thinking of hiring onto your staff? I recently wrote about CareerBuilder’s newly launched Applicant Explorer tool. If you haven’t been paying attention, this candidate snapshot tool is available to you for FREE [...]
I’m very impressed with Applicant Explorer. Being an old Headhunter.net user, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Careerbuilder.com’s innovative ideas, which have stayed true to helping their customers find the right talent. Thank you for streamlining my online search. You’ve saved me time, which saves my company money!
[...] responded to privacy concerns raised on a careerbuilder.com blog post, [...]
[...] learn more about how to use the tool, click here. AKPC_IDS += [...]
I love technology but there is also technology of information interpretation and corresponding problems of signal/noise, ethics, and social responsbility to be be taken into account to achieve an effective business system.
The Challenges
1. How do you know you aggregating information on the correct person?
2. Information is collected out of context -which can be terrifically misleading. Try answering a tweet a day late and see what sense you make of it.
3. How will you establish your audit trail of the information you used for decision making?
4. How will you satisfy Data Protection laws? This report is now in your hands and you entirely responsible for any action taken on the basis of this information and any interpretation.
Sorry to be pessmisitic but more information is not better. Better information is more.
Jo,
Thank you for sharing your concerns. Looking at data beyond what is on the resume is a very tough and complex issue that we have been working with in regards to Applicant Explorer. Just because an external piece of information such as a press release or a news article has the same name, employer, and job title, is it the same person as the resume you are reviewing? The answer is most likely but not 100%.
With Applicant Explorer we have been working on how to best match the information, but we have also drawn a clear line between candidate supplied information and external data that has not been verified. Many recruiters are “Googling” candidates right now searching just on a name. We are trying to help recruiters through our partnership with Microsoft Bing to formulate searches that search not just on the candidates name but other relevant information such as job title, employers, education etc. The ultimate responsibly falls to the recruiter or hiring manager. If they use external information in a hiring decision they have to use their own judgment on the validity and accuracy of the information.
With Applicant Explorer, we are working to create a tracking mechanism that records what external data is considered when reviewing a candidate. When a recruiter goes out and types in the candidate’s name in a search engine, there is no log of information that was considered in regards to that candidate. Applicant Explorer logs the click, date and time, user information and a brief summary from the external site, so if a company was audited on their hiring practices, with Applicant Explorer, the company could see what candidates were considered for a job opening, but also which external links were clicked on when the recruiter reviewed that candidate.
Finally to answer the data protection law question. Candidate data that is housed on the Careerbuilder site is not shared with other sites when Applicant Explorer is run and the Applicant Explorer results are all public information available via any major search engine. Applicant Explorer only looks at publically exposed sites and web pages. If a candidate has a social networking page that they mark private, Applicant explorer will not have access to that information.
I hope I have answered your concerns and appreciate your feedback.
Thanks,
Greg Brass
Director of Profile Search
CareerBuilder
[...] disaster waiting to happen or a boon to employers? This article talks about this service from CareerBuilder.com where employers can search for information regarding potential, and current, [...]
I find the concept strong but your delivery is lacking. The matching is spotty and the data often thin. If you ever could figure it out it would be great.