LinkedIn’s “talent solutions” service, which gives recruiters and hiring managers the ability to post job ads and hunt for candidates, is the fastest-growing and most profitable portion of LinkedIn’s business. The talent solutions homepage saw an update last week that involved several design changes, but it was the addition of the “People You Might Want to Hire” tool that’s sheds the most light on how LinkedIn makes money.

At this point, most professional people are at least aware of LinkedIn, and with the company boasting 200 million registered users, a good number of people now have profile pages listing their work experience and other relevant information on the social networking site. But the consumer-facing side of LinkedIn that you might see is not the portion of the company that brings in the most revenue — or, at least not directly.

The talent solutions portion of LinkedIn brought in 53 percent of the company’s revenue last quarter. The basic service allows corporate recruiters and human resources employeees to post job ads for the company, search for relevant candidates, track responses, and monitor people they might like to hire (yes, a recruiter can put an alert on your profile and know when you make updates or switch jobs.) Companies pay for access to those recruiting features, and the more accurate the data LinkedIn can provide, the more value the companies will derive from the service.

The new feature on the Recruiter page is an intelligent recommendation engine that suggests to recruiters people they might want to hire. It sounds simple enough, and with similar features all over sites like Facebook and Twitter, maybe not so novel. But the feature is huge for LinkedIn on the consumer side already, where the company reports that 50 percent of job seeker engagement comes from the recommended jobs tool, with the other 50 percent coming from people typing into the search bar. Users who are actively looking for jobs might be willing to put in search terms. But people who aren’t actively looking to switch jobs — which LinkedIn estimates is about 80 percent of the current workforce —  are far less likely to search.

“Recommendations have fundamentally changed the trajectory of Linkedin.com,” said Parker Barrile, head of product for talent solutions, in an interview this week. “The recommendations technology that suggests things for members totally change the game. Because we’ve realized how important it is not to expect consumers to actively search for things.”

My colleague Derrick Harris recently wrote about the engineering shift at LinkedIn over the past five years that now allows the company to put significant resources behind engineering projects like recommendations, and Barrile said that refining and perfecting the suggestions has become critically important.

“We’ve invested a lot into the technology that works on those recommendations,” he said. “All of these recommendation technologies learn from the way users interact with them. And LinkedIn’s recommendation technologies have become especiallly responsive because they’re so important to the business.”

The “People You Might Want To Hire” tool takes into account past behavior on the part of the recruiter, as well as data signals from within the job ad, to put together a list of candidates who might be a fit based on a variety of signals. For instance, let’s say you’re an tech company looking to hire for a PR position. The tool won’t just surface people working in technology PR. Instead, it might surface people working in technology who list writing and editing as their skills, or have a number of endorsements for communication or working with a team. Or, let’s say you’re hiring for a venture capital position in San Francisco — the system might also suggest relevant candidates from New York, since it knows people in venture capital are likely to move between the two cities.

Potentially creepy if you start getting a lot of messages from recruiters asking you to move to New York? Maybe. But for people who end up with job offers out of the process, there’s a strong upside to that technology.

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It would be convenient to fault the candidate for not conducting a proper, modern job search. But not me – I blame it on technology.

Resume spam

Human resource experts will tell you that for any one job posting, they receive hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes. As a result, they’re able to spend just six seconds evaluating each resume, typically scanning only the candidate’s education and their last job. Such a brief perusal means candidates who are a good fit for a company’s culture or who can bring a different and much-needed fresh outlook can easily fall through the cracks. There is simply not enough time in the day to wade through all the resumes that flood the inbox.

The resume deluge started when businesses began to rely on online job boards to find candidates. With a few clicks of the mouse, job seekers were suddenly able to upload their resumes and cover letters and then apply to dozens of jobs at a time – sometimes even more than once. This “spray and pray” strategy has completely clogged up the system. Just last month, Facebook announced a new jobs app that, at launch, boasted it already offered users access to 1.7 million job opportunities. You can imagine how that will only compound the problem even further.

The adoption of digital databases to conduct the initial winnowing has done little to stem the tide. Job seekers know now to litter their resumes with the right key words to game the automated systems and grab recruiting eyeballs. It’s no surprise then that, on average, 66 percent of applicants for a given job meet the minimum qualifications. The current system is set up to deliver the wrong people to prospective employers. This bottleneck has meant a huge financial drain on businesses. Millions of man-hours are wasted sifting through inappropriate or unwanted resumes, costing a company on average $5,504 and up to six months per hire. Conversely, job seekers now spend a median of 19 months looking for the next position.

A technological solution

So how can we make labor markets move more efficiently and effectively, for the benefit of all? The solution is a technological one – big data. (Full disclosure: My company Bright.com specializes in software that uses big data to connect job seekers with opportunities. We’re joined by companies like Path.to and TalentBin, both of which are trying to make job searching more simple and intuitive with the help of big data.)

Big data can help recruiters find the right candidates to interview by cutting through the noise created by the chaos of the current job search process. Big data tools such as modern distributed file systems and map/reduce/clustering techniques make large data sets accessible and more easily analyzed. Five years ago this simply wasn’t economically possible. Back then, it was cost prohibitive to purchase enough computer servers to make these calculations, and further, vendors were constrained by the physical size limits of data centers.

Now, vendors can process billions of transactions in the cloud at a fraction of the cost of local servers. Thus, employment-related data, regardless of size, can be leveraged to find subtle patterns reflecting a current candidate’s qualifications.

Another added benefit is the reduction of human bias. All human recruiters, regardless of background, bring a bias to the resume evaluation – it’s human nature. Big data algorithms, though, are blind to names on resumes that may surface a job applicant’s race, ethnicity, religion or gender. Machine-learning algorithms, utilizing large implicit- and explicit-feedback datasets, can be trained to simulate decisions made by professional recruiters and thus reduce or eliminate evaluator bias.

As a result, big data allows for a multi-faceted statistical approach to the filtering process at the first level, and thus helps identify better candidates from a deeper pool.

To be clear, this isn’t to say big data can replace a job interview. The interview is about culture fit, body language, eye contact, voice intonation, and the discussion of a general fit between the job seeker and the position. Technology can’t solve that on its own. Technology can, however, make sure that candidates you bring in for an interview are the best qualified, right from the first screening.

The job search is not rocket science. But the application of data science and big data can streamline the process so interviews are filled with the best fit candidates more quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost. Big data can revolutionize the labor space.

Steve Goodman is CEO of Bright.com.  

Photo courtesy of Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com.

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Launched in 2004, Indeed has grown to 80 million unique visitors per month and has been profitable since 2007. Revenues over the last three years have nearly doubled as the company moved past Monster to become the largest job site in the US in 2010.

Now the company will look to continue its strong growth overseas, which already accounts for half of Indeed’s traffic. It is currently the top job site in the US, Canada, the UK and France, and is number one in job searches worldwide.

Indeed raised $5 million in 2005 from Union Square Ventures, the New York Times and Allen & Company though, as USV’s Fred Wilson wrote, the company at that time didn’t need the money. That has been the only funding to date.

Although the details of the deal were not announced, Business Insider says a source close to the company pegged its value at  $750 million to $1 billion. It’s unclear if that’s true but the New York Times today disclosed that it made $100 million from its investment in Indeed.

Co-founders Rony Kahan and Paul Forster have operated under the radar and have largely bootstrapped themselves. Indeed helped validate the idea of a search advertising-based job service, which differed from other recruiting sites where users paid to list open jobs. It now has more than 25,000 advertisers in its pay-per-click recruitment ad network. The company also has 5,000 employer clients and 550 employees based in Austin, Dublin, London, Mountain View, New York and Stamford.

With the acquisition, Recruit Co. is hoping to be the dominant HR and recruitment services in the world. The private company already does $10 billion in revenue but most of it in Japan. It’s looking at an IPO to fund more acquisitions.

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“In some ways, the value of information and the job search process is lower in a hot jobs market,” says co-founder Doug Monro, who was previously COO at property search site Zoopla and classified outlet Gumtree, which is owned by eBay. When things are tight, users are more desperate for jobs — so we have to be really fast, and providing them with a good user experience is really important.”

To get potential candidates into positions, the site’s taken its cues from other comparison websites and rivals such as Indeed.com. Instead of bringing in listings itself, Adzuna simply aggregates job ads from across many of the major services, as well as including items from small, industry-specific boards and sites. This means it can provide a single point of contact covering wide swaths of the market — saving job hunters time they’d spend sweeping across what is, actually, a surprisingly fragmented market.

In fact, Adzuna’s engine is so broad that on launch, it claims to have more than 300,000 jobs listed all around Britain: enough vacancies to swing the country’s unemployment rate by almost an entire percentage point.

The site itself is actually pretty straightforward. You can easily refine your search by region, postal code, salary, industry, company, or contract type (I did a search for “manager” in my local area and got 720 listings back). It also adds a neat social element by letting users connect through Facebook or LinkedIn — and then showing them open jobs at the companies their friends and contacts work at. The idea, presumably, is to let them get the inside scoop on positions. Now, perhaps that’s not the most meritocratic way of doing things, but handy when it comes down to who you know rather than what you know.

So how does that compare to a social jobs search like Top Prospect and Branchout, which offer referrals and listings based on who your friends are? Monro suggests they are “doing it the wrong way around” by concentrating on niche markets first. In terms of mainstream adoption, he says, “they’re going to really struggle to get an abundance of listings”.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that he thinks this way: after all, Monro and his co-founder Andrew Hunter have a rich history in the local classified industry — they met at Gumtree and Hunter count the Yelp-like Qype in his background. But even with such experience, there’s no doubt that they will face significant competition. There are a wide range of well-established companies like TotalJobs and fish4jobs in the U.K., as well as the local arms of international giants like Monster.

“I don’t see the likes of Monster and TotalJobs as competition, they’re a consumer alternative, but really we see them as clients,” says Monro. He says data is provided to Adzuna either by dedicated feeds or by spidering job sites, but that ultimately this is good news for job listings sites as it simply helps them get more exposure. “For them, we drive traffic to their listings — we’re an alternative to Google. We’re not misappropriating any data.”

But competition in the jobs market seems to be the least of the site’s worries. In the long-term Adzuna, which is backed by a £300,000 ($478,000) seed round from new London-based fund Passion Capital, has broad ambitions. It doesn’t want to just stay in one sector, but intends to expand into other areas such as property search, car buying and so on. That’s going to expose it to a great deal of rivalry — some of it even more voracious than job listings. Is there really anything left to win in this classified battle? Monro thinks so.

“Other verticals are less fragmented than jobs, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t chances to expand,” he says. “There are a lot of parallels in search technology across different sorts of classifieds — you’ve got a listing, an owner, a price, a similar structure.”

As a result, the company is hoping to expand aggressively: new verticals could be in play by the end of the year, with a move into new territory to follow.

“We’re definitely looking at this as an international opportunity,” says Monro.

Photograph used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user BethCanPhoto

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Source: Elance

It should be noted that because this study is the result of an online survey conducted on the Elance site itself, there will likely be considerable selection bias distorting the results towards freelancing, so it would be wise to take these  findings with a pinch of salt. I doubt that a more wide-ranging survey of recent college graduates, for example, would show such an overwhelming number of respondents in favor of freelancing over traditional employment.

While some people may argue that freelancing has only become more popular as jobs have become harder to come by following the economic downturn, the Elance study shows that many millennials actually choose freelancing over traditional employment. Only 27 percent indicated they would prefer to work as an employee, while 42 percent stated they prefer the freelance lifestyle. Web working is popular, too, with 54 percent saying they plan to telecommute at least some of the time — a lifestyle choice probably made easier by freelancing. It seems freelancing is making these millennials happier: 53 percent say they are happier when freelancing than when working as an employee. Encouragingly, despite a somewhat weak jobs market, particularly for younger people with less experience, 78 percent of respondents said they were either “Optimistic” or “Very optimistic” about their chosen career path.

Source: Elance

The study also looked at millennials’ job search habits. Unsurprisingly, many respondents reported they use online methods to find work. Online job ads (Monster.com and Craigslist, for example) were popular with 94 percent of respondents, but social media (Facebook, LinkedIn) was also used by 40 percent. The study also shows that 56 percent of respondents think that a digital resume (a LinkedIn profile, for instance) is the most effective tool for landing a job, compared to 44 percent who prefer a more traditional resume.

Despite the selection bias that’s probably skewing these results, it’s interesting to see such a positive attitude towards freelancing in younger people. Attitudes toward freelancing have shifted over the past few years, with many more people now prepared to consider it as a long-term career choice. It’s a shift that has certainly been helped by online freelance marketplaces such as Elance and Odesk, which have made it much easier for freelancers to find work worldwide. While some people may have initially tried freelancing out of necessity due to the economic downturn, many people now choose to freelance because it gives them the flexibility to pursue their lifestyle of choice. If more younger people really are actively looking to freelance rather than take up traditional employment now, it could point to an even bigger shift toward freelancing in the years to come.

Photo courtesy Flickr user {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}, charts courtesy Elance.

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Consumers’ parent company, CMS Energy, is under intense pressure from the Michigan Public Service Commission to shave even more from its capital plans to avoid hitting the state’s already hurting economy with rate increases. Just how the proposed spending cuts might affect smart grid efforts, including a pilot project with Big 5 meter maker Elster and a try-out of WiMax-networked smart meters with General Electric, remains to be seen.

Expect more decisions like this in the future. State utility regulators around the country are denying rate increases for smart grid projects that won’t quickly pay off in cheaper power. In the past two months, Maryland state regulators forced Baltimore Gas & Electric to pay for its $500 $900 million smart meter deployment without raising rates, and Hawaii’s Public Utilities Commission rejected Hawaii Electric Co.’s plan to raise rates for smart grid projects.

Smart meters in particular are getting a bad rap. Both California’s Pacific Gas & Electric and Texas’s Oncor face lawsuits from customers who claim that their new smart meters have improperly jacked up their power bills, and the complaints have also spread to broader, more integrated smart grid projects, like Xcel Energy’s over-budget SmartGridCity pilot in Boulder, Colo.

The big question for the smart grid industry is how to adapt to the new era of frugality. Certainly, the $3.4 billion in Department of Energy smart grid stimulus grants have helped, but, as the BG&E case proves, even having some $200 million in DOE grants in hand can’t protect a utility from having its rate increases questioned. Beyond lowering the cost of smart grid deployments, it’s clear that utilities will be trying to front-load efforts to deliver savings to utility customers: perhaps by accelerating plans to connect smart meters to in-home energy management platforms.

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Photo courtesy TpolyG

But the skills and characteristics that a hiring manager is looking for on a telecommuter’s resume aren’t always the same as when you’re looking for other jobs. Among other things, employers are looking for the following:

1. Prior experience. While it’s not always possible for an employer to find an applicant that has already telecommuted, having prior experience can move your resume to the top of the stack. There’s a learning curve that goes along with becoming a telecommuter, and every employer would prefer to hire someone who’s already figured out the nuts and bolts of telecommuting.
2. Self-direction. Telling a hiring manager that you’re able to work at your own direction is useful, but if you can show that you’ve taken on projects at your own direction and worked without guidance through your resume, you’ll catch a reader’s attention. When describing previous responsibilities, mention the guidance (or lack of guidance) you’ve worked with.
3. Great communication. Working offsite requires an employee with above-average communication skills. Make every aspect of your resume as clear as possible to demonstrate that you have great communication skills.
4. Technical skills. The specific skills that each telecommuting position requires vary but most employers will want telecommuting workers who are technically-savvy. Even if you aren’t already familiar with the software and tools a company uses to work with telecommuters, knowing a variety of other tools can mean that you can pick up new skills quickly.
5. Professional objectives. If you include an objective — and not every resume needs to — it has to be professional. There’s a certain type of prospective telecommuter whose objective is just to “work at home and do X,” where X does not convince an employer that the applicant is professional. Make sure your objectives don’t play into any telecommuting stereotypes.
6. Access to hardware. Some employers will provide equipment and software to their telecommuting employees, but many hope that you have a computer and an active Internet connection in place. Mentioning that you do, in the context of past positions, or other parts of your resume package, can speed up the application process.
7. Your reasons for telecommuting. Employers probably won’t outright ask if you’re telecommuting because of family, health concerns or other reasons, but they’ll make assumptions. It’s probably best to be clear about your reasons for wanting to telecommute from the outset.

Share your resume tips in the comments.

Photo by Flickr user Fabio Bruna, licensed under CC 2.0

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One of those better options is Twitter. Twitter has the advantage of being a great way to open a direct line of communication between yourself and a potential employer before you even forward your work history or even any professional information at all. It’s almost the virtual equivalent of landing a job based on a conversation with a seatmate on an airplane.

JobDeck aims to make the process of looking for work on Twitter even easier. It provides a refined search that allows you to drill down and find job offers and information about prospective employers and employees, and it does it all in the familiar environment of TweetDeck, so as long as you’ve used the popular Adobe AIR-based Twitter client in the past, you won’t have to go learning a new interface all over again.

In fact, JobDeck really isn’t much more than a standard install of TweetDeck with some colorful rebadging and a couple of very special unique columns that will help you in your job search efforts. All the regular features are there, too, so you have access to your main timeline and all the time-wasting fun that could potentially go along with that. My advice? Create a new Twitter account devoted solely to job hunting in order to keep your focus and avoid distraction.

As mentioned, there are two new columns introduced in JobDeck, which is powered by TwitJobSearch, a site that provides search results from Twitter pre-filtered and tailored to job hunters. The first is a “Job Search Experts” user list. It’s a good way to pick up tips and find interesting articles about the job market and career development in general, and it has the benefit of allowing you to keep these people out of your main Twitter feed, where they might not be as appreciated or could get lost.

The other column is a dedicated column that returns results from the TwitJobSearch main feed, which searches the web, returns relevant job search results and organizes them into a single stream. As of right now, a lot of the traffic is related to the JobDeck app itself, but scrolling through the feed reveals that it does do a decent job of collecting career hunting info. Unfortunately, it’s also hit or miss, including info for jobs ranging from KFC front-line employees to iPhone app developers.

It’s nice, but it isn’t yet impressive enough to merit its own dedicated client in my opinion. It reminds me more of the Blink-182 branded TweetDeck release than a new and unique tool. The TwitJobSearch site itself is a much more useful tool, with customizable advanced search options and an experimental job map feature. Not to mention that the interface is quite attractive and highly usable, and there’s a browse function that lets you see job tweets by category in case you aren’t yet sure what exactly it is you’re looking for.

If you’re already using TweetDeck and you’re looking for work, using the JobDeck special edition isn’t going to cost you anything, and might provide you with a few useful links and/or tips. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for something that will dramatically change they way you look for work, skip this release and just use the web-based or iPhone version  of TwitJobSearch, especially if you’re not a fan of the TweetDeck interface.

Landed a job through Twitter? Tell us about how you did it!

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Flowz, the developer behind Raveal, has since introduced a variety of new features to try to up the game of the fledgling web site. Some of these are little more than aesthetic upgrades, but some are substantial improvements that really change the way the site works at its core.

Themes

Raveal now places a strong emphasis on what they call “Your Personal Brand.” It’s a concept not unfamiliar to us here at WebWorkerDaily. Part of that approach, as far as Raveal is concerned, involves letting you show off your skills, work history, and traits using a personalized theme.

Raveal themes work and look a lot like blog themes, for the most part, but some boast impressive features, like Flash integration, that really make them stand out. You can use the default set, create your own using a pre-made layout and some custom CSS, or choose from one of the available community themes (which is a little light on content right now). If you know a little about how CSS works, but aren’t comfortable building your own site from scratch, it’s a good set of tools to have.

I was a little miffed to find that there was no way to preview my profile unless I made it publicly available, which isn’t something I wanted to do before ensuring that my chosen theme would look good with my content. Even just a live preview of the theme in question with generic content would’ve been sufficient.

People Showcase

Want to get noticed? Flowz wants that for you, too. That’s why it introduced the “People Showcase,” a section which shows off the best and brightest of those found in there network. According to Flowz, being highlighted on the Showcase nets you an additional 400 views per month, a number the company says will grow as Raveal gains popularity.

There’s no word on how exactly people are chosen to appear in the Showcase, but in a blog post detailing the new feature, Flowz staff indicates that all you need do to be considered is make your profile publicly viewable. Presumably, staff members comb the public directory for talented individuals with complete, up-to-date profiles.

I like the presentation of the People Showcase, and the idea behind it, but only time will tell how the actual effect it will have on individual member’s career aspirations.

Company Profiles and Job Postings

Probably the biggest new feature is not on the employee side at all, but on the employer’s. Companies looking for prospects can now create a profile complete with a blog feed and job listings.

There’s even a back-end workflow that HR staff can use to manage applicants, allowing them to score potential employees as “Undecided,” “Thumbs Up,” or “Thumbs Down.” They can also keep notes on every application, the content of which can be shared with other staff who are assigned user privileges. Even if you want to share with someone who isn’t a Raveal user, you can do so using a Guest Pass.

Unfortunately, companies can only list one job posting at a time unless they pay for a Pro account, which ultimately hurts job searchers most of all. Hopefully the back-end workflow features prove worthwhile enough that companies end up going the pay route.

New Pro Features

A couple new features were obviously designed to make Raveal Pro accounts more appealing, as they’re only accessible once you switch to a paid account. The first is Voice, which allows you to pull content and comments from your blog, Twitter feed, Facebook, etc. to show off on your Raveal profile in addition to your standard Resumé and Portfolio information.

It’s definitely a bold step, and one that acknowledges that for many professionals working online today, their social media presence is as much a part of their career goals as is their work history. But it’s also risky, since we all know the dangers associated with allowing potential employers access to things like Facebook, which might not always paint you in the best possible light.

You can also now include an audio introduction if you have a Pro account. It’s interesting, but ultimately kind of gimmicky, in my opinion. Though I absolutely hate the sound of my recorded voice, so I might be biased.

One thing’s clear: Raveal is doing its best to stand out from the crowd and bring something truly new to the often arduous task of finding work online. Whether or not the specific things it’s trying are of value to you is another thing entirely. It’s definitely worth a look though, especially if you’re a content producer who isn’t getting anywhere with the established career finding resources online.

Have your tried the new features in Raveal?  Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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While networking is (and has traditionally been) the best way to find a new job, the second-most effective tool is another type of networking: sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, according to a poll released today by placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Old-school employment search tricks like attending job fairs and reading newspaper classifieds got the lowest ratings. Here’s how the web is changing how we look for jobs.

Social-networking sites are exploding in popularity, as people look to connect with pretty much everyone they know, from friends to co-workers to potential employers. Facebook claims it has more than 250 million users; Twitter’s traffic has grown tenfold over the last year; and LinkedIn — while not as flashy as its social-networking brethren — is perhaps the most useful of the bunch for job hunting because of its employment- and recommendation-focused profiles. It’s seen its total visitors double since last year.

Employment-focused web sites have been popular with VCs as well as job seekers. Job search engine Simply Hired recently raised $4.6 million in a fourth round of funding, and Glassdoor, an anonymous employer and salary review site, raised a $6.5 million Series B round last fall.

At the same time, it’s estimated that privately held Craigslist will generate more than $100 million in revenue this year, a 24 percent jump over the 2008 estimate, with much of that revenue coming from job listings. Meanwhile, for America’s newspapers, total revenue from job listings, a former cash cow for the industry, dropped 42.5 percent in 2008 to $2.2 billion, the worst drop in history, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Other job search sites, like Monster.com and CareerBuilder, which charge significantly more than Craigslist to list jobs, are also seeing huge increases in traffic, with 33 percent more visits overall, according to comScore. Yahoo has reportedly been looking for a buyer for its HotJobs site, and given the growth of the sector, will probably make a pretty penny as newly installed Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz looks to shed “non-core” assets.

(Data courtesy comScore)

The Internet is definitely making a huge impact on how we search for jobs, but as the Challenger survey notes, the ease of sending out shotgun blasts of resumes and hoping one hits the right recruiter is making things much more difficult for employers as well. “[F]or every qualified candidate who comes in from the Internet, there are 10 to 20 who do not even come close to being a good fit,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “Those who rely on one tool [for their job search]…will take longer to find a position. The problem with the ease and accessibility of the Internet is that many job seekers make it their primary job search tool.”

So, what are your tips and tricks for landing a job?

Image courtesy of Craigslist.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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