Splinter.me will certainly be hoping so. Currently in beta, the Egyptian-Romanian-Belgian startup (welcome to the EMEA region) is trying its own data-centric spin on the subject. Splinter.me essentially wants to replace the resume with information automatically pulled in from the job-seeker’s social networks and any other platforms where information about them may reside.

So far, so Silp, but Splinter.me wants to then mix up this functionality with not only automated job matchmaking, but also career advice. “We can tell a recruiter, ‘This candidate might fit your job,’ but can also give career advice to the user. We can tell them, ‘Others score higher because they have this skill that you’re missing,’” co-founder Adelina Peltea told me.

Splinter.me will only launch in full this coming September, but it added a raft of new features this week. One particularly handy feature called Common Connections does what it says on the tin: it tells two “splinters” (users) which connections they have in common. What’s interesting here is that it can find those common connections across third-party platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, even if those people are not themselves, er, splinters (I can’t quite shake the memories of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles whenever I hear that term).

What’s more, the company has also added a feature called Splinter Lookup that allows for natural language searching. Echoing Facebook Graph Search to a degree, this function allows users to search for, by way of example, “splinters who use PHP, live in Boston and know Bob Jones”.

Another new feature, Hubs, provides a repository of information to help job-seekers brush up particular skills, such as web development and gamification.

It is very early days for this company – it has just 1,200 beta users and so far it only has angel backing. But on the other hand, it does have certain things in its favor beyond the aforementioned features, in particular its (intended) lack of tech-industry exclusivity and the fact that it’s pushing hard in markets such as North Africa and Europe.

Many of Splinter.me’s key rivals in this space, such as Path.to, are highly U.S.-focused and deal mostly if not entirely with programmers and the like. Which is fine – the U.S. tech scene is a big market – but it does leave other markets to conquer. After that September launch, let’s see if Splinter.me can fill some of those gaps.

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Silp has an unusual approach to the so-called “social recruitment” business. Plenty of startups are trying to exploit Facebook and other social media to help people find jobs, but Silp’s take is passive. People sign up using their Facebook account, saying that they might be interested in changing jobs at some point, and Silp gets to work extracting useful data from their Facebook profiles and combining it with other information from linked services such as Twitter, GitHub and About.me. Recruiters will then come to Silp with a list of requirements for prospective job candidates.

Meanwhile, x28 deals in spidering and extraction, with a strong focus on ontology and semantics. According to Silp co-founder Dominik Grolimund, the two companies have complementary technologies — to give a very basic example, Silp might be really good at finding “software engineers”, but x28′s technology would help it know to also look for “programmers” and “developers”:

“There’s synergy with their technology because [x28 is] good at crawling and extracting information in a structured way — making meaning out of the text is what they’re good at. They’re also really good at… adding semantics to the matching process.”

Silp claims to have had a million people sign up within its first three weeks (the service launched last August). As those signing up also put their Facebook contacts into the system, that means the company has 150 million profiles in its database.

According to Grolimund, after that epic first run of sign-ups Silp removed invite features in order to halt growth while the company worked on developing its service for employers – a service that will now have x28′s technology built into it, and that will be co-marketed by the two firms. “We’ll resume growth again once we release the employer product,” he said.

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The trouble is in the execution. To some degree, the site is redundant, because developers already get plenty of offers without using the site, and big fees aren’t always involved. The site hasn’t been promoted as much as it could be. It prioritizes salary above all else, even though some developers don’t. Despite the write-ups it garnered in the tech press, a handful of developers I spoke with for this article had not heard heard of the site. While auctions run in private to keep developers’ current bosses from spotting attempts to find better work, at least one developer was fired for using the site. And to top it all off, the company’s name calls to mind the antiquated, antebellum idea of selling people as products.

Nevertheless, co-founder Matt Mickiewicz told me venture capitalists are interested in funding the company. At nine employees, overhead isn’t enormous, and its business model allows for sizable revenues off transactions. The company is profitable, Mickiewicz said. Plus, it’s not Mickiewicz’s first startup: He’s co-founded a few startups, including 99designs, which has become profitable, taken on venture funding and expanded operations to multiple countries. Plus, he’s a compelling entrepreneur. In a recent interview, Mickiewicz confidently delivered smart answers to tough questions.

Value begets more value

VCs refer more companies to the site than any other group, Mickiewicz said. A talented developer is “one of the biggest value adds to add value to (a VC’s) portfolio,” he said.

Sure, the site’s concept makes sense for the developer segment, especially nowadays. The number of jobs in Silicon Valley increased by 4 percent from the second quarter of 2011 to the second quarter of 2012, according to data from California’s Employment Development Department that was included in the 2013 Silicon Valley Index. That high level of job growth hasn’t been seen since 2000.

The website says a typical developer will receive five to 15 requests from venture-backed startups for job interviews. Developers stay available on auction for two weeks and are free to take any offer, not necessarily the one with the highest salary. The first auction ran in September.

The company claims to be cheaper than a recruiter, but it’s not exactly cheap. If a company decides to pay a developer $100,000 a year through DeveloperAuction, the company pays either a $15,000 flat fee — 15 percent — or a $10,000 fee as well as the equivalent of $10,000 of the developer’s salary in stock options (10 percent plus 10 percent in options). DeveloperAuction even kicks in a small reward to developers as an incentive for using the service — 20 percent of the fee that the hiring company pays DeveloperAuction, which can be $3,000-6,000 or more, according to the site. That appears to mean DeveloperAuction rakes in $12,000-$24,000 or more per hire.

There’s competition, too. Besides more traditional hiring routes on company websites and job boards, so-called dev bootcamps have emerged as a new talent source.

Issues bubble up

However, last month the site received criticism on a few fronts in a Hacker News thread. Commenters complained about spam emails, shared alternative recruiting options (Pitchbox, for example), pointed out technical shortcomings and even called the company’s name into question. According to one user, “‘auction’ reminds me (of) the last time human beings were sold like stuff.” Another user reported being fired for using the site.

Developer Zac Shenker of Collusion, a company with a plan to make iPad drawings shareable with a nifty pen, told me the site duplicates and commercializes what already happens naturally to those looking for new jobs, whether on LinkedIn, over email or at networking events.

Recruiting managers at larger companies might be reluctant to use the site because of its emphasis on compensation packages above all else. A recruiting director at one webscale company who declined to be named for this article said the company would not hire people through DeveloperAuction, because finding people with the right character traits is more important than finding someone willing to work for a low price.

And while the model seems sensible now, with developers in great demand, the most talented ones will get gobbled up quickly, resulting in a drop in quality, said Chris Hollindale, chief technology officer at Hasty, a stealth-mode startup creating technology that aims to make people healthier.

Developers, customers abound

Mickiewicz sounded unswayed as I brought up the issues.

Regarding the comparison to slave auctions, he said people elect to join the auctions. That wasn’t the case in the pre-Civil War South.

“I think that’s a very unfair comparison,” he said. He emphasized that developers don’t have to work for the highest bidder. “It’s about who tells the best story at the end of the day,” he said. Developers, he said, want to make “a meaningful impact.”

Still, the founders might just have to consider changing the name, because it includes the word auction, he said.

Overall, Mickiewicz cited the adoption of the website among job seekers — 10 apply for every auction spot — and employers alike as proof of its value. “The employers are seeing very, very good success with us, compared to any other platform,” he said.

Hollindale intends to try out the site when Hasty is ready to hire another developer.

“To me, it’s a very interesting kind of twist on the whole technical hiring process,” he said.

Will the steady stream of developers availing themselves of the auctions de-escalate the tech bidding war? The answer to that question could determine the fate of DeveloperAuction.

This story was corrected at 9:17 p.m. with a revised list of companies that have hired employees through DeveloperAuction. Dropbox and Quora made job offers through the site but did not hire.

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One company that wants to speed the evolution of job-searching is a startup called Entelo, which launched on Wednesday and has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Battery Ventures and Menlo Ventures. Entelo aggregates public data from a variety of online sources that might do a better job of displaying high-tech skills than a resume ever could — Github, StackOverflow, Quora and LinkedIn among them — and creates profiles of potential candidates. After six months in private beta, Founder and CEO Jon Bischke told me, the company has created more than 300 million profiles and has more than 40 paying customers, including Box.net, LookOut, Kontagent and LevelUp.

Recruiters can search those profiles and filter by skills, education or a number of other factors, but the real beauty of Entelo is that it predicts for clients when the best talent might actually be willing to come work for them. Bischke said Entelo has a predictive model that might indicate when someone is in the market for a new job. One factor is the length of time he has been at a job in comparison to his historical tenures, but the most telling, Bischke said, are updates to social profiles.

Already, Entelo was able to help a client proactively reach out to and hire an engineer who had recently moved to Los Angeles from Boston and hadn’t even yet begun a job search in his new city. Entelo’s database of potential employees is a good service in its own right, but it’s just a prerequisite to doing prediction, Bischke said. “As far as anything we’ve seen in the market,” he added, “that’s the really differentiated piece.”

But the company also could deliver value outside the world of talent acquisition by spotting macro trends and reporting on them. For example, Bischke said, the company’s algorithm could spot — indeed, already has spotted — upticks in profile activity among employees of individual companies that could suggest an acquisition or perhaps a round of layoffs is coming. Of course, there’s value there for recruiters, too, who have had to manually keep track of things such as the dates when stock lockouts lift following an acquisition or IPO.

“We’re using big data to apply some automation to stuff good recruiters have done for many years,” Bischke said.

Although, he noted, Entelo has to be careful to take any business expansion slow and to first focus on getting the core business right. Part of the challenge for Entelo will be finding a middle ground between being a straight delivery mechanism for potential employees and being something more intelligent. Bischke doesn’t think it’s fair for Entelo to pre-judge individuals’ suitability for any given position aside from traditional means of search-engine relevancy, but Entelo is gathering a lot of data (e.g., number of followers on social platforms, number of code commits, education, etc.) that could help identify trends among the people who end up getting hired.

Another challenge, he said, is “trying to assess the probability a person is the kind of person you’re looking for.” While the guys who created Ruby, Github or any other popular technologies and platforms probably are very skilled and have accordingly large social followings, it’s highly unlikely someone will be able to hire them, so putting them at the top of search results — or surfacing them at all — isn’t really valuable for Entelo’s recruiter clientele.

And there’s still a lot of room for growth in the talent-acquisition space proper without trying to get too fancy. “The wind is at our back” in terms adding new data sources, he said, with services such as Github for specific fields already popping up. If Entelo is ambitious, it could move beyond its technology roots and start targeting fields such as law or medicine, too. ”There’s a huge amount of open sky,” he said.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user maminez.

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DMGT already owned the Jobsite, OilCareers and Broadbean recruitment sites, alongside several property and auto classified sites.

Now, with the new addition, it will brand its job sites as a new business unit called Evenbase.

Jobrapido was founded in Italy in 2006 by CEO Vito Lomele, clocked 660 million visits from more than 50 countries last year and made 2011 profit of €6 million on €24 million in revenue, DMGT says.

Recruitment revenue at DMGT’s regional news publisher Northcliffe fell by 29 percent in 2011, which it blamed on “low private sector demand and government budget cuts”.

Digital recruitment revenue grew 15 percent across DMGT’s regional and national operations, as Jobsite continued invest in marketing campaigns to drive awareness.

‘Tis the season for classifieds sites to change hands…

• RBI just sold TotalJobs to Axel Springer for £110 million.
• DMGT also just sold Motors.co.uk to Manheim Remarketing, which owns the U.S. Autotrader.com.

Release.

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I spoke with Derek Ling, the CEO of Tianji, the company’s Chinese arm, to find out more. Based in Beijing, he started building his service 2005 and sold to his French rival two years later. Tianji now comprises the largest part of Viadeo’s business, with 10 million users spread around China. That, he told me, meant that China was an important part of the picture when it came to using the funding.

“We are thinking of using at least a third of the money to invest into China,” he said. “And that’s in three areas; product — to get better and quicker services; in marketing, to ramp up our sales side; and the third part is to look at acquisitions.”

But before you get too excited, Ling says that Viadeo probably won’t look at buying local competitors — largely because there aren’t many who have much scale. Instead, it will look for deals that can boost its sales operation or systems.

“We’re really not looking at acquiring users,” he says. “We’d be looking at existing recruiting companies with big sales forces, that’s one reason, or there are technology plays, when a startup has a technology platform we like.”

The same pattern is likely to be repeated in the other markets where Viadeo is active: use the money to improve sales (it works closely with recruiters to make the service a hiring platform), develop the technology or acquire interesting or useful properties. That covers a lot of territories, including various European markets, Brazil, India and a joint venture in Russia. But expansion in Europe and elsewhere “is not as clearly defined yet,” meaning that cracking the Chinese market could be crucial, says Ling.

“We believe the professional social networking space is about four or five years behind the U.S. — people don’t necessarily use it as a business tool yet,” he told me. “An interesting point of reference is that in 2007, LinkedIn was at 10 million users — and in 2008 it went up to 32 million. We believe we’re at a similar juncture.”

But of course when LinkedIn was at 10 million users, there was no other LinkedIn to stymie its growth — allowing it to expand to the point today when it can claim 150 million users worldwide. Taking on a big beast that already exists won’t be easy: particularly when Reid Hoffman’s got a lot of money in the bank from the company’s IPO, and the business already has users across 200 countries.

‘Interesting competition’

Ling admits that things are going to heat up, whatever happens.

“Reid has been watching the Chinese market for quite a number of years already,” he says. “It’s going to be an interesting competition coming up. But our biggest weapon is that we’re local: no U.S. internet company has succeeded in the Chinese market. We have a headstart on users, and a lock on the elite — like university graduates.”

Plus, he says, China is not a homogenous market — something that many outsiders do not realize.

“We have about 18 percent of our users in the Greater Beijing area, about 11 percent in Shanghai and around 10 percent in Guangdong Province,” he says. “But each province in China is equivalent to a country in Europe — both in terms of size, but also cultural differences.”

One thing that the money won’t be used for, however, is to push the business towards an IPO. After plans to go public last year were shelved, Ling says that Viadeo is focusing on building out — not selling up.

“We’ve made a decision to focus on growth without the distraction of the public market,” he told me. “There’s a lot of growth that needs to take place… so there are no plans to IPO in the near future, but it’s certainly on the horizon.”

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The problem is that the characters of the applicant and company they want to work at usually only come out in the interview stage — and if those characters don’t match, both sides will have wasted time, effort and money in getting there. That’s why a startup called Somewhere is trying a new spin on the recruitment game that puts company culture front-and-center.

The brainchild of Berlin-based Australian entrepreneur Justin McMurray, Somewhere is no traditional job site – it doesn’t provide listings – but rather brings an About.me-style service for talent scouting.

Somewhere lets companies advertise themselves as cool employers, and with many creative and tech firms currently finding it hard to get the right kind of people, it’s an approach that may get, er, somewhere.

“The original motivation to explore this area was driven by my frustration at all the clichés people spout about doing what you love,” McMurray told me. “The problem is that this is so difficult to achieve, and no one tells you how to do this. Which is why we threw ourselves into the challenge of working out how to help people find things to do that they might love.”

Employers can set up a permanent profile describing what they are like and what kind of people they’re looking for, and their page includes a mechanism that not only lets potential employees express interest but also serves as an initial filter to cut down on wasted time.

Somewhere has been quietly testing its employer profiles since the end of February, and this week let potential job-seekers into the beta so they can also create their own “cultural profiles”.

The companies that have been involved so far are mostly Berlin tech startups and creative agencies in London and Sydney. And some have already embedded profile links and buttons into their recruitment pages as the preferred way for applicants to get in touch.

Tweek.tv’s profile provides a good idea of what Somewhere can do for businesses. The page shows pictures of the founders and the office, briefly describes who they’re looking for and what applicants might learn at the company. Then there’s the all-important “apply to meet us” button, which will be able to trigger a customised questionnaire designed to weed out unsuitable candidates.

The service is clearly targeting a certain kind of employer: one that sees company culture as key to its hiring process, for a start, which probably means small-to-midsized firms in the touchy-feely creative, marketing and tech sectors. In other words, a company that doesn’t quite need a dedicated HR department, but that also finds too much of its time and resources taken up in the hiring process.

“Traditional recruitment is too expensive and time-consuming, and doesn’t get it right,” McMurray said. “[Our] opportunity is to change the way companies think about, scout for, screen and build their talent networks. Because this is how they’ll craft company culture, which is increasingly the biggest determinant of a company’s success.”

Things are very early right now. But the real test of Somewhere’s approach will come in April, when the beta starts letting applicants and employers in London, Berlin, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Sydney talk to each other — in what McMurray calls a “cultural marketplace”.

Down the line, McMurray’s talking about allowing greater customisation of the service and building tailor-made pages into company sites.

Somewhere’s still looking for the funding to allow that kind of development but, given the paucity of fresh ideas in today’s recruitment industry, the job site with no listings may be a concept whose time has come.

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When Alastair and I founded Huddle in 2006, it was a typical startup story. We identified a problem, came up with a solution over a few drinks and before we knew it the two of us were spending every waking hour developing our idea. Our mantra was, and still is, “go big or go home” so we eventually had to take a leap of faith, leave our jobs and hire a team. You can only juggle managing your company with developing your product, marketing it and selling it for so long! We haven’t looked back since. In December 2007, Huddle had five staff. A year later, the company had 20 staff, and by the end of this year, Huddle will have a 65-strong team based in London and San Francisco.

Speaking from experience, building a great team isn’t going to be all plain sailing — in fact, it’s very hard work! Making sure that you get the right people for the job can be a lengthy, expensive and sometimes painful process. As a startup, Huddle also faced the challenge of wanting — and needing — to attract the best talent without having the recruitment budget and resources that large organizations have.

How can you find people that share your passion and vision for the company without breaking the bank? Thankfully, there are numerous online networks and tools that can help you find the ideal candidate so you don’t have to spend a fortune on recruitment agencies. Some of the tools that have worked for Huddle include:

• Facebook: Use the power of your own networks for recommendations. Colleagues, friends and family are unlikely to recommend someone for a role if they don’t think they’ll be good at the job! Advertise available roles on your profile and encourage your colleagues to do the same, even if there are only a few of you. You never know where the ideal person is hiding! Build a Facebook page for your organization. This page should highlight your company culture (a shared love of beer and pizza works wonders, we’ve found), promote available job openings and keep people informed of your latest news and views. Make sure you keep the profile up-to-date and respond to any comments. A page that hasn’t been updated for months isn’t going to appeal to anyone, let alone the bright young graduates that live and breathe bleeding edge technology.
• Twitter: Twitter has proved particularly successful for us when hiring our tech team. As well as targeting people interested in and following your company, you can tap into your teams’ followers. It’s likely that staff will be followed by people in their industry, past colleagues, employees and others with the same interests as them.  You can also track relevant industry conversations and events thanks to hash tags and keep note of who is participating in discussions. When tweeting available positions at your company, make sure you direct them to an up-to-date careers page.
• Our own web site: Why should be people come and work for your company? Make sure that your own web site has a jobs page that states the benefits of joining your team. To attract the best people, you need to create a place they want to work in and talk about it! When your company is still finding its feet, you can’t entice people with big bonuses. However, you may be able to invest in a good coffee machine, regular team lunches and some free office food (again, I can’t overemphasize the beer and pizza thing). You want people to feel like part of a family.
• LinkedIn: A professional network with more than 80 million members, LinkedIn is a great way to advertise job positions to your target audience. As with Facebook, you have the opportunity to create a company profile and keep people informed on your latest news and job openings. However, an added benefit is that for a relatively small fee you can advertise available job positions, targeting people by industry, job function and experience. We discovered that this approach was more effective for finding marketing and sales candidates than expanding our product engineering team.
• Stack Overflow: Stack Overflow is a Q&A site specifically for developers. Such specialized online communities are great places to find candidates. You have the ability to view the profiles of people posting in the forum and can contact those that may be suitable for a role.

Using these tools is a great way of spreading your net wide, but I also recommend networking at industry events and following some simple rules to improve your chances of success. Firstly, always hire people better than yourself. When you hire great people, they hire other great people. And trust your gut: I’ve been bitten too many times after hiring someone who looked great on paper but didn’t work out in the end. Finally, be patient. Meeting the perfect candidate is like falling in love, and you shouldn’t be afraid to say no if you don’t think that they’re 100 percent right.

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew. He’s also one of the speakers at our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco on December 9th.

Photo courtesy Fliickr user TheTruthAbout.

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