Dice, known throughout the recruiting industry as the best job board for Information Technology professionals, reached out to me to test their Dice Open Web product click now.
The following is a review of the product, which was offered as a trial. No other compensation was provided other than free access to the product.
My first experience with Dice was back in 2000. Everyone was raving about this tech only job board that worked great in California, and my company signed us up to help us place engineers at Intel in NorCal. The talent level was great, and I was pleased when it made its way out to St Louis later in my career (in the sense that St Louis talent began signing up). In recent years, I've gotten used to seeing Dice at conferences, taking photos, shooting videos, and sponsoring events. So when they asked me to review Dice Open Web, I was all in.
My focus tends to be on digital marketing, but I get IT jobs every once in a while, and I wanted to test the tool for some obscure positions like my CNC programmer jobs. At the same time, a prospect asked me to find a Linux Engineer in Dallas, so I ran it through the paces on live searches. I took some screen shots, but cropped them to avoid publishing private data.
Step 1: Getting Used To Dice Search.
There are two views on the platform. The first is a Resume View that is your typical job board. You search like you normally would, looking through titles, using the filters, and trying to narrow down your description.
Step 2: Open Web View
My preferred method is to use the job board to source. If I can't find what I want from a Dice Profile, I click on the Open Web View and look for additional candidates. While speaking with the new Dice CEO, Shavran Goli, he explained that most Dice users supplement their recruiting with Open Web View. In addition to finding new candidates, you can find out more about the candidates who have uploaded their resumes to Dice. Either way, this is the view you get.
Do you see all of those icons? Those are the profiles on different social sites, from Facebook and Twitter, to Github, Vimeo, and Linkedin. The social sites that are indexed are those deemed most likely to have business information, but there is some overlap into the personal world.
The interesting thing for sourcers is you can see who has a Dice Profile and who does not. This means you can see who was recently looking, and who might be a passive candidate. That allows you to tighten or broaden you search, based on your sourcing criteria. If you're working an open req, you start with the profiles, and move to the Open Web. If you're building a list for an evergreen requirement or trying to reach someone in a passive environment, this screen gives you the flexibility to do both. The next step was to begin to apply it - to take a look at what silly searches turned up to check the algorithm, and then to dive into my live requirements.
Step 3: Search Results
The first thing I did was search Social Media Headhunter. I'm all over the web, so if the algorithm matched up to Google or LinkedIn results, we'd have at least a baseline search.
So far so good. I'm first. Paul DeBettignies and Craig Fisher are three and four. That's pretty accurate for results from other sites. Considering the number of sites scraped, it's hard to say if all of them say the same thing, of if some social results get a higher weight (this looks a lot like the LinkedIn ranking).
So let's do some other searches.
I tried Corona SDK, something I've sourced for my Facebook training. Very few of these developers exist, but I was able to find 553 people who had it on their social sites, but not job boards. Many of these developers have their own firms, and don't post profiles because they don't often need to look for jobs. That's a good haul, useful for finding mobile developers and the companies they work for.
When I did this through Facebook, Found 806 names of people who "Liked" Corona SDK, but you then have to go through each and every profile to see if there are more clues. In the case of Dice Open Web, I could right click directly to the LinkedIn profile, blog, or Stack Overflow.