Can we please teach young people instead of dumbing down the process? Young people need apprenticeships, mentors, internships and leadership to teach them how to become great professionals. They do not need the search for a job to be a Facebook app and then they make one click and say, “I looked for a job today.”
That editorial note, sent via email, was accompanied by a link to a website called Identified.com, and a suggestion to do a story about the site. Or more specifically, to do a rant about a site that uses Facebook as the starting point for a job search.
So I put on my rant hat, began to do some research, and was surprised at what I found. Yes, it is true, Identified “gamifies” the job search by offering game-like rewards as enticements to get users to fill out what seems like boring information.
But the secret sauce is what Identify does with that information. The company founders, who started the site at Stanford University in 2010 as a collaborative research project between the School of Engineering and the MBA program, say Identified is the only product on the market that can tell you:
- What companies and people are searching for you
- What they find
- Whether or not they like what they find
In fact, it actually gives you a score by measuring the behavior of companies as they search for, identify, and eventually interview and hire. Identified looks at what is in demand across educational background, companies, job titles and so on, and then looks at three factors from you:
- Educational background
- Work experience
- The breadth and depth of your network
“We founded Identified to increase transparency in the labor market,” says Brendan Wallace, co-founder, the person on the left in the photo below, and a former finance guy at Goldman Sachs and The Blackstone Group. ”The Identified score opens a channel of communication between companies and professionals that doesn’t exist on LinkedIn, job boards, career centers, and resume databases. The Identified Score is like a Professional Stock Price, making the interactions between professionals and companies more relevant.”
“We have seen an incredible amount of interest in Identified Scores, both from new users and companies,” adds Adeyemi Ajao, co-founder, the guy on the right in the photo at right. “Today, we’re providing free and open access to Identified Scores so professionals can connect with other professionals, companies can find employees, and job seekers can find future employers.”
The co-founders go on to say that not only does it give users visibility into how their publicly available professional information is perceived by companies, but it also empowers users to control that information and their privacy by actively managing how much or how little personal information they want to share.
So far Identified is only using Facebook to evaluate things, not LinkedIn. The company says that is for three reasons:
- Facebook is nearly seven times larger than LinkedIn
- Facebook users have a lower average age than LinkedIn users – 24-years-old versus 44-years-old
- Facebook users are more engaged with social media than LinkedIn, and tend to be heavier users of it
“Identified is solving one of the biggest problems on the Internet right now: making professional information relevant,” stated venture capitalist Bill Draper, one of several in the Bay Area who have invested $5.5 million in the company. “The Identified Score is becoming the new standard of how companies will evaluate employees and job applicants alike.”
“Identified is solving one of the biggest problems on the Internet right now: making professional information relevant.”
It certainly looks like it’s popular. When the alpha version of Identified debuted on campus at Stanford, over 7,000 students signed up before being shut down by the campus career center and Stanford administration.
More recently, this article in Venture Beat says ”Identified.com has reached four million active users in the past six months. The average age of users is 23.5 years, and 90% are under 35. By contrast, 60% of LinkedIn’s users are 35 and over. That means it’s harder to find job candidates on LinkedIn, because many older people have established careers. Identified.com is now adding a million users a week.”
So it’s not a Facebook app as such. But the founders of Identified say they have a special working relationship with Facebook that allows them to tap into billions of data points. And further, that job seekers are hungry for feedback, and Identified delivers that feedback in the form of their score, that identifies how “in demand” they are.
That’s it. What do you think of Identified’s platform, and the company’s goals and purpose? Have you used it? Heard of it? Do you think on its “face” that it can improve the feedback and communication between companies and the workers they seek? How? Why not?
We’d love to hear from you.
