Eggsprout is a new job site launched by a group of ex-Zillow employees that rates a candidate’s resume based on how ‘hot’ they are.
Here’s how it works: a candidate uploads their resume into the system, which then scrubs out their contact information, thereby reducing everyone on the site to anonymity.
The candidate is assigned a ‘hotness’ rating based on how they compare to other people in their field (currently Eggsprout only scrapes jobs from the Seattle tech market). The hotness rating is determined by how many recruiters have viewed their profile, their past employment, education, and skills.
This ratings system is similar to TalentSpring, which allowed job seekers to rate each other’s resumes. According to a Techflash article, TalentSpring CEO Bryan Starbuck said they eventually dropped the ratings because of unenthused job seekers.
“We were surprised that job seekers weren’t as interested in learning about their ranking score as we initially assumed,” Starbuck said. “We found that ranking scores were a turn-off to the majority of employees, except for a small group of aggressive career focused employees.”
But Eggsprout founders say that it’s the recruiter’s vote that matters, not job seekers, and that’s why this platform will succeed.
Aside from the ratings sytem, the site also recommends jobs to a seeker based on their search patterns and preferences. If someone is contacted for a job, the site will share that information too.
Currently posting and viewing resumes on the site is free, but the founders plan to charge a small fee to unveil the candidate’s information to recruiters.
The five founders of the site, who are all under the age of 25, came up with the site’s moniker from the idea of an egg meaning potential and a sprout symbolizing growth.
Popularity: 7% [?]
January 9th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Washington’s unemployment rate is up to 6.4%. Eggsprout might be a good idea if there were jobs to be had.
I just don’t understand why another new job site launches in the middle of the largest unemployment rate in the country since the early 1980s. It doesn’t make sense.
I wish them well.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Hey Vanessa (and Cheezhead): Bma from Eggsprout here. Long time reader and fan of your blog. Thanks for the coverage and being so on top of the careers beat. Always a pleasure to read.
@Linda: Thanks for the well wishes. We started Eggsprout because we saw the frustration of our friends as they were going about their dead end jobs and job search. It pains us to see all these layoffs. We think this is exactly the right time for a job site with a different perspective - one that can bring transparency with useful information into an industry that is desperately in need of it. We want to help.
January 11th, 2009 at 6:19 am
Bma, good luck with your venture, the Seattle test run should be interesting. I think the tool can have some appeal to job seekers just starting their job search who are hoping for some incdication about how tough their job search might be.
The crux is your hotness algorithm. At a glance, recruiter pageviews sounds like a logical factor to take into account but since the job seeker has no reason to promote their resume on eggsprout (that would defeat the purpose I mention above), I’m curious how you’ll manage this without skewing results.
Of course, the real test will be once you get beyond Seattle tech jobs and go national. If that happens, a very cool feature would be the ability to see how hot your resume would be in a specific part of the country.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:44 am
Thanks Jacob! To clarify a bit, pageviews is actually a very small factor in our algorithm. The main factors currently are recruiter contacts (very obvious the recruiter likes that candidate) and Follows. On our site a recruiter can explicitly “Follow” a user which means they get updates about any status/job changes and can keep track of this user for future employment opportunities if they don’t have open positions right now. We also use Follows to data-mine the recruiter’s preferences to recommend them candidates as they search or post new jobs. The combination of Follows and Contacts right now power the core of the hotness algorithm.
We’re seeing some very interesting trends already, will publish reports when we get some more data. We’ll definitely expand this to include all the different ways to slice and dice the data - hotness by geography, by industry, by job type, etc.
JobMob looks really cool, are you guys based in Israel? Just added it to my feed reader. :) Thanks for checking us out!