CareerBuilder just announced at SHRM that they’ve partnered with Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, to launch Applicant Explorer, a tool that will allow employers to view public background information on a candidate in an online dashboard.
Applicant Explorer combines information from its database of 31 million resumes with online content using Bing. The tool combs the Web for mentions of a job seeker based on data pulled from the candidate’s posted resume on CareerBuilder. The resulting data is generated from social networking sites, professional and personal blogs, personal and corporate web sites, press releases, discussion and forum postings, and articles and news stories.
Applicant Explorer is free to employers who use CareerBuilder’s Resume Database service.
“Applicant Explorer is a cutting-edge tool that was developed to save CareerBuilder clients valuable time in their recruitment process,” said Greg Brass, director of profile search at CareerBuilder. “With so many employers already utilizing the Internet to research candidates, Applicant Explorer was created to help employers do that necessary research in the most efficient and simple way possible – helping them go beyond the resume. In addition, job seekers can benefit from the clearer picture employers can gather of their qualifications and background.”
“One of our key goals with Bing is to simplify search and make it easier for people to find what they are looking for online; searching for the ideal job candidate is no exception,” said Alessandro Catorcini, senior program manager, Bing. “By combining Bing functionality with the extensive CareerBuilder database, Applicant Explorer helps recruiters and employers customize their search criteria and dynamically sort through and display hundreds of data sources in one easy to use interface, cutting the manual search time substantially.”
Popularity: 4% [?]
July 1st, 2009 at 9:16 am
CareerBuilder uses Bing APIs for this integration. I still having trouble understanding what value does this add to CareerBuilder user. The recruiter can go to Bing directly and perform the search utilizing advanced features available on the bing portal.
July 1st, 2009 at 12:57 pm
I checked out this new product through my Careerbuilder resume database account. I was displeased and frankly, a bit alarmed. To test it out, I looked up some people who I knew had resumes on the site to see what kind of information was returned. While I will admit there was some accurate results, the vast majority (really probably about 90%) of the results were in no way related to the candidate. It seemed that a very basic web search was performed and returned any results matching a single field. Not multiple fields that would verify results. The problem with this: recruiters using this tool have no way of knowing which results are accurate and which are not. Of course, this is a risk with the recruiter searching on their own, but by presenting this as a new product, is Careerbuilder not responsible for presenting the false and potentially damaging results? I noticed no disclaimer warning the recruiter that the results are not guaranteed accurate.