Web app helps mine for tech talent
When Romotive moved from Las Vegas to San Francisco in March of this year, the company said it needed to be near strategic partners and top senior talent.
In order to build the world’s first affordable personal robot, the company needed to recruit technical talent that Las Vegas lacked.
While the city was able to accelerate the startup, ultimately it was not able to sustain it.
Enter Peter Kazanjy, a panelist at SXSW V2V meeting at the Cosmopolitan, said Monday that his web app TalentBin might be able to help improve tech-job recruiting in Las Vegas.
Perhaps not for small companies like the then 20-person Romotive but perhaps for large corporations.
“Any city that has a meaningful population has a tech community,” Kazanjy said, pointing to various jobs within the casino industry.
TalentBin, founded in 2011, aggregates information about job candidates from various social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, GooglePlus, MeetUp and others. For a fee of $6,000 per year, recruiters are presented with top candidates, selected for their experience and interests.
Recruiters are able to specify skills they want — iOS, Java, etc. — and TalentBin mines social networks to find out in the industry is reputable and has the desired skillset.
Talentin was about 200 corporate clients now, including Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook.
TalentBin was born of Honestly, a site Kazanjy launched in 2010, that was supposed to be a “Yelp for professionals,” where users could rate and rank career people in town. The product failed, because most users went to the site to read reviews, but didn’t create any themselves.
So, in 2011, Honestly turned into TalentBin.
While sites like LinkedIn resume site require people to update their own profiles, TalentBin uses updates on other social media to create snapshots of candidates, based on information they share about themselves on other sites.
“This info already exists in Twitter, on Meetup,” Kazanjy said.
Companies that move to larger tech communities to recruit also face stiffer competition from other businesses looking to hire.
“Sometimes there’s value in recruiting in places where there are fewer companies,” Kazanjy said.
Contact Review-Journal writer Kristy Totten at KTotten@Reviewjournal.com
