In their ebook Race Against The Machine, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argue that technology has only magnified the jobs shortage. What were once considered distinctly human tasks – speech and pattern recognition, language translation and even driving vehicles – are today among the accelerating list of skills that can be performed by robots. Global productivity may be trending upwards as a result, but so is unemployment.

Now, with automation outpacing the human workforce, the looming question is whether that same computational horsepower can also help repair the economic damage. Can technology steer the jobless millions into finding employment opportunities that would otherwise pass them by – or at least do a better job of unearthing relevant talent?

In the US, start-ups have emerged that are betting on algorithmic matchmaking as the future of recruitment, career advancement and networking. These go well beyond the myriad job boards by trying to mimic the personal referral and vetting process that companies use. The fact that technology might supplant headhunting and even serendipitous encounters might not seem such a revelation in a world where more and more people search online for their soulmates. But what is surprising is that so many of these job boards are hitching their wagons to Facebook. The church/state separation between our professional and social identities is becoming as meaningless as our once-sacrosanct weekends.

Such a shift ought to ring alarm bells for the pre-eminent business networking platform, LinkedIn, where as many as 125 million people post their CVs and access their peer groups across 200 countries.

LinkedIn, with a capitalisation of more than $8bn (€6bn) following its IPO in May, is clearly a powerful connective thread across the business establishment; indeed, all the interviews for this article were facilitated through LinkedIn introductions. But with 800 million addicts around the globe, Facebook is untouchable in terms of reach and, above all, daily engagement.

“Facebook is also where your authentic relationships are – your family, friends, and closest colleagues – whereas LinkedIn is often where you connect with less committed acquaintances, like someone you met at a conference for five minutes” says Rick Marini, the founder, CEO and ‘chief connector’ of BranchOut, an early momentum player in this field of social recruitment. As it is this inner circle that you lean on for support during hard times, Facebook is arguably a better equipped entry point for helping all ends of the social pay scale – in other words, for keeping both Wall Street and Main Street occupied.

While boardroom suits might scoff at Facebook’s professional credentials, those entering the workplace as freshly minted graduates make no such fine distinctions. “It is largely a function of age. If you are under 30 then Facebook is where you gather all your social and professional friends. It’s among the older generation where you see a bifurcation,” says Identified co-founder and co-CEO Brendan Wallace. Stripped of all those compromising keg-party photos and the mundane barrage of social intercourse, Facebook sits on a treasure trove of educational details, career milestones and relational links prized by recruiters. Identified’s algorithms sift through these data points and come up with a score that denotes how ‘in demand’ a user might be. The end goal is to become a professional search engine that ranks human capital in the way that Google ranks information.

Also leveraging Facebook’s vast cache of information is Meeteor, a nascent networking service that wants to turn cold calls into ‘warm introductions’. You might not necessarily know that your old college roommate is now Best Friends Forever with someone high up at Google – but your social graph certainly does. “We take the work out of networking,” says Philip Cortes, who co-founded the company with colleague Chris Lee. “You can spend a few hours every day on online job boards, manually doing searches, writing cold emails, etc. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we found people you were close to, who could make the right introductions and get them excited about helping you?”

But not everyone is convinced that social media represents the best answer to the current crisis. After she was downsized from her corporate job in 2008, Helen Rosen resorted to every job-search tool. “Companies get flooded with resumes and they don’t have a good way to filter them out. Hence, hiring comes to a halt,” she says. “Social media sites haven’t really invented a new way to deal with the old problem – only a new medium. But the same problems that exist on job boards also exist on the social media sites: hiring managers are overwhelmed with random submissions by candidates – most of whom are not suited for the position.”

Rosen’s response is a more hand-crafted approach to matchmaking, drawing on her experience with dating sites. Direct Approach Solutions requires candidates to fill out a professional profile dossier, which she vets for any discrepancies. “In my view, if there is no filtering process, then I might as well just call myself a job board. Also, when candidates know there’s a gatekeeper who oversees the approval process, they tend to be more truthful.”

Whichever approach ultimately prevails, anything that helps spur an otherwise dispirited workplace into action can only be a net positive in the current climate. By making it so effortless, even fun, to reach out to job leads, these new utilities provide the necessary confidence boosts to keep knocking on those doors. The more they do, the greater their chance of success. “People are the best sources of algorithmic matching, and available matching technology is still not useful beyond helpful suggestions,” says Joe Essenfeld, CEO of JIBE, another social recruitment platform that has sent out half a million job applications to employers this year. “We’ve seen that the more people a job seeker connects with, the more likely they are to find a great fit in their new job.”

THE MATCHMAKERS

BRANCHOUT
launched July 2010 www.branchout.com
BranchOut lays claim to being the largest professional network on Facebook with millions of users in more than 60 countries and 15 languages. Users leverage their Facebook friend network to find jobs, recruit talent and strengthen relationships with professional contacts. BranchOut also operates the largest job board on Facebook with more than three million jobs and 20,000 internships. Clients include Target, HP, Salesforce.com and VMware. Having spent 15 months amassing this user information, BranchOut has just launched RecruiterConnect. Here, companies pay to search Facebook for candidates.

“LinkedIn has always stated that Facebook is for your personal life and LinkedIn is for professional work,” says CEO Rick Marini. “We fundamentally disagree and believe that all networking, both personal and professional, will happen on Facebook, the site that most of us visit on a daily basis. Knowing that most jobs come through referrals, we place a high value on not only matching jobs on title, location, experience level and so forth, but also on strength of connections.

“What has surprised us is the diversity of BranchOut’s community. It includes everyone from Fortune 500 CEOs to recent college graduates, freelancers and military personnel.”

JIBE
launched March 2010 www.jibe.com
JIBE is visited by more than a million people each month. Its users, who can sign in through Facebook or LinkedIn, are connected to more than 50 million professionals. Clients include Amazon, Bank of America, Verizon and Lockheed Martin. JIBE aggregates users’ friends and connections to show them the companies and industries they are linked to as a result. For those nervous about giving away their info to help and interact with their existing connections, the company will this quarter launch a service dubbed JIBE Connect.

“In 2008, when the economy came crashing down and unemployment skyrocketed, I was convinced I needed to be a part of solving this problem and help people get back to work,” says CEO Joe Essenfeld. “Since JIBE’s inception we have refined the application process to facilitate more eff ective communication between jobseekers and the people that can help them most. Linkedin [and others] focus on building their networks or creating new ones. JIBE’s sole focus is to have people activate those networks and reap the benefits from them. Data that our clients have shared with us shows that applicants who originate from JIBE are approximately four times more likely to get hired than from other external sources.”

IDENTIFIED
launched spring 2010 www.identified.com
Identified says it has the largest professional network of under-30s in the world. It boasts more than 50 million profiles, of which 44 million are below 30 (nearly five times as many as LinkedIn has for the same demographic). In addition, Identified has profiles on more than 100,000 companies and 10,000 universities.

It is backed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other top-tier Silicon Valley insiders such as venture-capital icon Bill Draper and his son Tim, who is generally thought of as the creator of viral marketing.

“We recognised that people want to understand how their educational and professional background is perceived by companies,” explains Brendan Wallace, who shares the CEO title with his co-founder Adeyemi Ajao. “We built a very simple but very powerful tool for them to measure how ‘in demand’ they are to companies instantly. Thousands of companies search through our database profiles. We pay very careful attention to what these companies are searching for, who they contact and who they hire. Then, using some very sophisticated and proprietary algorithms we’ve developed by watching millions of these interactions, Identified measures what companies value: university, major, companies worked for, job titles, skills, network, connections and hundreds of other variables. This is your Identified Score. Identified now lets people improve their Identified Score by adding more information about themselves.”

MEETEOR
launch date imminent www.meeteor.com
Meeteor uses data from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to introduce users to people they don’t know, but should. In 2009, co- founders Philip Cortes and Chris Lee went off to business school and soon realised that human networking was needlessly tedious. Furthermore, it’s not necessarily accurate or comprehensive: your old high-school friend may know a lot of people at companies such as Google, McKinsey and Goldman, but you’d only know that if you asked. Meeteor is designed to solve this. After testing the service at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the team has set its sights on a launch this quarter.

“The secret to general networking, a successful job search or a sales call is a personal introduction,” says Cortes.”Our algorithms analyze your existing network to get you the warmest introduction possible, at the companies or in the industries you’re interested in.”

“We have data on 60,000 individuals to run our algorithms with,” adds Lee, “and one in four of our algorithmic matches leads to someone reaching out to someone relevant. Two prominent angel investors connected and are now exploring deals together.”

DIRECT APPROACH SOLUTIONS
launched March 2010 www.directapproachsolutions.com
On this site, candidate and employer are asked to complete brief profiles before algorithms do the matching. All candidates are screened beforehand. Phase one has been limited to finance and accounting (founder Helen Rosen’s area of expertise) in the New York tri-state area, but the plan is to expand nationally across many fields once she has raised enough capital.

“The problem we face isn’t that there isn’t enough talent to go around; it’s the process of finding that talent that needs addressing,” says Rosen. “My approach is online dating for job searches, providing targeted matching. The only way this works is if the users themselves complete their own individual profiles. There’s a skills assessment as part of the profile matching. This type of thing cannot be downloaded from an existing database of information. For example, you can have two accountants, one with M&A experience and the other with IPO experience. If the hiring manager is looking for someone with IPO experience, they’ll only get those matches under our system.”