WorkDigital, creators of TheSocialCV.com, is launching TalentRank, a tool which assigns a score to a candidate’s CV or profile based not only on skills and experience but also on their online and social media activity.

Bill Fischer, director and co-founder of WorkDigital, told Recruiter that many different factors are used to arrive at the score including the quality of school, university or company but also the individual’s “social authority”.

“They can have a professional engagement score so we look at what they tweet and blog about, who’s in their social network and who they communicate with, as well as career path data,” he explained. “We also look at the lexical density of their status updates.”

TalentRank is the second product WorkDigital has launched recently, built off its TheSocialCV platform, which aggregates data contained within social profiles. It has also introduced FreshUp, which identifies and gathers data from across the web to build profiles of potential candidates and then matches this to CV records. This tackles recruiters’ perennial problem of its databases containing too much out-of-date and irrelevant data. “When we talk to CEOs of large companies or recruitment consultancies, they are frustrated that they have spent millions building a CV database that their in-house recruiters don’t use,” said Fischer. “The recruiters flip it around by saying ’we don’t use it because the data is out of date’.”

When developing FreshUp, WorkDigital has worked closely with recruiters to assess which information is important to them and how they want it presented, which is where TalentRank comes in. “For instance, they could have 500 people with the same specialism,” said Fischer.

Both products, especially when combined, greatly extend the functionality and value of TheSocialCV for recruiters. Many recruiters recognised the power of TheSocialCV, Fischer said, but they wanted to make better use of their own in-house database.

A recruiter can provide WorkDigital with access to its applicant tracking system, or even just an Excel or HR-XML feed of names and email addresses, and it can set about building the profiles, matching them to the CVs held on record and then assigning a score. “Typically it is used for legacy CVs, which may have been accrued over the last 10 years,” said Fischer. “So we are usually dealing with 50,000 to 5m CVs.” He said that WorkDigital is usually able to update around 40-50% of a database.

Both FreshUp and Talent Rank are available as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and the former is paid for on a per match basis. “One of the ways employers look at return on investment on this is against what it would have cost them to get a new candidate,” said Fischer. “The fact that these people are already in their database means they already have an interest in their company.”

www.thesocialcv.com