I don’t normally write about tools, but felt compelled to in this case as I like it so much. I am speaking of TalentBin. I had the good fortune of interviewing Peter Kazanjiy, a hungry entrepreneur and a nice guy. What follows is a podcast I recorded where I interviewed him about his product, a cheat sheet that he is giving away, my thoughts on the products and links to other people’s opinion as well. Curious to see what your experience has been with Talentbin. Do tell…

GRADE A

What I think:

• I’ve seen similar tools (Zoominfo comes to mind), but TalentBin seems to have taken it to the next level. I like that they scour multiple social networks and (at least for now) focused on the niche of techies, rather than being all things for all people.
• I like that you can use their automated search (just add job title and prospects appear) and/or do a search with your own boolean search.
• I like that I can ask my co-workers to join TalentBin and in afterward, I will be able to search across their social networks and later, ask for introductions / referrals to people that they are connected to.
• I would like it if I could export the results into a spreadsheet with links to the original profiles found and search string used for the sake of OFCCP.
• They have a premium product debuting soon which will be half the price of LinkedIn Recruiter.
• Since they search other networks beyond LinkedIn, I don’t see them as vulnerable as other search tools that rely on LinkedIn’s API. Still, if I were Linkedin, I would keep a close eye on them.
• As more people join into TalentBin, it can only get better. I think that this tool is a game changer in that people who are novices could get expert sourcing results at a fraction of the time it would normally take to find the same data.

What other people think:

New Site TalentBin Merges Social Media Info Into Sourcing Profiles

• What it is trying to do is fairly simple: create a searchable database that merges information about a person from all over the web into a single profile so that recruiters can get all of the information about them in one, digestible place.
• Kazanjy explained that the implicit database it is building is better than competing search tools by LinkedIn or job boards because it takes in information people are creating elsewhere.
• … TalentBin focuses very heavily on having your co-workers connect to your TalentBin so you can search resumes from their networks.
• One of the things that launched with the move from private beta to public was the addition of a Google Chrome plugin that allows you to have easy access to the consolidated profiles TalentBin offers when you’re cruising social networks.
• “One of the things we heard from our [beta] customers is that they would love it if this could be integrated into their ATS,” he said. “This is a first step.”
• … it seems the further away you are from a technical background (or from Silicon Valley), the less chance there is that a profile will be in the system. He claims they are continuing to expand the number of profiles but they started with technical talent since that’s where the greatest need is at right now.
• Pricing is on a sort of seats-based, freemium model. Kazanjy said they are debuting with a $4,800 per seat/per year price point for the full version of the product. He said that’s about half of what LinkedIn Recruiter costs.

Social Recruiting and TalentBin: A Match Made in Heaven

• In a nutshell, TalentBin is a candidate discovery tool that utilizes open web recruiting to the fullest AND leverages your company’s network to maximize referral generation. In short, it is the ultimate sourcing tool.on crack.
• From an open web perspective, it blew my mind and is extremely easy to use. (In all honesty, it completely levels the playing field for recruiters of all experience levels because it builds your booleans for you.and these booleans are formulated by super smart Stanford engineers.)
• Once you log on and create the title of whatever job you are recruiting on, it immediately searches every single person with that background available anywhere on the web. It scrapes social networking sites like Facebook, Quora, Google+, Google Groups, MeetUp, Twitter, GitHub, Stack Overflow and makes it searchable by location AND skillset. Once your search results populate, you can search by your company’s network (with filters) or everyone (without filters).
• When I did this search in LinkedIn, I got back 3,850 engineers with this skillset in the Bay Area. When I ran this same search on TalentBin, I got back 8,870 with this skillset in the Bay Area.
• And.to make it even better (and more fun for all of you stalkers), it gave me any contact information they had linked to any profile on the web.
• In the four months I’ve been using TalentBin, I’ve located, extended offers to, and hired nearly a half-dozen candidates (all top notch engineering and design professionals) and my pipeline is robust with killer talent that will, at some point, be looking for a new company to join.

TalentBin – Boolean Strings

Here are my current wishes for TB that, I think, will make it killer software. Implement:

• An “Export-to-Excel” function for the starred profiles. I’d like to see the person’s name, tagline, perhaps some keywords, and the link to the main profile included. Links to other potential profiles would make it even better, even if “merging” is not implemented.
• Ways to sort the search results.
• Crawl LinkedIn – which is “the” site many of us use.

Download the TalentBin cheatsheet here!