Michael Specht

For all you recruiting types out there, there is a new service that you need to be aware of, Spock. Currently in beta, it’s kind of private but if you ask I will send you an invite as of writing I have 100.

Basically Spock is a search tool about people and the validity of the search results are based on the feedback from other searchers who vote Yes or No to attributes of the person. If you want a fantastic run down of the tool check out Jeffro’s review, I’ll wait for you to come back.

Back? Ok let’s continue.

It is becoming a common that people acknowledge that the footprints they leave online are there forever and can be seen by all, a few Miss Universe/America constants will agree. Spock uses these footprints out there to build profiles of us all, the data is then augmented by feedback and votes from other people, almost like Digg but about people.

One of the problems/challenges with Spock is that there are currently so many identities for people out there. Spock seems to be heavily tied to LinkedIn and Wikipedia as it’s main sources of data. As such ti is very easy for multiple profiles to exist for the same person. Once you sign up you also create a profile. Before I knew I existed I created myself a profile and tried to merge it with the data that had been found on me by the Spock crawlers, not the easiest process. I tried several times to join my profile with the records that Spock has of me, you complete this by entering your LinkedIn user id and password then wait for the Spock system to combine the data each time the process seemed to fail.

UPDATE: Looks like Spock final combined my records, I guess I had to wait a while.
I’m sure you can see how this can and will relate to recruiting. Not only in sourcing new candidates, but also in time reference checking and background checking. Right now the system is loaded with lots of information about celebrities but there is still data about regular folks. Right now not the best source of data for background checking etc given the system is in Beta. I am sure this will improve as more people begin to vote and add different attributes.

So let’s give this a bit of a go, I will pick on Jason Davis and Jason Goldberg.

Jason Davis

JD was a bit hard to find in Spock it is a popular name and JD was not on the first page. Once I found him Spock had him listed as the founder of Recruiting.com, and involved in Staffing and Recruiting. Right on both accounts. I updated the information a bit added RecruitingBlogs.com, that he is ex-Jobster and also ex-Recruiting.com. Over

Jason Goldberg

Jobster Jason was a lot easier to find. Jason was listed as Chief Jobster, in the Internet Industry both right, he was also listed s a Taurus and single, not sure about that one. Sites that were relevant to him listed his LinkedIn profile and a MySpace page, the LinkedIn profile was right and not so sure about the MySpace. I added a couple of links to his profile from Jobster.

Overall not too bad as another source of information about people, but this is a very crowded market, for example Pipl, and it may not survive.

Great San Francisco jobs await you at San Fran Jobs.

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