T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market. None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion. There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find. If you want to be T3 – send me a note.
This week I’m looking at Swoop Talent. When I first contacted, industry veteran, Stacy Chapman to talk to her about her company Swoop, I assumed I would be demoing a basic, straight forward people aggregator. Boy, was I wrong, and in for a treat! That is how Swoop first got started, but that is not where it’s going.
Swoop is a social sourcing tool for sure, but they are beginning to pivot away from just social sourcing, people aggregation, and into the world of solving talent acquisitions problems of having all of the people record data amongst disparate systems. What does that mean? Right now you have candidate data all over the place. Your own ATS. Social profiles on systems like LinkedIn, social profiles from people aggregators, your employee referral tool, etc. Basically, you’ve got potential candidates strung all over the place.
Sure you try and pull them all into your ATS, but even your ATS can be bear to search and retrieve. Swoop solves all of this by building one talent record off all of your data from ATS to Email to CRM to Resumes to Social, and gives you one single view of talent. Going to do campus hiring and the college kids are handing you paper resumes? Swoop allows you to take a pic with your phone and automatically builds a talent record of this kid, with their resume and their social profiles.
Swoop basically takes the overlap of records out of your disparate systems and gives you one true view of what your talent landscape truly looks like. Why is this important? You need to know what system(s) are delivering you the most talent, the best talent, how should I spend my recruitment marketing dollars. Swoop answers all these questions, and has great data visualization as well, to help tell the story of what’s going on in the markets you’re going after.
5 Things I really liked about Swoop:
1. Swoop integrates your own ATS data. This allows you to use their search capability to mine your own ATS. Can’t stand Taleo’s search functionality? Swoop solves this.
2. Swoop still has over 150 million talent profiles, so you still get great sourcing technology, the difference is unifying this with all your other data gives you a much more complete sourcing tool, that eliminates the overlap and waste. Plus, it automatically updates profiles as well, behind the scene, so you aren’t looking at some old ATS record from three years ago.
3. The product actually mines and helps uncover some real talent gold within your own ATS. I see this constantly with RPO clients we work with. Once we get into their ATS, we find great talent just sitting there they had no idea was already in their system.
4. Swoop gives talent executives an understanding about talent markets they operate in unlike anything else I’ve seen. This is important when making financial decisions on what products to continue, to purchase new, to stop using altogether, etc.
5. The college recruiting piece is easy. For those that go out to campus and need to get all this data back into their systems, you know what a pain this can be. Swoop makes this really easy, and functional.
Not many people know the capabilities of where Swoop is right now. They haven’t gone out publicly in a big way yet, and marketing will start soon. This is an enterprise play to be sure, implementation costs run $10-20K based on size, and annual costs run around $.15 or less per record. Overall, that isn’t really that big of a cost when you really understand the capabilities you gain with Swoop.
If you’re using a bunch of tools right now to source talent it’s really worth your time to demo Swoop and see how they can help you. If you’re using one of the giant HRM systems, like Taleo, Bullhorn, Successfactors, etc., it’s also probably worth your time to demo as well.