The team behind an Estonian startup Emp.ly has come out with a new product Talentag. The company is focusing on the online recruiting space and is already a house hold name with their release of Emp.ly in May this year. Emp.ly is a social media recruitment service to post job ads, share them to social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and add rewards and incentives for people to spread the word.
Talentag, on the other hand, lets you create an online profile and then ask feedback from others that builds up your ‘social CV’. Your co-workers and friends can tag a you with words or a badge. They can also vouch for a particular role you have had. At the moment this is largely focused on pulling information from one’s Facebook profile. Talentag also rides the lets-give-them-a-badge bandwagon, which more and more services have started to use after Foursquare made it famous. TechCrunch has also a nice analysis on the actual product here.
I talked to Talentag founders Jüri Kaljundi and Andrus Purde to get my head around the product. To get started they advised me to import work history and friends from LinkedIn or Facebook. Then browse friends to see where they have worked with and what are the most popular companies and professions. From there on it should be easy to ask for feedback (via Facebook, mind you) about yourself and give it to others.
Despite a nifty idea and great effort from the team to enter this very profitable niche, I still think professional services like LinkedIn or Talentag don’t mix well with what is the most personal of websites for most people, one’s Facebook profile. At least not yet. It does not matter which way you try to mix these, whether importing Facebook and LinkedIn to Talentag or importing Talentag and LinkedIn to Facebook. People come to Facebook for a different reason and its not to pimp their resume. For this to change Facebook itself would have to start drive the service to a new more business mingle friendly direction, which they are unlikely to do. And Facebook is really the only network that matters if your strategy is to get to scale through an established closed platform.
