... who’s taking aim at a USD $100 billion recruitment industry

By Mike Howie, Frog Recruitment, M2 Magazine - July 2011

Jason Kerr has always been attracted to industries where things just aren’t working correctly – and at the moment he’s helping some of the biggest US corporations tweak the way they hire.

The majority of New Zealand’s successful entrepreneurs don’t shout itfrom the rooftops. No, they keep it onthe down-low. Think Colin Meads running back from the try line with his head down in that “Hey, it was nothing,” manner.

Jason Kerr is a Kiwi in that mould.

Based in Silicon Valley (Palo Alto), the global centre for technology, innovation and investment, Jasonand his company FIND.LY are changing the way some of the US’s top Fortune 500 companies recruit their talent. Jason Kerr says this is just the start, as he has his sights set on changing the way employers and prospective employees connect with each other – affecting what is a USD $100 billion US recruitment industry.

Jason Kerr believes that the resume is dead; because it’s instantlyold information and can lead to lost opportunities. The future for organisations is all about making, maintaining and enhancing social connections with future employees.

However, let’s first go back to Blenheim in the early 1980s where Jason began his working life as an apprentice electrician.

“I’m here in Silicon Valley now thanks to unrequited love,” admits Jason on the phone from his California home.

“I was really keen on this girl, so when she said she was off to apply for a job as a cabin attendant with Ansett, I followed. She didn’t get the job, I did!” Jason remembers.

Between flights, Jason would sit at home and play around with the basics of computer coding.

So what does a cabin attendant who’s playing with computer coding design first? Why, a software application to roster flight staff and manage an airline of course.

A couple of years down the track and Jason’s “teach yourself code” course led him down a path where now 90% of the airlines in Australasia using his software programs.

“One night it dawned on me that our airline roster software had a natural fit with the recruitment industry.” (And here’s another pithy saying: “Opportunities don’t yell – they whisper!”)

“This one night I was having a couple of beers with Virgin Blue in Australia. Their HR guy let slip he was receiving 80 kilograms of mail every two days from people wanting to be flight attendants.” Jason’s immediate response was, “I could probably fix that for you.”.

How did he fix it? By building what is probably the pre-cursor to modern-day social networking. The web-based software Jason designed for airline recruiting did away with old-world paper resumes and moved to an online system. Cabin crew and pilots could use the site to create and maintain a single centralised profile and decide which airlines could see their info and contact them for future opportunities. Sound familiar?

The result was that over 20,000 pilots and 400,000 cabin crewapplicants used the system to build and maintain online profiles and network with airlines for jobs – a full two years before LinkedIn, and four years before Facebook.

On 1 September 2001, Kerr took the Airline recruiting solution to the United States. The date of its kickoff was 11 September, 2001… yes, 11 September, 2011. “Consequently, we lost all that business overnight. We went bust.”

Here’s a valuable lesson from Jason Kerr’s professional life: Review, re-calibrate, re-vision or re-whatever the latest catchphrase is. Basically – pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.

The upshot is that in 2011, Jason Kerr and his company, FIND.LY are staking their future on a world where ‘social media’ and staying connected via social media sites and cloud computing is here to stay.

Currently, large Fortune 500 companies like Time Warner use FIND.LY. These companies attract thousands of candidates, and they use FIND.LY to engage these candidates in the recruiting process. With the candidate’s permission, FIND.LY turns their social profile into an up-to-date living resume in the cloud.

And this is where it gets slightly clever. FIND.LY creates online resumes that sit in the cloud and are automatically updated when each candidate updates facts on for example, their Facebook or LinkedIn pages. FIND.LY makes each candidate’s social media site a pivotal recruitment tool – minus the drunken pictures of you in that pirate hat of course.

“What we create is a living resume that is always up to date,  lwaysrelevant – and this living resume is recruitment friendly – leaving out the mundane and the embarrassing. It can look at your LinkedIn, Facebook or MySpace pages and not only garner your professionally helpful data”, says Kerr, “but also augment it to make it much easier for recruiters to find you for jobs.”

What’s pivotal for Jason Kerr is that LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and the myriad of other social media sites connect people – 600 million people for Facebook and 100 million for LinkedIn.

“One of the keys to making those millions of profiles usable for recruitment,” says Kerr, “is standardising the information.” “When you fill in your LinkedIn details, the site tells you how to type in your employment history and it’s quite a serious site.

With Facebook, you’ve probably got a beer in your hand, as it’s more social. FIND.LY makes Facebook and MySpace just as useful as LinkedIn for recruitment by standardising the formats.

What’s fascinating is that LinkedIn is trying to become more social and Facebook is trying to be taken more seriously.

FIND.LY doesn’t care. “We take what you’ve got and ensure it is formatted and useful for recruiters, hides your private life and is a living document sitting in the cloud – so if you want to work with Time Warner, in a single click you can safely share your social profile with Time Warner, and theycan then follow your career and see real-time resume updates when you change vital details on your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles.

“We have one client with one million job candidates a year, so you can see how FIND.LY can help keep track of all these people, and in doing so give candidates a chance to keep connected for future job opportunities,” Jason explains.

Jason Kerr believes this living resume is so much more useful for the candidate than the old way where you applied, spent forty minutes filling out an application form, and if unsuccessful, found you were forgotten in a couple of weeks.

The cleverest part of FIND.LY is that they have devised a way to make social content relevant for recruiting. By taking information from different networks and mediums, and using it to present a consistently formatted, up-to-date resume, they can offer to keep a candidate’s ‘best foot’ in the market for future opportunities.

A final thought from Jason Kerr: “The market is evolving faster than you can react. Privacy used to be a big thing, but now the younger generation is saying, ‘We don’t care so much’. In my opinion, the next generation will exclusively use their social content for jobs, and products like Facebook who are about ‘openness’ and ‘connecting’ will be the big winners. Job boards like Monster and Seek need to take note. If they don’t embrace social, or find ways to open connectivity and add more value – they are going to totally lose the next generation of employees.”