SI Review: July 2012

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The Buzz

Finding Bliss, Measuring Data

Website lets workers review employers; product gathers business intelligence for staffing firms

CareerBliss

Reviews can be great for business. Consumers often read a review before buying. Moviegoers will read a review before they go to a showing. Diners will read a review of a restaurant before heading out to eat. So it’s natural that job seekers would want to check out prospective employers.

Enter CareerBliss, which allows workers to review firms they work at, post data on salaries and view job posts. That information can then be accessed by other workers. There are similar models out there.

CareerBliss’ competitive advantage is that it allows job seekers to find out what kind of career culture they are best suited to through its “BlissFinder” questionnaire. CareerBliss can match them up to appropriate jobs among the 3 million it has online.

“By taking the Blissfinder they can get a great idea of what company would truly make them happy,” says Heidi Golledge, chief happiness officer (CEO) and co-founder of CareerBliss along with Chief Technical Officer Matt Miller.

For companies posting jobs on CareerBliss, those with high ratings in their reviews could be more likely to have their jobs clicked by top quality candidates. Staffing firms are also reviewed by the site.

Founded in 2009, the Irvine, Calif.-based company has 3 million job ads, 6 million salary data points and almost 1 million reviews of employers.

It covers all job types from administrative assistant to CEO.

InsightSquared

Insightsquared is a software-as-a-service offering that connects with customer relationship management software and financial systems to help staffing firms analyze data. In May, the company announced it received $4.5 million funding, which it plans to use to bring in programmers and reinvest in the product.

Some of InsightSquared’s features, according to the company, include:

  • Activity tracking — Dashboards that can track activities.
  • Sales forecasting — Uses client history, employee activity and deal activity to predict the value of a sales pipeline.
  • Data quality monitoring — Identifies data errors.

The product also enables users to click into charts to see information on each data point; filter data by industry, geography or team; integrate with other data sources; and send nightly email reports.

“One of our biggest things that people give us feedback on is data quality monitoring,” says Robert Woo, marketing manager for InsightSquared.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based firm launched its product in 2011 with $1 million in seed funding.

To recommend a product or service, please email us at buzz@staffingindustry.com.