SPARCIN debuts today to “create better interviews.” The software opens up a crowdsourced question pool in which members of the community can submit and rate interview questions.

“Interviewing is traditionally a pretty terrible experience. It’s awkward and intimidating for the interviewers and even more so for the candidate” said founder Patrick Hutchinson in an email. “What we’re doing is creating positive experience for both the interviewer and candidate so that at the end of it all, the interviewer is able to make an informed devision about the candidate.”

Interviews are an opportunity for employers and recruiters to dig a little deeper into an applicants experience and judge whether there is a personality match.

By contributing questions, employees not normally involved have the chance to participate. The more they participate, the more of a role they play in supporting the company’s interviews. Contributors can also vote for other people’s questions to promote the queries they think are important.

SPARCIN currently has thousands of questions across hundreds of content-specific categories. The Interview Builder tool finds the highest scoring questions that meet specific needs (category, difficulty, and so on), and the Live Builder feature displays those questions along with possible answers and tips to the interviewer to keep the momentum flowing. After the interview is over, it has tools to aggregate and quantify the results to help recruiters with the next step.

While many recruiting and interviewing products are on the market — like Hirelogy, which provides questions for interviewers, or video-interviewing service HireVue — SPARCIN distinguishes itself by focusing on crowdsourcing.

SPARCIN is the second product crafted by SPARC, a web development shop in Charleston, S.C. Hutchinson was spending significant amounts of time growing SPARC’s team from two to 175 and realized the interview process was not as effective as it could be. In February 2012, he cofounded SPARCIN with Jake Benardot. It was the first launched out of SPARC’s ‘interpreneurship’ program SPARC Ventures.

Check out this infographic from SPARCIN:

The company surveys employees and summarizes them in 12 numbers that cover work style (“What kind of tasks do you prefer? Are you detailed-oriented? Collaborative?) and motivators like creativity, bottom-line, or a sense of mission. These “talent characteristics” are not skills, which are specific to a field and change over time, but rather innate traits. Companies can the map the data to performance and use it for hiring or to help build complementary teams.

Roberts insists that far from dehumanizing employees, talent characteristics highlight their value. “Numbers are the language of business, ” Roberts explains, “and people are also numbers — but not only numbers. We have a weight and a height; That doesn’t make us less human.” Companies often trumpet their people as their greatest asset and yet rarely seem to put much effort into quantifying that asset. “People become confident when you value who they are, and they are doing things that they do well naturally,” Roberts told me, “You also start seeing people who haven’t been seen before.”

A group of 250 accountants, whose data is shown below, liked rules and routine (shock!), were competitive, detail-oriented, and focused on the bottom line. Clients initially found them cold, but their talent characteristics showed that they were simply seeking information before warming up.

Knowing your people can also help reframe a company’s vision of itself. One Talent Analytics customer, a forklift operator firm, constantly received complaints about customer service. The operators were not friendly, but as it turned out, they were very focused on accuracy. So the company started to highlight accuracy as its main selling point rather than trying to transform the personalities of its staff.

The process can also throw up surprises. Call centers instinctively hire staff who are warm and friendly, but the Talent Analytics analysis showed that the top performers didn’t actually meet this profile. Callers wanted a listener, not a talker, and employees who were too friendly stayed on the line for too long. The main performance metric in a call center is how many calls you process.

Talent Analytics isn’t the only company experimenting with data-driven HR. Google’s people-analytics team, a hodgepodge of data miners, psychologists and MBAs, uses data to drive decisions on compensation, talent management, hiring, and other HR issues. One of the team’s better known endeavours is Project Oxygen, Google’s quest to build a better boss, or at least identify what makes a good one.

Roberts doesn’t name any direct competitors. “Our biggest competitor is people not doing anything,” she says. While there are various talent and analytics packages available that solve part of the puzzle, she says Talent Analytics is the only one which makes it easy to map people’s intrinsic characteristics on to performance.

As Malcolm Forbes once said “To measure the man, measure his heart.”

Talent Analytics is based in Cambridge, Mass., has 10 emloyees, is privately funded, and was founded in 2002.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Group texting application GroupMe’s high-profile acquisition today by Skype could be the first indication that the zero-revenue company is back in style.

Of course, there’s a long history of companies with zero revenue being acquired. But this is one of the highest profile among such acquisitions so far this year.

The company hasn’t made a dime since its inception. It raised $10.6 million in January this year, and at the time co-founder Steve Martocci told me he was focusing entirely on customer acquisition and building out the service. He’s kept up with that promise so far — the company unveiled a slick new version of its mobile app just last month. But a revenue source is still a ways off.

And now Skype, an online messaging and phone service that uses voice-over-Internet technology, has bought the revenue-less company. It reportedly paid more than $50 million — as high as $85 million, according to reports buzzing about the Internet. Whether it’s a talent acquisition or part of the massive group messaging land grab, it’s a lot of money for a company with no revenue.

GroupMe is a group-texting service that creates a virtual chat room around text messages. You create a phone number that anyone who signs up to the group can text. That text is then delivered to everyone in the group. You can make as many groups as you want. It works for conference calls as well — anyone can dial in to the number and start a group chat.

The company was looking into using sponsored texting groups and branded groups that other businesses could use as advertising, but there still wasn’t a roadmap for that monetization strategy as of July, the last time I spoke with Martocci. The company doesn’t have any plans to change their upcoming monetization strategy (or possibly lack thereof), a GroupMe spokesperson told me today.

“Monetizing chat has been very hard,” August Capital and early Skype investor Howard Hartenbaum told me. “If GroupMe sold for more than $50 million, then that’s a huge win for them.”

There is a chance that Skype is using this as a talent acquisition, even though Skype chief executive Tony Bates described the deal as a way to help Skype reach the company’s target of 1 billion users. Bates said GroupMe creates an “instant sticky feeling” — which I’d have agree with, since I have a huge crush on the service and its text-messaging component.

There’s also Kik, a mobile messaging service that has grown like wildfire since launch because it’s blazingly fast. (I personally use that one as the fastest way to get in touch with VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall.) Group texting and messaging obviously carries a lot of value. There are other group-messaging applications like Highnote. Google also introduced a mobile group messaging system called Huddles in its latest social networking site, Google+. All of those companies still rely on wireless data, whereas GroupMe sits on top of text messaging (but still gives its users the option of using data.)

“We’ve been expecting to see competition in the space, but this does not change our focus on delivering the best service possible,” a GroupMe spokesperson told me today. “Our goal is to bring people closer together in real life and help our users to solve real communications problems.”

Manquisitions are also pretty common — startups that are now bombshell companies like Twitter and Facebook have been acquiring small startups for their teams since inception. It’s a smart way to pick up savvy engineers and professionals without having to poach them with sweet deals or spend a lot of time hunting down talent. The GroupMe team was able to turn a hackathon idea into a working and popular application and build an entire company in the span of a year. It’s natural to expect that Skype would be keen on picking up the GroupMe team, which appears business-savvy enough without revenue.

Even at face value, the deal is elegantly sensible. GroupMe is built on top of a service provided by Twilio, a San Francisco-based startup that provides access to voice and text-messaging services that might otherwise be out of reach to small companies. GroupMe was born on top of text messaging and independent of wireless data. Skype has its own way of using phone networks and text messaging.

GroupMe will still run its own messaging app and the text messaging service will be preserved for the time being, a GroupMe spokesperson said. That’s a sigh of relief – at least for me and my relentless infatuation with text messaging. But whether it’s a talent acquisition or not, it’s clear that group texting carries enormous value — so much so that Skype is willing to bet a lot of money on a company that still hasn’t quite secured a business model.

“The shift in smartphones and things you’ll be able to do that you’re seeing now, like messaging, that’s gonna be bigger then the PC and web revolution,” Kik founder Ted Livingston told me. “The odds that you get on a wave like this, it’s like once in a lifetime.”

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This rumor falls under the same category as the Zuckerberg $1 billion Mexican meal story (which shall henceforth be referred to as “TacoTip”): an item that could turn out to be interesting, or it could turn out to be nothing at all.

A reader told us that he overheard a conversation in his San Francisco-based dentist’s office between a patient and the receptionist. The patient told the receptionist that her social media company was being acquired by Facebook, but only the employees were being acquired and not the company itself. The reader was under the assumption that the patient’s company is based in San Francisco.

Who do you think Facebook is acquiring now? Tell us in the comments below.

[Image via outcast104/Flickr]