TalentSpring, a startup that uses semantic technology to help recruiters find the best candidate for a job, has raised $1.6 million in a first round of funding.
The Seattle company claims to stands out from the horde of other resume matching sites, such as TalentHook and JobFox, because of that aforementioned semantic technology. Vice President of Marketing John Kelly says it allows the site to understand the general meaning of the job listing, rather than just matching keywords. And that, in turn, means that recruiters will be able to see the full range of qualified candidates.
"About 65 percent of a recruiter’s time is spent reading resumes," Kelly says. "The reason for this is that there really isn’t a good way to weed out the unmatched resumes. It is so time consuming that candidates that are near matches often get pushed through the interview process just because the recruiters and hiring managers are tired of looking."
TalentSpring pulls those resumes from social networking sites, job boards, and corporate academic talent search sites. Recruiters can log into their various accounts through the TalentSpring site, so for example they could pull in the resumes they have access to via professional networking site LinkedIn.
The funding comes from Second Avenue Partners and private investors. The site is currently in pilot mode with more than 50 medium and large organizations, and plans to open to the public in May.
