The web is littered with a ridiculous number of professional networking sites, yet none that I find particularly useful. While LinkedIn, the best known of the bunch, has its fans, I've never found the connections made there to be terribly meaningful. Now an Oakland, Calif., startup called Reputation Networks is launching a site called WorkScore that sounds pretty close to what I'm looking for.
Asked about the difference between his site and LinkedIn, founder and chief executive Marty Manley says that where LinkedIn functions as your "social rolodex," WorkScore wants to be your "social resume." WorkScore has several cool features, but perhaps the best place to start is to compare it to LinkedIn's recommendation feature, which is pretty barebones -- you just enter a few sentences recommending a person and the work they did at a specific job. But the LinkedIn recommendation isn't all that trustworthy, since the person who asked for the recommendation knows you're the one who wrote it.
WorkScore adds the needed level of anonymity to the process, and instead of asking people to write a few vague sentences about how a person is really motivated and a great team player or whatever, it asks recommenders (or, rather, people providing personal ratings, which may not be positive) to provide answers that translate into quantifiable scores. So when you score someone you've worked with, you rate each of their specific skills, such as their technical expertise and their communication abilities. The person being rated only sees the aggregate score, not the individual ratings you gave them, so there's more incentive to be honest.
But what if someone has a grudge against you, or just doesn't know what they're talking about? Well, WorkScore users can decide how much each rater's opinion should be worth -- they can say that someone they worked with closely should be weighted more heavily than someone they met once. Of course, that means users will favor people who are more likely to give them positive scores, but they still don't know the rating each person gave them.
The rating isn't just limited to colleagues, either -- you can also rate the place you work, assuming you have an official email address. Just as someone's aggregate WorkScore might be important to a potential employer, a company's WorkScore could be useful if you're offered a job there.
WorkScore is still in beta testing, so everything is free for now, but Manley says he plans to start charging for extra data -- so managers can see how their companies compare to other workplaces, while employees can see how their skills and ratings compare to people with whom they might compete for a job.
Manley, by the way, has founded a startup before, namely used bookselling site Alibiris.The company is self-funded, and its advisors include Robert Reich, who was labor secretary under President Bill Clinton (Manley was assistant labor secretary at the time, and founded the Office of the American Workplace).