Job-search site Identified.com found that most job seekers don’t provide all the information in their online profiles that recruiters need to know. To get them to do that, Identified.com has gamified the job search.
The San Francisco-based company says that a combination of social networking and gamification — the use of game-like achievements and rewards in non-game applications — can encourage young people to provide the right information that can land them better jobs.
Identified.com is part of a growing number of companies using gamification to empower consumers in areas ranging from dating to fitness, energy use, and healthcare.
Identified.com has reached four million active users in the past six months. The average age of users is 23.5 years, and 90 percent are under 35. By contrast, 60 percent of LinkedIn’s users are 35 and over. That means it’s harder to find job candidates on LinkedIn, because many older people have established careers. Identified.com is now adding a million users a week.
Identified.com requires users to fill out their detailed professional profiles and create a short-form resume to find out their Identified Score. The average user adds 10 additional professional data points to his or her profile such as school, major, grade point average, graduation year, past employers, job titles, and other background.
The Identified Score shows a user how they are ranked by companies in terms of how desirable they are. Identified.com also offers scores for schools and companies.
By offering game-like rewards, the gamification technique gets users to fill out otherwise boring information. The scores are not just vanity points. Rather, they represent the value of key information that is currently in demand by employers. Identified.com also makes it easy to import data from a Facebook profile to its own profile system.
“Critical information that recruiters need to hire literally does not exist in one place online for young people,” said co-founder and co-chief executive Brendan Wallace. “Generation Y is nearly invisible to employers, so this technique is key.”
He added, “We constantly hear that the pain point among employers is sourcing the education and job information of the 18-29 year-old demographic, but Facebook is a great starting point.”
Engineers who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are now in high demand across the country. Employers can find them, if the information is in the engineers’ profiles.
Recruiters say that 92 percent of Facebook profiles do not contain enough publicly available education and employment information (major, graduation year, job title) for recruiters to qualify potential candidates for jobs.
Identified found that more than 72 percent of Facebook users who come to Identified.com add new information that is not part of their Facebook profile to create “short-form resumes” online. That makes the candidates easier to recruit.
Identified.com was founded in 2010 by Wallace and Adeyemi Ajao, who conceived while doing research at Stanford University. The company now has 52 employees. It has raised $5.5 million from venture capitalists Tim Draper, Bill Draper, and others.