Wanted Technologies previewed its cloud-based recruitment analytics software at HR Tech Europe in March. Cath Everett looks at the tool that helps organisations move beyond “gut instinct” when making recruitment decisions.
This month sees the introduction to the UK of Wanted Technologies, a Canadian cloud-based recruitment analytics company.
According to president and chief executive Meredith Amdur, the company, which generates 90% of its revenues in North America, has until recently focused on selling leads to job boards and aggregators gained from “scraping and spidering unstructured data from lots of different websites”.
It has also made a bit of money by selling job market information to financial services firms and government bodies who are keen to get their hands on useful economic insights gleaned from employment data.
But the fastest-growing part of its business these days is recruitment analytics, which is why the company, established in 1999 in Quebec City, has decided to concentrate its efforts in that market.
Its product is presented in a dashboard format and can be integrated with in-house recruitment management systems via a plug-in. This enables users to take a job description and compare it against the vast amounts of data that Wanted has collated over the past 10 years.
The aim is to answer questions such as how many potential candidates are in a given area, what other employers are looking to fill similar posts, how difficult the position is likely to be to fill, or even where it might make sense to set up a new office.
“The value generated is in the amount of time the tool saves as it empowers HR teams to be more scientific around creating workforce strategies both locally and globally,” Amdur claims.
Pastures new
And just to add to the excitement, about 22 months ago, the firm decided that the time was right to start a foreign adventure.
As a result, it started “scraping and spidering” data from job sites in 22 markets across the world, which equates to up to 45 million positions per week, and created its Wanted Analytics International tool on the back of it.
Late last autumn, the sales pitch began to recruitment agencies and staffing firms, and in January, the product was formally launched in the UK, Singapore, Australia and China.
France, Belgium and Russia followed at the HR Tech Europe show in London last week and the plan is to launch in other key countries such as India and Germany every three months.
“A number of our US multinational customers were buying product for their UK subsidiaries so that’s where we chose to put our office,” Amdur said. “The UK is the most ready for this kind of solution because it has a number of large companies, a maturity of adoption in technology terms and a healthy jobs market.”
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Key customers include Amdur’s former employer Microsoft and PepsiCo, while its most important vertical markets to date comprise tech, manufacturing, healthcare and financial services.
So we could well be hearing more from them soon.
