This week’s e-biz in brief
Compare and contrast job boards
Three of the major job boards are taking part in a seminar in central London
on 19 March aimed at helping HR professionals and recruiters decide which is
the best site to use and how to get the best from them. The job boards will be
Workthing (which incorporates PeopleBank), GoJobsite and Top Boards. Tim
Elkington from Enhance Media will also be on hand to give unbiased information
and advice. Organisations signed up include Reuters, the Ministry of Defence,
the Inland Revenue and PricewaterhouseCoopers. A full programme is available on
the website. www.osneymedia.co.uk/events/events.asp?etype=ima
Intelligent skills sourcing
The SkillLocator from Applied Psychology Research is a new technology that
claims to be able to intelligently extract information from CVs whatever their
format. It is being developed in conjunction with online portal Probit-e and
reads CVs at about 6,000 times faster than humans do. The information it
extracts can be used to compile individual candidate’s skills and experience
matrices that can be scored and used to match candidates to their ideal job. www.probit-e.com
UK leads Europe in e-learning
The UK e-learning market leads the way in Europe according to a survey by
Enterprise Ireland, the Irish government’s trade and technology body. The UK
accounts for 50 per cent of the European market’s total spend and the survey
found that UK expenditure on e-learning is set to increase to £390m by 2004
(European spend is predicted to reach £3bn by 2004). Eighty-three per cent of
UK companies are looking to increase or maintain training budgets.
Seventy-three per cent of companies are already using e-learning and 32
companies that are not using e-learning at present are set to implement an
online training solution in the next two years.
AI comes of age in Cambridge
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to replace the knowledge belonging
to employees who leave their companies via a new system developed by
Cambridge-based web services company Transversal. Metafaq uses AI to create and
store a permanent record of an employee’s expertise and customer questions in
an online knowledge base, which can be searched using natural language queries.
One of the development team, David McKay, who is a lecturer at Cambridge
University, has used the system to capture and store answers to students’
questions over the years. www.transversal.com
Tapping into employee potential
NetTPS is a new web-based organisational development tool used to help
discover untapped employee potential. Developed by HR consultancy RSM Potentia
International, the system uses five web-based modules that uncover individual
or team values, thinking habits, and action needed to reveal where the
potential exists. www.nettps.com
