Why this is the perfect time to launch a Klout for Professionals
In the last few months, a bunch of Professional Networking products have shut down. Path.to which was launched in March 2011 as a “Linkedin meets about.me”, later pivoted to a “Eharmony for Jobs” , received a $1.5 million funding from adecco and finally closed down last month. Workforpie, a memphis based startup, was launched as a website which scores software developers by pulling their activity from Github, Stackoverflow and HackerNews. The were backed by an amount of $315 from ‘ am-ventures’ and SeedHatchery. Few weeks ago I saw an email in my inbox from them saying that they were shutting down. While Path.to and Workforpie never picked up greatly, there was another product which had garnered significant attraction, it was Identified.com. Originally launched as a people ranking professional search engine, Identified managed to get millions of users and nabbed $35 million in funding. A year ago, they quietly started killing their product, by the end of last year they started focussing on the health recruiting market and finally in 2013 they pivoted to a social recruiting product.
Enough said about the history, what do you think lies in common with all the above startup ? Ofcourse, they all shutdown their products, but there is something more. All of them were loosely built on one idea, an idea of Quantifying Professional Data. Well, since a series of products based on a similar idea shutdown, does it mean the idea itself is a failure? Was it really a collaborative effort for extended MVP testing which failed ? The answer would be ‘NO’. Bright.com is just doing fine while being based on a similar idea. So it wouldn’t be wrong to say that “it wasnt the idea that failed, it probably was the execution and the intended target market that mattered”. Read Jill Felska’s (COO of Path.to) blog post on how they could have saved the company.
So, what is the future of the recruiting & professional space ? Will Linkedin keep dominating this space by surpassing the likes of monster.com ? While that is certainly a possibility, alternatives such as Zerply, Jobvite, Quora, Twitter, Stackoverflow, AngelList, Indeed and Careerbuilder have been wholeheartedly contributing. But where’s the disruption ? I really like the products Bright and Gild have built for matching job and sourcing talent. Having said that, where is the “Klout for Professionals” which the social web has been anticipating for so long ? A quora thread discusses the possibility of Linkedin coming up with a Klout-style score, but those are just could’s & would’s.
What should a Klout for Professional’s look like and why do we need it? Michael Arrington earlier had expressed his detailed thoughts on Klout and later invested in Klout. Clearly there are benefits, and the concept applied in a professional context would make even more sense. Quantifying a user’s professional identity can substantially simplify talent discovery. After all, the economy is driven by products and products are built by talent, and there is a gap that needs to be bridged between the talent and products (or companies). With a bunch of professional space startups shutting down the gap is open even wider and taking this opportunity I would like to launch Predikt.co, something on similar lines to “Klout for Professionals”.
Thanks for reading, feedback will be appreciated. Do check out the beta.
