RealMatch Brings Online Dating Model to Job Boards

CIO — Job seekers and employers have a new option for finding and posting job ads online. A new job board called RealMatch is launching today, and its goal is to make it easier and cheaper for job seekers and employers to hook up.

RealMatch uses proprietary technology to match job seekers' specific skills with the employers who need them, and vice versa. Rather than having employers and job seekers enter keywords into search boxes to find candidates' résumés and job ads based on those keywords, RealMatch uses "a homogenized taxonomy of terms" associated with different jobs and skills to automatically pair job seekers and employers, says Rafael Cosentino, vice president of the Potomac, Md.-based company.

With RealMatch, job seekers and employers can choose from RealMatch's list of 65,000 professional job titles and over 300,000 skills associated with specific titles. Job seekers create their profiles by choosing the most popular job titles associated with their profession and from among their most relevant skills. An employer chooses from specific job titles and most-important skills associated with them, then RealMatch identifies the candidates who best fit the employer's needs, says Cosentino.

Cosentino says the keyword search technology that most job boards use is less effective than RealMatch's technology because the results that keyword searches yield aren't always relevant to the job seeker. And that's because there are no universal search terms job seekers can enter into search boxes to get the jobs they want, he adds. Cosentino notes that the keyword search model is also troublesome for employers who often have to weed through hundreds of résumé submissions to find a handful of candidates worth calling for initial phone screenings.

"Keyword search technology comes out of the box with a SQL server," says Cosentino. "Matching technology doesn't exist out of the box. We've spent $11 million refining our technology. Twenty-three people have been working on it for three years."

Judging by the way RealMatch worked in a test CIO.com conducted this morning, the developers are going to be spending more time working out some kinks, which included error messages that appeared in pop-up windows when CIO.com tried opening certain positions.

RealMatch is free for job seekers. They can access RealMatch's database of over 1 million jobs by creating profiles for themselves based on their current title, their industry, the skills they have, their level of proficiency with those skills, their educational background and location. Once they've created a profile, RealMatch shows users a list of jobs that best match their skills. Job seekers can also upload their résumés and block certain employers from seeing their résumés.

Employers can post jobs to RealMatch for free, and they can specify the skills and proficiency levels required for the specific jobs they post. RealMatch's technology then goes to work parsing the currently 2 million profiles in the system to find appropriate candidates. Employers are presented with a list of potential candidates, and they can look at each candidate's profile. Only when the employer wants to open a job seeker's contact information does the employer have to pay a $25 fee to do so, says Cosentino.

"That's much different from spending $400 to post a job on Monster, then spending days to weed through résumés," he says.

Cosentino says over 200,000 employers and recruiters are using RealMatch, and over 75,000 jobs come into the system each week.

"Because we've lowered the barrier to entry and a more diverse group of employers are posting jobs, we're getting a lot of jobs now, says Cosentino.