Want a job? This site reveals if you have a chance

Recruiters and hiring managers are just too darn busy these days to read résumés on Monster or to scour professional profiles on LinkedIn to find hot talent. But hey, no problem! Everything they need to know about a prospect’s potential can be automatically extracted from his or her Facebook profile and reduced to a numeric rank between 0 and 100.

That, at any rate, is the promise of a new social networking site called Identified, which left beta yesterday. The idea is that you let it connect with your Facebook account, and within moments, it spews out your Identified Score based on information you’ve given Facebook about your education and work history, as well as where your Facebook friends who use Identified work or study.

The value of the service may be questionable — but you just know it’ll catch on. People will pretend not to take it seriously, and those with high scores will mention them with air quotes. But ultimately, inexorably, it’s going to affect people’s employability, and one of the key reasons it will likely gain traction is the clout of the backers who have poured $5.5 million into the service, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt, venture capital gurus Bill and Tim Draper, and Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya.

At least Identified works both ways. As a job hunter, you can look at companies’ scores (which are based on the scores of their employees who are Identified users) and view, for example, what schools its employees attended, what they studied, and how long employees work there on average. Recruiters and companies worldwide can view your score and use it as a prescreening tool.

Naturally, I was very eager to learn my value according to what Identified dubs “the world’s first Professional Stock Market.” The whole experience proved to be illuminating, despite the fact that I have a dismal score of 22. I’ve long thought that recruiters and hiring managers were interested in knowing more about prospective employees than the bare-bones work and education information you can feed into Facebook. It never occurred to me that being Facebook friends with a lot of different people at a lot of different organizations would make me a more promising prospect — regardless of those people’s job titles or what their organizations did.

Adventures in Identified land

I started my quest for my Identified Score by going to the Identified home page, which features a drawing of a skeptical-looking recruiter gazing at his laptop screen. To the right, in bold text, it asks the ominous and far-reaching question, “When companies search for you, what do they find?” I dutifully clicked the big green “Connect to Facebook” button to find out.

Into Identified’s hopper, compliments of Facebook, went my email address, education history, and work history, as well as my Facebook friends’ birthdays, education histories, and work histories (their privacy settings permitting). It’s a small price to pay, I guess, for the professional equivalent of my credit score.

I was then invited to click a green button to see my rank — almost missing the tiny prechecked box telling me I would be sharing my rank on Facebook when I clicked the button. I was then presented with my score — a whopping 22! — and was told where I stood among my Facebook friends’ rankings.

How did it arrive at this judgment? Somewhat surprisingly, Identified recognized the small liberal arts school I attended in Southern California and that I got a degree in English there. But the education portion of my score did not reflect that I went to said university on a scholarship, that I earned a second degree in Business Administration, whether or not I graduated with any honors, and so on. And why should it? Facebook can’t accommodate any of that information. Oh, Identified didn’t recognize the San Francisco high school I attended, either.

What of the work history Identified imported from Facebook? Of the five or so past and present employers I listed, it recognized and thus “credited me” with just one: KFC, where I worked in 1991 through 1992 during my senior year of high school. So much for those two years at my first post-college job at a small community newspaper and my employment with InfoWorld since 1999! What’s more, Identified helpfully chose to list my primary job as performer/instructor, because I spend a few hours a week performing and teaching at a local theater.

Maybe my friends can help

But salvation was at hand. Evidently, every connection I had to a different company or school, be it through one person or a dozen, boosted my Identified Score by a single point. Were I to connect via Facebook with, say, the CEO of Netflix, two VPs at Chevron, four undergraduates at the University of Boise, and one part-time cashier at McDonalds, my score would shoot up four points — one for each organization. That’s just … weird.

Now that I was scored, I was able to unlock more of Identified’s power. Under the heading Marketplace, it presented an automated stream of updates that it deemed of potential interest to me. Because I worked at KFC in 1991, Identified decided I would be interested in knowing that the company has recently hired someone who went to Maryville College and someone with a degree in Business from Wytheville Community College. It informed me that REI had hired someone who attended the same university from which I graduated in 1996. And because my title at InfoWorld is “senior analyst,” it decided I must be interested in career-related news pertaining to other senior analysts, regardless of their field: one recently hired by Tiffany, one hired by Levi Strauss, and one hired by Analysis Group.

I could also see the rankings of my Facebook friends, presumably based on the information I’d passed on via Facebook when I allowed Identified to mine my account. That including one fellow with an Identified Score of 77, who lists himself as a member of the R&D department at Zombie Preparedness & Survial [sic] Industries (ZPSI).

I was also able to examine profiles of different companies on Identified. For example, my previous employer KFC has a score of 91 and is ranked 22nd in Travel and Hospitality against such competitors as Starbucks and Hilton Hotels. Companies, it turns out, are scored based on the weighted average scores of the people who work for them. I also learned that the most prominent job title at KFC is Cashier (held by 11 percent of its workforce), followed by Cook (just over 6 percent) and Manager (just over 4 percent). I also learned that the most common college major among employees at Disneyland is Business (just over 5 percent), followed by Communication and Drama.

With a little searching, I found the link through which I could deactivate my account. When I was prompted to confirm that I wanted to deactivate, I was given a space to explain why. I’m still struggling with exactly what to say, so please offer your suggestions in the comments below. A big bucket of Original Recipe goes to the winner.  

This story, “Want a job? This site reveals if you have a chance,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.