Xivort Thinking About Trovix
(October 02, 2007) It's easy
to be cynical about new entrants to our industry. Predicting failure (or
lackluster performance) is easy. That's what most new businesses do.
Great ideas with bad understanding of
the market coupled with unimaginably small marketing budgets and ideas
is normal for our marketplace. Of the 50,000 vendors aiming for
the fabled
HR Decision maker, less than 1% have adequately budgeted for their
own success. For the most part, entrepreneurs in our space act as if
you're the dummy when you don't see their brilliance.
Evangelizing a new approach, displacing
an incumbent in a budget and ramping a sales effort all require
investment, patience, an adequate sense of the market and the ability to
endure some lean initial returns. Sales has a J-curve (a friend of mine
calls that the "network effect, I'm not so sure). Sales lift happens as
the result of sales. The initial efforts will be slow and tedious.
Results take time to manifest themselves.
That's why it's so easy to forecast
failure. Building a revenue stream (or a candidate pool for that matter)
requires the opposite of the energy that brings you to the question. New
ideas and new requirements have a deep need for urgency. Building equity
is a question of patience.
You're probably muttering to yourself,
"Yeah, yeah. So what does that have to do with
Trovix. It seems like you're
winding up for a predictable lambaste."
After a somewhat
predictable response to the new release from Trovix, I began to
indulge in an alternate view. What if the product lived up to the hype?
What if this was a case where there actually was revolution in the air.
The folks at Trovix maintain that if a
job seeker submits a resume, they will be able to architect the perfect
search query to run against their jobs database. Their technology (which
I've seen
and believe in) generates inferences based on huge volumes of data.
Rather than executing simple key word search strings, their technology
interprets data based on the data it has already seen. It's a sort of
google on steroids.
(Without being too tutorial,
Trovix
uses web efficiencies to generate something like the "structured
lexicons" that powered some of the earliest Resume databases and
Applicant Tracking Systems. This approach allows the query writer to see
results that a keyword query simply can not find. In a very real sense,
by structuring the relationships and semantics, this approach reads
resumes rather than indexing key words. In the old days, these
structured lexicons had to be developed by people and were really
expensive. No one ever doubted that they represented a better path, they
were simply too expensive to execute.)
Here's where the revolution is. If you
can use a resume to generate the search query for a job, and, I'm sure,
the job description to find a resume, why not do the opposite (hence the
title of this piece). It ought to be a no-brainer to have the Trovix
tool set use a resume to find similar resumes.
Much of the fussing about job
descriptions (which everyone readily admits never reflect the job),
competencies (which always feel like a list of things to feel guilty
about), and, assessment (which almost everyone agrees is a form of
voodoo) comes from one important fact. In today's workplace, it's really
hard to tell what someone does for a living. You can get a general idea
but the reality involves relationships in a network revolving around
particular situations and technologies.
All jobs are pretty unique (well, except
for call centers, manufacturing and retail). The resume of the last
person to hold the job is every bit as useful in describing the job as
any of the other alternatives. I bet that a
Trovix search of a resume database
(using the resume of the incumbent) would produce lots of novel job
candidates. I bet that they'd be better fits.
So, there it is. Everyone knows that
keyword searching is the culprit. Everyone knows that job descriptions
are inadequate. What if, rather than being the problem, the resume is
the solution?
That's the question that
Trovix asks our industry.
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