RiseSmart does what it calls “web-enabled outplacement” – which the rest of us can translate as “finding a job on the internet”. Transition Concierge is the flagship product of RiseSmart, which combines automated search with human filtering to provide much better results for job searches. GoMo News interviewed Sanjay Sathe, founder and CEO of RiseSmart, about the Transition Concierge To-Go mobile application, which launches today.
Transition Concierge To-Go is a Blackberry, iPhone and Android application that brings the on-line service to your mobile – it has launched on Blackberry today, and the other platforms will be coming soon. A big part of this service is the human element. It’s not just an on-line forum or search engine. There are actual people there that you can contact by phone or email, called Transition Specialists. They can provide you with extra information and help, as well as making your job search results more relevant
The search allows job-seekers to enter their skills and preferences into a profile. It then matches jobs to that profile and notifies you of new results every week – and allows you to tag jobs you like for following up, as well as sending you reminders to do so.
We made contact with Sanjay Sathe to get a few additional pieces of info:
Is there a purchase charge or subscription fee for the service?
The service is available at no cost to eligible employees of companies who use Transition Concierge 3.0 as their outplacement solution. We currently have several thousand employees in the system who can begin using the app right away. We do have a consumer job-matching offering that is available for a monthly fee, and are currently looking at extending the mobile app to consumers as well.
How are the jobs sourced? Is it only through job search engines, or do employers submit requests to RiseSmart? Does RiseSmart go looking for positions?
We use a combination of aggregation and semantic search technology to match each employee’s job preferences with listings across the Web. This includes virtually all publicly available information — pulled from job boards, corporate sites and other sources — as well as listings that employers and recruiters have submitted directly to us.
The truth is, there’s no shortage of job listings out there; the problem is finding the ones that are right for you. We’ve been working for several years to better understand searcher intent and the contextual meaning of job-related terms, so that we can deliver highly relevant job leads from the millions of listings on the Web. We then have a trained set of human eyes go through each employee’s results to further refine the matches we send them.
Particularly when you’re on a mobile phone, it’s a lot easier to go through a small number of results that are matched to you, rather than searching a job board and getting bombarded with irrelevant results.
Where did the idea for the application come from? Was it through personal experience, or just an awareness that there was a gap in this market?
The mobile app is a natural extension of our Transition Concierge outplacement offering, which is all about leveraging Web-based technology to put people in jobs faster. Whereas traditional outplacement firms typically require laid-off employees to come to their offices for group seminars and the like, we believe in taking our services to the jobseeker directly. And mobile is a great way to do that.
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