Introducing People Search

We know – we’ve spent four years making software to perfect it. But your success ultimately comes down to the quality and volume of candidates that enter the top of your recruiting funnel.

Today, we’re introducing a powerful new tool that will make you better at sourcing passive candidates in competitive markets.

Solving the hard part of recruiting

At Workable, we believe that your recruiting platform should – first and foremost – help you build a richer pipeline to work with. Our software reflects the reality that sourcing talent is your strongest leverage for success. We brought you seamless integration with 50+ job sites to advertise your openings to the world. We helped you build beautiful careers pages and a mobile-friendly applicant experience. We’ve baked in a hassle-free referral program and external recruiter collaboration into your workflow.

Now we’re empowering your passive candidate sourcing with instant People Search, a recruiting technology that puts millions of rich profiles at the fingertips of your team, saving them hours of research, improving their hit rate and letting them bring people data in the context where your next great hire will be found.

Boolean expressions? Really?

When I hire a designer, it’s not the word “photoshop” in a keyword list that did it. It’s because I admire their work. So, when I’m looking for a designer, a database, a search box and a boolean expression hardly seem like the right place to start.

Instead, I want to look at online portfolio sites for work that inspires me. I want to check out the list of attendees in a design meetup that attracts the best professionals in town and learn more about each individual. I want to find people in the context of their work, not in the results pages of arcane search queries.

Put your sourcing workflow in the right order

People Search from Workable lets you do just that. It’s a sourcing tool that lives in your Chrome browser so you can right-click any name or social profile you spot on the internet to look them up. It will instantly research dozens of internet sites and data sources to put together a complete resume including contact information and links to social and professional profiles.

This way, you don’t need to start your search with databases and boolean expressions. You can find candidates where they are active, on professional sites, meetups, communities, company websites, articles or blog posts and instantly bring their profiles into life. And yes, you can clip them right into your Workable account for your team to review and reach out to, or download them as a PDF if you’re not a Workable user yet.

Spend your time on people, not data entry

We’ve been working with recruiters long enough to understand what really slows you down. We’ve seen you limit yourself to picking only a handful of candidates because researching them takes a long time. We painfully watched as you copy-pasted the basics into your applicant tracking system, often not enough for your hiring managers to make good decisions, because let’s face it: reproducing rich resumes from one system to another by hand is terribly tedious. We’ve seen you torture yourself looking up emails in five different databases, often missing good candidates because you lack a universal search.

We know you’re a creative and curious crowd, limited by the time it takes to research and collate information that’s already out there on the internet. To search across multiple sources, to aggregate and deduplicate and feed it into your recruiting platform is an inhuman task. It should be a computer’s job really. So we taught the computer how to do it for you. In seconds.

Your new superpowers

What can you do with an instant, universal people research and aggregation tool that syncs up with your applicant tracking system? Quite a few things that you wouldn’t dare try in the past:

• Break free from the tyranny of boolean search. Start in the right place: where people are active online. Look up every employee of that great company on Angel List. Check out the profile of the person who wrote that insightful answer on Quora. Get your hands on that list of conference attendees and right-click yourself to recruiter nirvana.
• Be unapologetically greedy. Source 100 candidates, or even 200 for a job. Conducting a resume search and feeding it to your system takes a few seconds, so go to town with it.
• Get it all in your ATS. Not just a headline and a couple of notes. The full resume, social profiles, skills, even deep info like their activity on GitHub. It’s not like you’re doing the copying yourself, so clip it in and help your hiring managers make better decisions.
• Forget shortlists. Build a long list and get your hiring manager to review it with you. Engage them earlier in the cycle and get them to help you aim your search in the right direction.
• Improve your hit rate. With a higher chance of finding personal contact information and a full-featured talent CRM sitting behind it, People Search will make sure that you don’t miss out on good candidates because the research was too tedious.

How does this work?

People Search does its magic by looking up multiple sources of publicly available information about people, essentially letting you reach almost anyone with a single universal search. It combines information from many sources intelligently to look up full resumes starting with as little as a name. Behind the scenes, it’s a lot more complex than it looks, using NLP and machine learning to deduplicate, verify and deep search information – a technology that took over a year and a team of awesome data engineers to build.

But you don’t need to know about that. Your job is to find great people. Let us worry about the technology. What you’ll want to know, is that some of the best folk in recruiting tech are constantly improving the algorithms and integrating more data sources, so it’s only going to get better. We hope that, once you’ve lived with it for a while, it will become the only research tool you need for recruiting.

Take it for a spin

People Search is now available for all Workable customers. We’ve included 10 searches per month for free as part of your plan so anyone on your team can source great people simply by installing our Chrome Extension. Not a Workable customer? People Search is still available to source the best talent. Instead of adding the candidates to Workable, download profiles as a PDF.

For in-house recruiters who do intensive sourcing, we offer individual recruiter licenses with unlimited lookups. And for those of you using Workable with multiple client accounts, it’s easy to switch between them from within Chrome. People Search is aware of the jobs you have in each account so you can clip people into the right funnel with one click. It will even tell you when you’re looking at someone that has already been sourced for another job in your account and let you check out their history.

Have a look at Workable’s features, or get in touch with us to tailor a solution to your organization’s needs.