TalentBin launches as recruiting tool to find engineers

First Round and Charles River Ventures-backed start-up officially opens its doors, after pivoting

TalentBin, which crawls the Web to compile a profile for technical workers based on implicit information, announced Tuesday that it's officially launched, and has moved out of private beta.  

TalentBin started off as Honestly.com, which was launched a couple years ago with $1.2 million in funding back in May 2010 from First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures. Whlle the original idea of surfacing high-quality professionals remains intact, the execution of the idea by getting users to input their information proved too difficult. To that end, Honestly.com pivoted in July 2011 to become TalentBin, while it still had more than $600,000 in the bank, said Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of TalentBin, in an interview with me.

Since mid-2011, TalentBin has been in private beta building out its thesis and customer base, which has grown to 60 customers, including companies like Groupon, Intuit and Yahoo. 

TalentBin essentially crawls the Web, such as Twitter, Quora, GitHub, to name a few sites, to find implicit activities of engineers and other technical workers. By doing so, TalentBin can aggregate a fuller picture of a person that is not reflected in, say, a LinkedIn profile. (See a comparison in image below)

"The only people who spend time on LinkedIn are recruiters and sales people," said Kazanjy. But other people, like engineers, don't typically beef up their LinkedIn profiles, Kazanjy added. To that end, recruiters don't get as large of a pie of potential hires as they could. In the image below, one can see that TalentBin provides more candidates for a particular search than BranchOut or LinkedIn - both providers of explicit resumes.  

For instance, (see image below) if a recruiter is looking for a Ruby on Rails developer, he may find under 4,000 candidates on LinkedIn, compared to 22,361 profiles on TalentBin. Then if a recruiter narrows his search to a "ruby on rails and sinatra" expert, he gets 103 results on LinkedIn versus 1005 profiles on TalentBin.

Market opportunity

By aggregating this information, TalentBin hopes to tap into the market for passive candidate recruiting, a market that LinkedIn has shown to be big business. Passive candidate recruiting means a recruiter reaches out to potential hires versus people currently looking for jobs. One of the dominant ways LinkedIn makes money is to charge recruiters about $9,000 a year per seat to its database of profiles, said Kazanjy. LinkedIn generated $188 million in revenue in the first quarter of this year.

For its part, TalenBin is charging $4800 per seat, per year. The alternative for a recruiter is to pay LinkedIn $9,000 to access a relatively sparse profile or pay a recruiting agency about $20,000 for one hire, said Kazanjy.

As for whether focusing on the technical worker is big business, apparently it is. Dice Holdings, which focuses on the technical professional, generated $179 million in sales in 2011.