1) What is WCC Group Smart Search & Match? Can you give me a) WCC in 10 words or less,
(WCC Smart Search & Match) finds what you want, not simply what you asked for
and b) A 30-second Elevator pitch?
Matching is smart search, call it search+
This technology creates a human way of searching to deliver the optimal match.
ELISE achieves this by using
§ Word & concept affinities
§ Flexible numeric boundaries
§ Weighted criteria
§ Bi-directional search method
to help businesses / governments and their customers to find people, products, or services that best fit their requirements
2) How long have you been around? Where are you located?
WCC was founded in 1996 and is located in the Netherlands, with offices in Palo Alto
3) So are you a sourcer, an outsourcer, a third-party recruiter, or a mixture? Do you see yourself competing with contigency contract firms or independent recruiters?
Well, we are a software provider of matching technology, among other markets also applied at staffing companies (such as Adecco and Robert Half), DoLs (such as West Virginia, UK, etc), job boards (such as market10, wpni.com, etc) making the search & match process sexier and let the people do the smart work J
4) It is becoming more difficult to find top quality candidates. Everyone says their process is what matters, but they can’t all be true. Without using marketing speak, what is actually different about how you generate results?
Let me try to elaborate a little on what we provide, as I think the difference is in how our technology works. Firstly, matching as done by ELISE is the art of meaningfully ranking results. When ranking results, the axiom is that all data is returned – in ranked order – no matter which search criteria were used. Of course, one may set a threshold when no longer results should be shown. For one a bad match could be anything below a 95% match, while someone else that is more desperate may still be happy with a match above 60%. The bi-directional search and match capabilities of ELISE allow both the searcher and the counterpart to set individual thresholds. So a candidate looking for a job could set a threshold of 60% and an employer to set the threshold to 90%. Only when both parties are sufficiently satisfied in each other, a match is made. As a result of these individual thresholds, it is thus possible that the results are reduced to only meaningful results. Bi-directional matching is the ideal approach to tackling the flood of too many matches.
WCC was founded on the belief that traditional database search tools all too often miss what the searcher is truly seeking, and finding more relevant answers takes too long. The contrast to this is the internet search engine where search terms deliver a too broaden set of results that very often does not match the expected results, even if ranked by relevancy.
All search technologies around focus on finding information that meets certain criteria, but often information wants to be found. Not just by anybody, but by a specific group. For example, a job posting with a job board wants to be found by a particular candidate, with certain education and skills. It is only when employer and candidate are both happy, that a match is made.
This is why we have introduced the term “matching” to mean find mutual interest and to connect mutually interested parties. So matching is bi-directional search, finding matches where both parties are interested in the match. The results are better and sustainable results.
5) Do you use any of the new Web 2.0 tools (blogs, social networking software, podcasts) to help you find people?
It depends on what our customer in the employment arena would use, our technology ELISE can search through Web 2.0 tools as well. At the same time we use e.g. Webinars for promotional reasons.
6) One of the toughest challenges for online employment firms is keeping talented people from going out on their own. What does WCC do to ensure that key players stay with the firm instead of starting competitive businesses?
It is important for us that the customer of our customer = the candidate / user is happy too. The search results is one thing, as matching just delivers meaningful results. What our customers feed back to us is the fact that we go further than just perform the match, but e.g. do gap analysis between the candidate’s skills and the requirements in the vacancies and the other way round, so that the person’s talent can either be put to the best-fitting position or the person can work on some things to one day get on to that position.
7) What business results do you feel comfortable sharing with the audience (growth numbers, number of clients, big deals announced)?
30% growth p.a.
8) Do you read blogs on a daily basis? If so, who do you regularly read?
I actually do but not too many, yours indeed, the one from Andy Bitterer (http://bitblueblog.com/) and http://www.contentmatters.info/
9) What is the most exciting technology that you see out there?
The whole area around biometrics and location based services
10) Give us two trends that affect corporate recruiting departments in North America.
Obviously a shift of ‘power’ from the employer towards the candidate, one consequence thereof will be the set-up of a more individual talent management, merge of job boards, media and social networks
11) Anything you want to finish with? Promotions, reasons to use you, final thoughts?
Yes, I’d actually like to finish with an IDC quote, as that describes how independent analysts see us: WCC is a company with a different approach to unifying access to information, its architecture appears to be quite different from other content-based applications. It is really a flexible, scalable matching engine for any kind of information that can be represented by extracted features (Sue Feldman, Research VP IDC in: ‘Unified Access to Information: Content Vendors Heed the Urge to Converge’ – IDC## 202942, Aug 2006)
That’s nice isn’t it?
And Gartner has just put us on their magic quadrant for information access technology – as a niche player – why? Because our strength lies in the HR world
Recent comments