RiseSmart, yes the same folks behind
the Career 100 rankings have just announced that they have got angel funding. In an email they sent to me they said:
RiseSmart, the human-powered job search service for $100K+ earners, announced today that it has secured a $1.5 million seed round of financing from angel investors, including leading authorities in the human resources and recruitment industry.
Bridging the gap between traditional job boards and the personal
attention of a career coach, RiseSmart - a subscription-based service
competing with executive job sites such as TheLadders.com - assigns
each member a personal "Job Concierge" who is responsible for matching
member profiles with the most relevant job listings returned through
an intelligent automated search of its million-job database.
The RiseSmart Concierge is the centerpiece of RiseSmart's strategy
of building deeper customer relationships than other $100K+ job sites.
Each RiseSmart Concierge is responsible for reviewing the resumes and
learning the job preferences of assigned members. Concierges can
modify future searches based on member feedback - for example,
screening out jobs from undesirable companies.
So would there be takers for RiseSmart's services? I think so. Senior executives, in my personal experiences, are really not very technology savvy and while jobs have moved to the jobsites, CXO level folks are chary about doing a job hunt through job sites. One CEO I was talking to was so concerned about his privacy that he hadn't even opened a Linkedin profile.
So in my view RiseSmart is competition not just for specialised jobsites like ladders.com but in this part of the world it can be a viable competition for executive search consultants, depending on the value their "Job Concierges" can add to their clients!
