Review: Broadlook

As the flow of technology accelerates, it’s easy to lose sight of the functionality of industry standards. While users are busy using and non-users are busy using something else, software evolves relentlessly. The hardest part of any review process is that as soon as you put your foot in the river, it’s a different river.

Increasingly, the meaning of software is really the ecosystem that surrounds the company that produces it. There are all sorts of Applicant Tracking, Payroll, HRInformation, Performance Management, Compensation, Learning Management, Job Board, Assessment, HR Metrics and Workforce Planning tools. The difference between one and the other is a combination of design, capability, customer service, alliances and company stability.

Predicting which of the many (over 100,000) competitors will survive, thrive, continue to be well capitalized, succeed at sales and continue to provide innovation is a sophisticated game involving a good deal of speculation (that’s high paid code for guesswork). What’s clear is that the more diverse the ecosystem (information and service providers tied into the core offering), the more stable the overall platform. This notion, that the core tool is really a platform for the integration of other tools, is a real shift in emphasis for the industry.

Instead of continually redesigning the wheel to keep up with the other wheel makers, smart software companies put a stake in the ground. They commit to giving you the ability to harness all sorts of functionality. Facebook, Salesforce.com, Apple and Cisco run variants of this strategy. Taleo, SuccessFactors, and a couple of RPOs are nibbling at the edge of it.

The traditional approach to platform development in HR/Recruiting is to brand a white label (generic) version of some company’s functionality and call it your own. Gateways and passwords to the alliance partner are an additional method. In each case, the platform owner acts as a prime contractor with the rest of the ecosystem behaving like subcontractors.

There is an interesting alternative.

Rather than investing in the complex set of alliances and customer relationships that make a big ecosystem, a software company can focus strictly on platform agnostic tools. In this scenario, the software provider is responsible for the continuous integration of their tool with a range of providers. Companies like Infohrm and dashboard providers assume the role.

I had a comprehensive demo of Broadlook this week. Their products are not databases or platforms. They offer a toolset for Recruiting and Sales lead generation. As you might guess from the introduction, it’s been a while since I looked at them and am surprised at how they’ve grown.

While it is true that you can search Google for candidates and find gems, the process is always a one-off search with lots of stray data (that is unless you have Shallybots). Broadlook’s toolset automates the search engine interface and supplements it with 700 business rules that parse, sort and sift results into usable lists. With their tools, you can quickly make a list of sales contacts, engineers or the telephone directory of a company.

The genius of the Broadlook approach is that they clearly understand the required output. That leaves them free to figure out how to manipulate the data as it comes out of search engines or social media sites. They are currently using the tag line “Real Time Internet Sourcing for Passive Talent”. They continually emphasize that they are a toolset, not a database. They are a tools provider that helps customers maximize their Internet usage.

Broadlook integrates data from the entire spectrum of internet sources: Lists, Job Boards, Websites, Corporate Websites, Business Intelligence Sources, and Search Engines.

The product s composed of four major modules:

• Profiler: Finds candidates on corporate websites
• Eclipse: Parses lists from professional associations and trade shows into csv files
• Diver: Validates search result by going one page deep.
• Market Mapper: Builds lead lists according to your criteria; overcomes SIC code problems

In addition, the company offers a free module called Contact Capture. The tool automates much of the field mapping that makes list integration so time intensive.

Broadlook is a set of data management tools that make internet Names Research simple and repeatable. The drudgery of wading through unnecessary context is eliminated. The company is continuing to expand its investment in R&D as it strives to become a first tier technology operation.