Textkernel: Narrowing Search to an HR Utility
January 5, 2017
Remember the good old days of search? Autonomy, Convera, Endeca, Fast Search, and others from the go go 2000s identified search as a solution to enterprise information access. Well, those assertions proved to be difficult to substantiate. Marketing is one thing; finding information is another.
How does a vendor of Google style searching with some pre-sell Clearwell Systems-type business process tweaking avoid the problems which other enterprise search vendors have encountered?
The answer is, “Market search as a solution for hiring.” Just as Clearwell Systems and its imitators did in the legal sector, Textkernel, founded in 2001 and sold to CareerBuilder in 2015, , is doing résumé indexing and search focused on finding people to hire. Search becomes “recruitment technology,” which is reasonably clever buzzworking.
The company explains its indexing of CVs (curricula vitae) this way:
CV parsing, also called resume parsing or CV extraction, is the process of converting an unstructured (so-called free-form) CV/resume or social media profile into a structured format that can be integrated into any software system and made searchable. CV parsing eliminates manual data entry, allows candidates to apply via any (mobile) device and enables better search results.
The Textkernel Web site provides more details about the company’s use of tried and true enterprise search functions like metadata generation and report generation (called a “candidate profile”).
In 2015 the company had about 70 employees. Using the Overflight revenue estimation tool, Beyond Search pegs the 2015 revenue in the $5 million range.
The good news is that the company avoided the catastrophic thrashing which other European enterprise search vendors experienced. The link to the video on the Textkernel page is broken, which does not bode well for Web coding expertise. However, you can bite into some text kernels at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, January 5, 2016
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