When my co-founder, Ade, and I started Identified in 2010 at Stanford Business School, our vision was clear: we knew there had to be a better way for people to make career decisions using the data on the social Web. We both had spent years using data and analytics in our careers to help businesses make decisions, and yet there was no real way to use data in order to make decisions for our own careers.
Like many of our classmates, we’d mainly followed paths of trial and error to land where we were. Huge decisions in people’s careers were being made without any data; classmates were making decisions as to where to work based on information sessions, gossip, parental ‘wisdom’, or pure luck. Yet we knew that the answers to many of the professional questions we were asking ourselves were out there, ‘trapped’ in the mess of data on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and countless other social media sites. Questions like:
- What companies hire people with my background?
- To end up doing [X] at [Y] company, what is the right next step?
- What companies offer the fastest career trajectories for growth, development and promotion?
- Who are some professionals who’s career paths I should emulate?
At Identified, we’ve focused on how we can use information from the social Web to create transformative data-driven products for professionals and companies. Today, we are proud to announce the most important tool we’ve developed as a team – a technology called, “SYMAN,” (Systematic Mass Normalization). SYMAN is a new technology for a new type of problem. It is the same problem that plagues every company using social data, and which no other social or professional network has been able to solve. SYMAN cleans and organizes masses of disparate, incoherent professional data from social media sources to create new insights into the labor market.
As a team, we’ve worked incredibly hard to develop SYMAN and we are excited about the new applications it will power. SYMAN has the potential to uncover powerful insights that will radically shift the way companies pursue talent, manage their workforce, and understand their competition. It also has the potential to help us realize our original vision of helping people make better career decisions. Check out our video that explains how SYMAN works.
-BRENDAN WALLACE
