Heard of Workscore.com yet? You probably will soon, when applicants send you their “social resumes.”
Workscore, currently in beta, has several not-new features, such as rating your own workplace and seeing how others rate their workplaces. But the most interesting feature involves letting users build a social resume — a profile of their skills, plus ratings from co-workers the user has selected.
Users who collect enough ratings can then send ratings links to individuals — such as HR managers — at prospective places of employment. Essentially, it’s a way for a job hunter to say, “Here’s what others (but not my boss) think of me.”
The site — and the social resume — is a reaction to the reluctance of managers to give references and appraisals on a former employee when contacted by a company thinking of hiring the employee.
The flaw?
Yes, we see the flaw: So, someone gets his buddies/workmates to give top reviews that make the applicant look like the best thing since the invention of the microchip. The fix is in, right?
Well, maybe. As we said, Workscore requires users to amass a bunch of reviews, not just one or two. That means people looking to game the system will have to find a whole bunch of buddies at work willing to play along. Further, users who are reviewed can’t see the scores individually or change them, so the user is taking a bit of a risk by sending blind reviews to an employer.
And reviewers remain anonymous so they can’t get sued for saying bad stuff about an employee.
One quirky caveat: The system allows users to weight individual scores. In other words, if a user thinks a particular reviewer is likely to give high scores, the user can give those scores greater weight. Conversely, if a user thinks a potential reviewer is likely to be critical, that score can be given a lighter weight. Though you’d have to wonder why a user would approach someone like that for a review in the first place.
How valuable would Workscore ratings be to applicants and, especially, HR managers? It’s unlikely you’d ever hire someone based solely on Workscore ratings, no matter how much you might trust them. The ratings might develop into just another tool used to judge the applicant. We’ll see.
Note: As mentioned, Workscore is in beta, so if you give it a run-through yourself, you might hit a few technical bumps here and there.
