Jul 22, 2014, 10:41am EDT
Software firm Zapoint hires new CEO
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Career management software firm Zapoint Inc., based in Somerville, has named chief operating officer Joseph Brooks as its new CEO. Email  |  Twitter  |  Google+
Career management software firm Zapoint Inc. , based in Somerville, has named chief operating officer Joseph Brooks as its new CEO. Brooks joined Zapoint in 2007 to help develop the company's patented technology, and later became general manager and chief operating officer. Brooks succeeds Chris Twyman , who was Zapoint's CEO since the company was founded in 2006. He will remain the company's chairman. Brooks' primary focus will be expanding the global reach of the product SkillsMapper. “Zapoint has reached a very exciting point in its evolution,” Brooks said in a statement. “We have an exceptional team, solid partners and customers, a patented technology and a significant investment in product development. As I take on my new role, I will continue to devote all my energy to ensure that our solutions continue to exceed market expectations. "
Before joining Zapoint, Brooks worked in real estate in London. He holds a bachelor's degree in geography from University College London and a master's degree from Hult International Business School in Cambridge. Zapoint has four employees in Cambridge and is backed by more than $7 million from undisclosed investors to date. Zapoint ranked No. 43 on the BBJ's 2014 Pacesetters/Fastest-Growing Private Companies List. Its 2013 revenue was $2.1 million, up from $950,000 in 2012. Related links:


Software firm Zapoint hires new CEO

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Jobster, the company most famous for burning through almost $55 million in venture capital while it searched for a business model, has been sold to Zapoint. An excited  Chris Twyman, Zapoint’s founder and CEO, told me the acquisition fills a void in his company’s portfolio. By acquiring Jobster’s 800,000 profiles and, especially, its 250,000-280,000 active users, Zapoint simultaneously fills a void in its own talent network and it gains the data to enhance its external skills mapping. Zapoint is a talent management and career-mapping service that enables employers to see the strengths and weaknesses in their organization, based on internal employee profiles. Its free skills assessment tools allow career-oriented users to map their skills, background, and career progress and compare themselves to their industry peers. The profiles users complete become part of Zapoint’s Talent Network, which is searchable by recruiters. The Jobster acquisition greatly expands the talent pool and the number and type of career maps users can see. “We are really strong on the working side,” Twyman explained, meaning profiles and assessments completed by employees of client firms. “But we need to grow on the external side.”
Twyman, and Zapoint Chief Marketing Officer Keith Woodward, said Jobster would continue as a separate, consumer-facing brand. Zapoint will become the b-to-b site for its employer tools. Though Jobster began in 2004 as a jobs referral program, leveraging the social and business connections of company workers to fill jobs, it went through a number of DNA changes and very public struggles . Today, it is fundamentally a job board with a strong social networking and community overlay. Users not only have a standard resume, but they can have a Facebook-like profile and connect with other people on the site. Twyman said Jobster’s social component was part of the attraction. “It’s an integrated social networking site with profiles that are complementary with what we are doing.”
Zapoint intends to add its career mapping tools to the site and thus “rejuvenate” it. Jeff Seely, CEO of Jobster and companion company Recruiting.com, a talent acquisition CRM provider, couldn’t be reached. (The company changed its name last year to Recruiting.com, a site it bought in 2006 when Recruiting.com was a blog. However, TechCrunch, which brought the story of the Jobster sale , said Seely will remain in Seattle with Recruiting.com.


Zapoint Buys Jobster - ERE.net

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Zapoint , a Cambridge, MA-based maker of career management software, is taking an unusual approach to getting the attention of HR departments. The company announced last month that it is compiling the data generated by social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook to put together what it calls “skills maps” of the workforces at roughly 300 organizations, says CEO and founder Chris Twyman. The purpose is twofold, he says: to point out the “artificial walls” HR can put up within an organization, and to show potential customers the new analytics capabilities of Zapoint’s software, SkillsMapper. Twyman says that HR departments hold back in informing employees about the skills possessed in different departments and required of certain roles. Meanwhile, he says, employees themselves publicize much of this information on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. “The fact is that all of their employees are driven to those applications. Let’s take that desire and capture it in a career management tool that benefits the organization as a whole.”
Zapoint is roughly four years old and has raised about $5 million, from Stage 1 Ventures, HFF Investments, and individual investors. Last year, the firm acquired the Jobster business unit from Seattle-based Recruiting.com . The company has developed its software to better automate data imports on individual employees, but has decided to take that experience and technology to painting a macro picture of what an organization looks like, specifically, analyzing the skill sets of the workforce. “There’s a lot of data that you can extract from a LinkedIn profile or resume; much more than you’d anticipate,” says Twyman. “We’re wrapping a career management capability around that. We’ll take the talent profiles that have been created and put the context around them.”
Zapoint is creating its 300 skills maps upfront to show employers what they could get from the technology. The startup claims that the mapping technology could help customer trim recruiting costs by better showcasing who is qualified within their organizations and helping employees develop a career roadmap within a given firm rather than looking for a job at other companies. Twyman says the skills maps could ultimately give organizations insight into things like how their companies’ skill sets compare to those of competitors. Employees, meanwhile, could gain a more accurate picture of what gaps in skills lie between them and their desired promotion and can help bridge these with e-learning tools integrated into the Zapoint software for their company. The startup selling this organization-level skills analytics at a fixed cost of under $10,000 (for the base level) Twyman says. Zapoint has completed about 30 of the 300 maps at this point, and is targeting the full 300 by the end of the year. It’s bringing the maps directly to the organizations they cover. “In some cases it’s going to feel very threatening to the organization,” says Twyman. “We’re accessing data on their employees that is very accurate but they don’t necessarily own and control.”
Zapoint has also been commissioned to analyze organizations’ skill sets for a state initiative called Commonwealth Compact to create a talent database for the state and map the diversity of the workforce.

Zapoint Charting Out "Skills Mapsâ€ of 300 Big Companies

Zapoint constructs resumes from social networks
Zapoint constructs resumes from social networks
Want to just settle into a nice, anonymous job behind a desk somewhere? Too bad. Companies like Zapoint will tell the world what you do, for whom, and how you compare. @rafe
"Office Depot has 40,000 employees, and they don't know who there speaks Vietnamese," Chris Twyman, the CEO of Zapoint , says in his pitch. The Cambridge, Mass., company is launching a "Skills Map" for 300 major companies that, he says, will tell them more about their employees than anything in their own human resources systems. Zapoint gleans this data from information that people post on personal social-network pages -- Facebook , LinkedIn , and so on. Unlike resumes, which employees may update only when they're job hunting and even then not make public, people continually self-report and publicize a lot of work-related skills data. They just don't do it with job hunting or career development in mind. And employers generally can't capture it because their data collection systems (such as they are), are inward-focused. They don't look out toward social networks. Zapoint's Skills Mapper can compare two people at a company -- or people from different companies. Zapoint
On the other side of the fence, the data that big employers do have about their workers is generally walled off from the public. Who you report to, what training you have, and so on -- that stuff is not made public. Twyman thinks that's an archaic way to manage information about a workforce. "The social nets are marching in. You've got to embrace them," he said in an interview earlier this month. So Zapoint, which was founded in 2006, is attacking these silos of employee information by creating a series of reports on the people at 300 major companies. It's focusing on general job descriptions and doing cross-industry comparisons. For example, marketing execs at pharmaceutical companies. The company is figuring who's who, and who has what skills. It knows how good an entire  team is at a given company, too, since it knows who works with whom. It knows names. "It's LinkedIn on speed," Twyman said. If you're one of the people who's been corralled in a Zapoint roundup, now your skill set can be compared to your competitors. Maybe you think that that's good, maybe not, but you can't do much about it. If you're in HR, the worry is that now your competitors can see who your best-trained people are, and poach them. But there is an upside. Individuals could also use this information to see how they stack up, and start working toward improving their skills in ways that matter; or they could use the competitive information to get promotions or raises. Likewise, employers can use the data for skills development. And at the moment, Zapoint is not actually releasing individual dossiers and names. It is telling the 300 companies that it has profiled that it has the data, and is showing them only information in the aggregate. It will sell them the names attached to the data, though, and then let them fill in the information that Zapoint can't collect: the org chart that shows how all the people and skills are arrayed in a business. I'm not sure that Zapoint's pitch to businesses -- "We have data about your people; pay us and you can have it too" -- will go over so well, but the company is one of several that is taking the historically private information of what we do at work and how well we do it, and making it public (See also: Honestly.com ). The days of being able to hide behind a desk are coming to an end. Watch


Zapoint constructs resumes from social networks

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CAMBRIDGE , Mass. , October 31 , 2012 -- Zapoint , Inc. , the leader in social career management software solutions , today announced it has entered in a strategic partnership with the Indiana University Kelley School of Business .

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