Most individuals seeking out new job opportunities use their personal e-mail address to correspond with a prospective employer, presumably keeping that job hunt secret from their current employer. However, now, Joberate, a startup that tracks an individual’s job search activity into their public social media accounts, calculates a score of how likely each individual is to be looking for a job. Joberate scours publicly available data from millions of individuals’ online social media accounts (or buys the information from other parties) in order to assign each individual what Joberate calls a “J-Score” that estimates their level of job search activity. For example, if an individual starts following new companies on Twitter, clicking through articles about resume writing or career-related content on their Facebook feed, or makes a series of professional connections on LinkedIn, the J-Score goes up. Joberate then shares these scores with their clients for purposes of keeping tabs on talented outsiders or to see how engaged their own workers are at their own jobs. Joberate does not see activity that is set to private and it does not pick up on general online searches. However, if you use an “Apply with LinkedIn” button on a job posting or you comment on a story about job searches that uses Facebook to collect comments, Joberate could detect the activity and include it in the individual’s J-Score. The J-Score takes into account an individual’s typical social media use and job responsibilities to create a baseline score. This type of predictive analytics is being used more and more by many different sectors. For now, it is unclear how valuable companies will find this data to be, but Joberate’s client base is certainly on the rise.

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