Monday, February 18, 2008

Startup Genotrope.com offers company 'personality' search

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

Thomas Summit, who spent 20 years as a local technology recruiter, says every company is an ecosystem, each with its own DNA -- its own genome, so to speak. And he wants to map it.

Summit began the process four weeks ago in Newburyport, with the launch of Genotrope.com, a job search and recruiting website that uses elements of social networking, online job search and a graphic interface to present corporate recruiters and candidates with a novel way to locate and research job openings by corporate "personality," rather than just job description.

For example, if a candidate (or recruiter) were looking for a job in the mobile web sector, he might think Waltham's Mobicious Inc., or a company like it, is a good fit. But typing the keywords "mobile web" into an online job search engine could return thousands of unqualified leads, says Summit, while a search for "Mobicious" would return leads only for the specific company.

Summit said Genotrope.com searches not only Mobicious, but tracks where that company's founders and executives worked previously, as well as its investors and transactions involving those related companies.

"Monster.com and others have become victims of their own success," said Summit. "If you search for 'java,' you may get 1,500 listings, but you don't get any information about the companies."

Still, the online recruiting space is chock-full of big names such as CareerBuilder.com and Jobster, web portals that feature job listings such as Yahoo Inc. and Craigslist Inc. and specialty websites such as ITjobs.com and TelecomCareers.net.

David Chang, a co-founder of Mobicious, had not used Genotrope previously, but said it could be very useful when hiring specific kinds of people.

"We can look at companies like ours and see who has had experience in the areas we are looking, such as people with B-to-C experience," he said.

Genotrope traces its own geneology back to Newburyport's Catalyst Corp., Summit's brick-and-mortar recruiting firm.

The site had attracted "less than 1,000" users in its first few weeks, according to Summit. Summit and his four-person team chose New England to beta-test the site, but he said the software was set up to be rolled out to other regions based on demand.