Recruiting Technology Review, May 19, 2008

By Bill Branstetter

Today, I want to introduce you to an under-the-radar product called CardBrowser (www.cardbrowser.com). If you're a Jigsaw, ZoomInfo or LinkedIn user, you're really going to like this concept. It goes like this: CardBrowser associates are continually visiting trade shows (in the hundreds) around the country. While making their rounds at these shows, they visit each booth on the hunt for the energetic, outgoing, customer-facing representatives. Once they've identified their targets, they dive in, grab their business cards and head to the next booth. This results in roughly 30,000 new contacts each year. These cards are scanned into a database that is searchable by trade show name, industry, location, company, and title.

So who are these contacts in the database and how can you, as a recruiter, benefit from this database? Pick a title and they are there at your disposal: corporate executives, account executives, sales engineers, product managers, program managers, and techies (to name a few). There are over 150,000 business cards in the system replete with all pertinent contact information. I did a search for government related conferences (my industry) and had over 13,000 contacts. I then narrowed it down to people with Program Manager as a title. That's my marketing list of clients for the next 5 years!

Most of the CardBrowser customers are corporations. On their website, they proudly display IBM, Oracle, Google, Cisco, Yahoo, EMC, SAP, and Sun as users of the product. But I can also see this particularly useful if you are in executive search - specifically in the areas of sales, sales engineering and marketing. These are your “A” candidates. These are the folks that will tell you who is hiring in their company. These are the decision makers who do the hiring in their company.

The database access retails for $3,500. Add in the ability to export into a spreadsheet and you're looking at a total of $8,000.

About Bill Branstetter - I work for a technology solutions company. As a recruiter, my job is two-fold: I search for technology professionals for our internal positions and act as a third-party recruiter for other companies.