Digital footprints are increasingly factoring into the job seeker sprint to get hired. Not having one means not getting on the radar… and is equivalent to being seen as irrelevant.

Dice.com recently unveiled their Open Web platform which provides an insight into how the big data future has now arrived onto the doorstep of both recruiters and job seekers.

Dice’s Open Web platform pulls from billions of Web pages of publicly available information to put it all into one convenient spot to help recruiters not only find more candidates, but more unique candidates that would not have been able to found using one single source.

On the talent acquisition side, Open Web is a great tool that provides an aggregate picture of what job seekers have to offer, as well as insights into who they are… AND what they are up to by creating a snapshot overview of the person’s digital footprint.

This information helps recruiters and hiring managers parse through potential candidates to find the best fit.

But job seekers need to understand that what these recruiters are seeing.

Dice.com generously shared a screen grab of the back-end of their platform, and the results are shocking as well as staggering.

In short, platforms like Open Web summarize a job seeker’s digital footprint into a concise dashboard.

Information includes an indication on the person’s career activity, length of employment in the industry, skill sets, interests, social media activity, salary information, current résumé, blog posts, and network activity.

This platform also draws from the information that the job seeker submitted when setting up a profile on the Dice.com site, so everything pulls together into one nice candidate profile.

Be aware that this is just one of many different platforms, but you can bet that many job boards and employment hubs are all racing to develop major software programs that links existing online content about the job seeker with the profile they set up within the platform.

Mark Hovind, (who recently passed away and was the innovator behind jobbait.com), was a thought leader in this respect.

He theorized that the candidate data system is being built that pulls data on job seekers / workers into one giant hub, and eventually be molded into an “e-Bay”-like bidding war format.

If you are a recruiter, you type in the job title for which you are hiring, how much you want to pay, how long someone has worked in the industry, and BANG!

A list of potential candidates pops up and you just scroll through them at your leisure.

Fundamentally, job seekers need to be thinking consciously about their digital footprint.

Concerns about privacy are taking a backseat to factoring into a recruiter’s talent search in order to be found and be considered relevant.   What you do, how you do it, and where you do it are all becoming part of the bigger picture of who you are as a candidate.

So what are you doing to get yourself out there?