I keep hearing all my recruitosphere buddies falling all over themselves to talk about how great ZoomInfo is and how much easier it make it for them to network and find candidates, and how if you say something on the Internet that you regret, ZoomInfo will surely find it.
Meh. So I go to check out my own summary a few months ago, and it’s wildly, woefully out of date. No worries, I say to myself, I’m sort of re-strategizing my personal brand and rearranging some web stuff, and I’m sure ZoomInfo will catch up.
Well, today, 6 months later, it hasn’t. It hasn’t found my new online resume. It hasn’t found my LinkedIn profile. It hasn’t found my name change, even though it’s on every one of my sites. If you look for Tiffany Bridge, you don’t find me. If you look for Tiffany Baxendell Bridge, it’ll find Tiffany Baxendell and ignore the Bridge.
People, I am all over the damn Internet. I am not difficult to find. I put that stuff out there so that it will BE FOUND. And yet the most recent information ZoomInfo had for me was a cached version of my MPOJ bio that’s at least 5 months old. One of the other references was from a staff listing at one of my old jobs. My name was taken off that staff listing three years ago when I left that job…
And yes, of course I can (and did) claim my summaries and update them (somewhat, haven’t finished yet), but surely ZoomInfo can’t seriously expect that everyone is going to take the time to do this, not when I’ve already had to take the time to fill out my profile on heaven-knows-how-many other profile-and-networking sites. It seems like it would be a lot easier to just not act like the Wayback Machine.
And then, even after I filled all that in, ZoomInfo has the same serious shortcoming that I’ve been taking LinkedIn to task for:
It has no way whatsoever to handle a person’s name change.
This is not rocket science. A significant portion of the population changes their names at least once, and then a significant portion of THAT population changes them again later.
Why is it so difficult for the makers of social software to add in a little extra functionality for “former names used” or “some people know me as?” Why, once I have claimed a summary at ZoomInfo and confirmed my identity, can I not change the name on that summary? My last name is not Baxendell anymore, and I’m working very hard to get that change reflected on all my various web identities, and yet LinkedIn and ZoomInfo refuse to add this one simple feature that would allow people who knew me at my previous jobs AND people who have met me recently to find the same information about me.
At least at LinkedIn I can include both names in the last name field and the search will find them both, but what about people who aren’t using their pre-married names anymore professionally? Should the people they knew earlier in their career or went to college with not be able to reconnect with them?
Maybe if the tools were better more people would, you know, USE them.
UPDATE: Lest anyone think I’m just pickin’ on ZoomInfo and LinkedIn, let me also point out that Jobster doesn’t accommodate former names that well, either. Hey JGo, can you do something about that?
Tiffany, believe it or not, your frustrations are shared by someone at an unlikely place. As the vp of product management at ZoomInfo, it drives me crazy that the name-change problem you note above hasn’t been addressed yet.
Part of the difficulty of delivering a product that has thousands of customers is that we’re always hearing about ways we can improve the product, but don’t always have the resources to act on every request. I’m constantly trying to weigh the value of one feature vs. another, and often those that seem really important to some end up losing out to ones that are of equal importance, but to more of our users.
Believe it or not, the feature you requested has been on our list for about 12 months now, but because of resource constraints it has been moved to “non-critical” multiple times and hasn’t been developed. The good news is, we’re planning to get it in our next release. Hopefully your post will raise it’s status so it doesn’t get dropped!
Regarding your second concern about the freshness of our information, we recognize that fresh information is critical to our customers and are tackling this head-on. We’ve worked hard on improving over the past few years and by early next year, we will be making nightly (vs monthly today) updates to our index, in addition to crawling the Web at many times the speed that we do today. The combination should solve much of the latency you’ve noticed.
We pride ourselves in our ability to listen to users and respond as quickly as possible. In the meanwhile, I hope you’re still getting good value out of ZoomInfo as many of our customers are, and I appreciate your feedback.
Thanks for reading, Russell. You’re clearly working on the weekend- thanks for your dedication, but make sure you get some playtime, okay?
We were actually talking about this in my office this morning, since we’re all web application and usability junkies first, and recruiters second… It occurred to us that perhaps y’all have a development team full of single men?
Seriously, every time I have encountered a missing “duh” feature in any web product I’ve used, the reason for it has always been that the people developing the product would never need to use such a feature, so it either doesn’t occur to them, or they underestimate how useful it would be to everyone else.
I don’t know what was elevated while this feature was being shuffled off to “non-critical,” and for all I know I would agree with those choices- please don’t think I’m casting aspersions upon your product management process. But that said, while women certainly don’t ALL change their names upon getting married, it’s still the more common choice. There are also an increasing number of couples who change both names, and people who change their names again after divorce or remarriage. Meanwhile, there’s a non-trivial number of women who use one name in one life sphere and the other name in another, and would at least need to be able to claim summaries using two different names.
And the societal trend is to get on the internet earlier but get married later, so the number of people who are going to have to sort out these issues after they’ve already established an identity on the Internet is only going to get bigger.
So I guess what I’m saying is… maybe it’s time to rethink how many users are going to need that feature the next time it’s up for debate?
Thanks agin for your comment, Russell.