As the round of depressing job statistics continues, those in job search mode may want to take advantage of the new cloud-sourcing feature from Zoom Information, which maintains a comprehensive and daily-updated database of more than 45 million people at more than five million companies. The feature is called FreshContacts, and the idea is basically this: Trade your business contacts (anonymously) from your Outlook database for a free two-month subscription to the wealth of contacts in its PowerSell database.

The service formally launched this month but it’s been running in beta mode since October and so far it’s been downloaded by 13,000 people and has led to the addition of 1 million unique email addresses to ZoomInfo’s business roll call. At the current rate the company expects to have more than 10 million newer or updated contacts from this source. “We have a history in the recruiting industry that 9 of the top 10 search firms use us, so in terms of being found by a recruiter it’s important to be up there, ” says Chip Terry, VP and GM of Enterprise Products.

ZoomInfo’s history marrying semantic search to deliver up-to-date business intelligence about where the potential contacts you want to reach in your employment hunt really are now, along with user community profile input, is what the company touts as a core value-add in the job finder space today, where proactive networking matters.

It nightly crawls the business web gathering publicly available information from millions of online sources—SEC filings, press releases and so on—and then disambiguates among these to ensure the right information goes with the right contact. As ZoomInfo has seen RSS and RDF taking off in certain news-related areas on web, it is trying to leverage those formats to stay on top of press releases, blogs and so on, as well. “We’re able to follow those and make some sense of it,” says Dominic Lachowicz, Director of Core Development. “As RDF grows that’s an area we definitely are looking to take more advantage of.”

Making the right match-ups of person to current job or other affiliation in its database matters to job hunters. ZoomInfo notes that it has 2,469 Bob Smiths in its database, 60 of them who either were or are CEOs. When something appears about Bob Smith in an online source – he gets appointed chairman of the board, wins an award or whatever else – it’s important to make that update to the right Bob Smith’s profile. For job hunters contacting one of the Bob Smiths as a networking opportunity, it’s nice to know they can confidently allude to the recent event – or not make the mistake of doing so when the honor belonged to a different Mr. Smith. “What really is interesting about Fresh Contacts right now is that in a few months we already have sources of new data that are comparable to what we get from the crawler,” says Lachowicz. For those names it has to go through the semantic-indexing processes of ensuring the new contacts added really are new or if they already exist in the database, and also whether the information that’s come in is up-to-date so as not to add inaccuracies to the system as well as to integrate valid changes into its own database.

Zoom Info lets those that get added to its database by way of others’ Outlook contacts opt out. And it automatically scrubs out non-corporate email addresses like Gmail or Hotmail. But given the number of companies, especially small businesses, that may use such accounts, it is looking at ways to make it easier to let appropriate contacts with such addresses make it through the filter. (It can let some such account owners through to some extent today.) “It’s probably fair to say we may find a way to actually determine what contacts using Gmail are business vs. personal,” says Eugenia Gillan, VP of Engineering.

FreshContacts, the company says, is equally applicable for entrepreneurs, recruiters and those in search of partners to take advantage of part of their plans to network with the executives they want to work with. But with the number of jobs being posted down significantly, it makes sense that it’s the job hunters who will initially be hitting it the hardest. They know they need to be proactive in making the connections that could result in their finding the openings no one else knows about – or the ones that get created specifically for them because of the outreach they’ve done. “Find the company you want to work for, and network with the executives you want to work with,” advises Terry.

And if that company happens to be ZoomInfo, and you’re looking for a position as research engineer, there might be an opening for you. “Dom’s group has a very uniqe position,” says Gillan. “They’re combining solid engineering practices with lots of research and some science to develop these techniques. So we are looking for a very smart and risk-averse engineer to blend engineering expertise with the ability to do research and engage in some scientific debates to help us develop better products.” If that sounds like you, give ‘em a call.

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