Guru Search Leverages Work Samples to Filter Candidates and Guide Contract Hiring Decisions

Pittsburgh, PA – September 28, 2009 – Guru.com – the world’s largest online marketplace for freelance talent – launched a new ‘Search for Freelancers’ tool Sunday, enabling businesses to more quickly and efficiently find Freelancers for project needs using any combination of keyword, skill, location, industry and budget range criteria.  The new Guru Search features quick access to indexed work samples – viewable as images or as websites – to create a more “browse and shop”-like experience when comparing, screening and hiring freelance professionals.

The power of the Guru Search lies in its ability to quickly and simply filter through the world’s largest freelance talent pool to identify manageable subsets of only the most highly qualified and relevant Freelancer Profiles for a given project need. With advanced search refinement features to assist businesses in defining a narrower niche of candidates, hiring options become less cumbersome while quality improves.  The new Guru Search aids Employers in identifying only the precise service providers that match all of the business’s combined project requirements.

“The new Guru Search creates quick, logical sense out of millions of potential hiring options to ease candidate screening and selection,” said Inder Guglani, CEO and Founder for Guru.com.  “Freelancers also gain greater opportunity and visibility within those specific market segments where a focus in specialized skills, prior work experience and core locale is apparent.”

Screening Candidates with Work Samples Search

The new Guru Search integrates seamlessly with Guru.com’s patent-pending approach to Freelancer Ranking to provide Employers with the best information for protecting their freelance investments.  The Guru Search resolves questions about quality and credibility – issues long associated with freelancing – by aligning work samples with performance data.  With access to searchable images and websites that demonstrate capability, Employers can better assess the work product potential of Freelancers available for hire. Employers can compare work samples against Guru.com’s Quality Score Rank which orders the service providers appearing in Search results by a calculation of proven service excellence.  The Rank algorithm reports business performance measured by customer acquisition, earnings and retention rates. As an integrated system, the new Guru Search affords Employers the most comprehensive information for approximating the likely outcome and success of Freelance hiring decisions.

“A core component of the Guru.com platform, the new Guru Search complements our focus on helping Employers to better gauge the quality and authenticity of individual service providers before contract,” said Guglani.  “The ability to visualize probable results saves Employers time, boosts their success, and improves the overall satisfaction of business services outsourcing for everyone. With this approach, too, Freelancers can best leverage their work credentials, experience and professionalism so that their talent will truly speak for itself.”

Advanced Search Dimensions in the Guru Search

The new Guru Search was engineered to offer improved performance and speed over its predecessor by allowing Employers to sequentially layer in refinement dimension options such as location, industry, and budget – for a more cumulative, filtering effect. Businesses benefit from additional functionality to:

· Improve candidate selection decisions with the guidance of Guru’s proprietary Rank and Quality Score data;

· View work samples as thumbnails and see other decision-making data prior to click-through;

· View the number of active, available Freelancers in main skill categories, areas of expertise and other sub-level refinements prior to click-through;

· Sort Search results based on rate, budget, or yearly earnings;

· Save profiles to a Favorites folder for future reference; and,

· Invite a Freelancer to place a quote on a project directly from the Search results.

Skill categories remain a central feature.  Guru.com recently expanded its available skill categories from 160 to 222 offerings that span technical, creative and professional business services.  The company plans to overhaul its industry offerings later this year.  In August, Guru.com added an alphabetical Freelancer Directory to streamline access to known Freelancers; an automated optimization feature was also introduced to allow Freelancers extended marketing and visibility for their Guru Profiles within major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

The Guru Search affords businesses the ability to review thousands of qualified professionals virtually — anytime, anywhere. Freelancers in more than 220 countries and 4,800 metro areas are included in the new Guru Search.  With more than one million Freelancers registered, Guru.com is a resource for strategic talent management and provides access to the world’s largest online freelance talent pool.

About Guru

Guru.com (www.guru.com) is the world’s largest online marketplace for freelance talent. Founded in 1998, Guru.com connects businesses with freelancers specializing in over 220 professional categories including: website design, programming, graphic design, business consulting, and administrative support. Employers seeking professional expertise locally, nationally, or globally get quotes from freelancers on their contract work for free. Guru.com’s proprietary Rank captures and reports objective performance data about the quality of freelancers to help facilitate hiring decisions based on service excellence.

Contacts:

Kristen Sabol, Communications Specialist, Guru.com, 412-687-2228 x837; pr@guru.com