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Permalink Reply by Harry Joiner on January 9, 2008 at 6:34pm

Zoom is very useful for senior executive level searches in industries that are outside of the recruiter's normal area of expertise. For example, I am an ecommerce marketing recruiter, but I was able to build a very compelling slate of candidates for a Fortune 500 CIO search I handled last year. The winning candidate was a referral, but the two runner ups were from ZoomInfo.

However: I don't do that much work outside of my normal area of expertise. My house database holds >50,000 ecommerce executives, which is larger than Zoom's.

Also, ZoomInfo is not cheap -- and their reps do not engage in deep discounting. The company also frowns on group subscriptions (at least in my experience).

And finally, at the time my ZoomInfo account had expired I had >10,000 unused exports in my account. While Zoom was anxious to renew my subscription, getting them to roll-over my exports was not a slam dunk. I never fully understood this, as these exports had no value to anyone else but me. But to me, these exports were (and still are) very valuable inventory.

Bottom line: Great tool. Nice people. Not cheap.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Jenkins on January 10, 2008 at 12:49pm

I have had a chance to test drive zoominfo this morning and I would agree with Harry that it can be quite useful for management and c-level search assignments. But even so, only as a 'supplementary' tool to be used in combination with other tools. Given that fact, the cost is too high to be just another tool. Furthermore, it does not appear to be very useful for non management (direct contributor) level searches as skills are next to impossible to determine. In other words, zoominfo is a glorified contact database at a steep price.

Zoominfo claims to offer the passive candidate advantage because the database is populated by daily internet scrubs and not voluntary posting of profiles. There is some truth to that. But even though with LinkedIn, professionals do voluntarily upload their own information... most of them are passive as well and not actively searching. They join LinkedIn for networking reasons which of course is the lifeblood of successful recruiting. So I am not sure zoominfo really gets the nod here. The problem with LinkedIn on the other hand of course is the painstaking network building process required to even make searching worthwhile (though I hear that can be circumvented with next generation services). In conclusion, zoominfo can definitely be of value for high level executive search assignments but that is about it. I could imagine using zoominfo on a pay-per-search basis but at least for me, the high yearly fee is not good value. While it may be like comparing apples and oranges... I think LinkedIn is much more valuable to the average recruiter. And the new generation of LinkedIn services should compound that.

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