I was able to chat with Kred's CEO Andrew Grill about how the site works, what their plans for the future entail, and what his thoughts are on using the site to find candidates.

Kred has the potential to be a very powerful way to source passive candidates. As a sourcer, you can search through the Kred "communities" to find people that are influential about topics that relate to your business, and/or your open positions. For example, a brand like R.E.I. may search the hiking and sports communities, and someone hiring for a marketing position may browse through the advertising community.

What I find most interesting about Kred, as compared to Klout, is that a Kred score will show you a candidate's level of influence and engagement for a particular community. A person's Kred for one community will be different than their Kred for another, so you can get a good gauge of how influential a person is on a given topic. For example, I tweet more about recruitment than I do about marketing, so my recruitment Kred is higher because that's where I'm most influential.

This site is going to be a gold mine of passive candidates as they continue to grow - so keep an eye out!

Read on for the full interview.

Jen Picard, Identified: Which social channels does Kred measure? Are there plans to add more?
Andrew Grill, Kred: Kred influence and outreach scores are calculated from Twitter interactions, and when people visit our site they can also add Facebook. We include offline achievements with our Kred Moments feature. We plan to continue adding more social media platforms and other indicators of influence.

J: What are communities, and how do they work?
A: Communities connect people with similar interests and help create meaningful relationships. We use keywords and hashtags in a person’s Twitter bio and public posts to identify which communities they belong to. For example, if someone says in their bio that they are a “Dachshund owner,” they will be counted as a member of the Dog Lovers community. A person will be considered to be influential in a community if they are frequently replied to or retweeted by people in that community - even if they don’t share its interests.

J: If I'm a candidate, and I want to get a job in a certain field, how can I use this Kred to my advantage?
A: One of the things we want to help people do with Kred is connect with like-minded people, and often these connections are professional. You can visit Kred.com to find influential people in the communities where you are looking for a job, then follow and interact with them. A high Outreach score indicates that a person has a history of interacting with others in their community, so you can think of it as an indicator that someone is open to chatting and likely to respond.

J: How can recruiters use this tool to find job candidates? Can it be used for sourcing candidates, screening applicants, etc?
A: We would never recommend that an employee be selected based on a single metric.  Even so there is certainly a lot of public information that will be interesting to recruiters at Kred.com.  Kred is completely transparent, so anyone can see exactly what composes a candidate’s influence score and if their influence is rooted in something that is relevant to the position. If a recruiter knows a candidate’s Twitter handle, they can view their Kredentials and their recent interactions. Kredentials includes their influence and outreach scores, commonly used words and hashtags, and communities where they are most influential.  

Recruiters can also identify and contact the top influencers in the communities they are targeting, a good method for meeting people and finding passive candidates.

J: For which types of positions would this tool work best? Would you be limited just to searching through communities, such as Marketing, Finance, and Architects?
A: It can work with any position. If someone is influential about something online, it’s likely they have real world wisdom as well or others would not be following and interacting with them.  Recruiters may also wish to consider using our Playground social analytics platform so they can search by relevant keywords like “Software engineer,” and then sort by Kred.  

J: Do you have any recruitment success stories?
A: Kred is working with a range of companies in the recruitment and professional services space, and is not able to share individual stories at present.

J: What are your enterprise solutions?
A: Kred Rewards can help brands reach targeted audiences, promote events and product launches, learn about customers and competitors, and increase social media ROI.  Kred Events finds the influential people in temporary communities like trade shows or TV audiences in real time by gamifying the event’s social media stream.  Playground, our social analytics platform, helps social media teams research, manage, analyze and report on their streams.  Our API gives developers easy access to our datamine of social data from Twitter since 2008, public Facebook posts, over 40 million blogs and forums, and other public social data sources.

J: What's the difference between Kred and Klout?
A: Kred is composed of two scores: Influence and Outreach. We also give scores in hundreds of communities rather than just a single global score, meaning that everyone has a score in every community; your influence may vary in each based on your interests and who you interact with.  

Kred updates in real time.  You’ll see the effect on your score of an interaction within minutes by visiting your Kred Activity Statement. Finally, we are completely transparent. Our scoring algorithm is published at http://kred.com/rules.  Between our openness and the Activity Statement, there can be no confusion about the sources of anyone’s influence and Kred score.  

We are also the only influence measure to let people include their ‘real world’ accomplishments through our Kred Moments system.