CardBrowser - Product Review
The Fordyce Letter, May 2003

I was happy to review this somewhat unique Internet-based service of potential interest to the recruiter community. CardBrowser is an online searchable database containing the business cards for thousands of attendees of major technology events throughout the country. The people in charge at CardBrowser attend these major conferences weekly, collect all the business cards available from each conference and then the cards are scanned, converted to text, verified for accuracy, then uploaded to their database. As you might imagine the types of people that have booths at technology conferences run the gamut from sales and sales support personnel all the way up to the executive level. For this reason I believe this service is going to be of most interest to a sales/marketing or perhaps an executive level recruiting service.

A couple of pluses for recruiters in dealing with this type of data. One is that you have access to a database of what you might call passive candidates (in the sense that everyone is a candidate) that may not even have their resume anywhere on the Internet. You do have a name, direct dial info, mobile numbers, email address, job title and employer name at your fingertips. Another plus is that you have de facto permission to call this person. A lot of credibility is garnered by calling and stating you got his or her card from a conference. Why wouldn't they call you back . . . that is why they went to the conference in the first place. They also have an event calendar showing the upcoming events they will be attending.

The service itself is the simplest interface I have seen to date. You log In to the service then select the conference that you would like to see the contacts from. I picked the Computer Security Conference and Expo. Although I left all other criteria blank you can also screen for job titles, companies, states, countries and area codes if you wish. There were 154 business cards from that conference and as I perused them I noted CEO's, VP's, Product Managers, Architects, Sales and everything in between. Your results are presented in a list format and a button gives you access to full contact information for each person. A good starting point for any search assignment for a computer security professional.

The service is not for everyone at $2,495 per year for a single-user subscription, but could be a bargain for the right type of recruiting service. My contact for this article, Steven C. Morgan, is CEO of CardBrowser and can be reached via voice at (800) 735-1629 or via email at stevenm@salesrecruits.com.