Let’s be more specific when we discuss people aggregators By @DeanDaCosta

The term “People Aggregator” has become a catch-all for many different kinds of tools. So much so, it’s being over-used and misused. It’s time to get it straight.

Before we go on, please let me make it very very clear. Entelo, Gild, and Talentbin are not the only People Aggregators out there. Don’t get me wrong. They’re very good tools. I use them all. However, they’re not the only ones.

Once you understand what a People Aggregator is and how many different kinds there are, you will open yourself up to a whole new world of aggregators.

My definition of a people aggregator

People Aggregators are tools that allow you to gather information and sometimes save information about people in one place.

Types of aggregators

ATS and CRM systems are people aggregators. Examples: Taleo, Avature.
Job Boards with resume databases. Yes, these too are people aggregators. Examples: Monster, Careerbuilder, Dice.
Social Aggregators are tools that aggregate information about a person from social media sites. Examples: 360social, Leaf, Riffle, Peoplegraph, Prophet, Falcon.
Scraping Aggregators are tools that scrape sites and allow you to bring in that scraped information to a site for data manipulation. Examples: Zipprofiles, Capture.
Network Aggregators are your networking/social sites. After all they are all about aggregating people, they just rely on the people to add the info rather than finding it for themselves. Examples: Linkedin, Facebook, Google+.
Combined Aggregators are tools that do a multitude of things. For example, they might allow you to save a profile and also bring in other information into the profile from other sites. Examples: Connect6, Conectifier, Archively.

Hopefully, this will help make things more clear and we can start being more specific when we talk about people aggregators.