by Strac Ivanov

When I speak at employment and community resource centre events about the challenges of finding work, I am often asked about tools that could help job seekers to learn about potential employers. At a recent business conference in Toronto, I learned about a quite impressive and fairly new free online information service called BizCompare.com that could come quite handy to some job seekers. It enables its visitors to research businesses in the United States. Unfortunately, BizCompare.com does not currently include information about Canadian businesses. However, I believe that it provides a very unique new perspective that could benefit Canadian job seekers as well.

Due to the tight economic integration between Canada and the United States, many local Canadian employers are, in one way or another, affiliated with larger US based businesses. So when you are researching employers in your home community in, say, Ontario or British Columbia, you are quite likely to end up looking for information about a US-based entity. And this is where BizCompare.com can help.

There are certainly other online services that you could use, including Hoovers.com from information industry giant Dun and Bradstreet, Manta.com, and specialized databases like Crunchbase.com (for IT businesses). But while each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages, BizCompare.com - as its name suggests - provides some unique comparative tools that its competitors don’t have. These make the service particularly useful for job seekers looking to educate themselves about businesses in particular industry / vertical.
And, unlike many of its competitors, BizCompare.com is available entirely free of charge.

When you research a given company or vertical, most services will show you information about the company itself, and may list a few of its (arbitrarily selected) competitors. BizCompare.com goes a step further. In addition to informing you about the company, it will tell you how many other companies are in the same industry, how the company compares with its peers when it comes to number of employees, revenue per employee, years it has been in business, etc.  All of this information adds an important context without which performance indicators would be just numbers to you - unless you are an industry insider that has all the background. But if you are like most of us, you will find the context information quite valuable.

BizCompare.com lists about 1.5 million businesses currently, and focuses primarily on business services vertical. The site also features an informative blog from its CEO Geoff Vincent, and a Resources section where you can find some quite helpful information. For example, if you are looking for a sales position or considering starting your own business, you should check out BizCompare’s Sales Compensation Calculator. It enables you to compare different performance scenarios.

Overall, BizCompare.com has come up with a very refreshing new concept - and I encourage you to have a look and consider it as a tool in your job search. Best of luck!

Tags: company databases, company directories, employers, job market research tools

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.