Professional reputation tracker Mixtent launched its site today. The year-old startup hopes to muscle in on the crowded job finding sector by letting users rank the talent of other people in their social networks.

The Redwood City, Calif. company says it is aiming squarely at people trying to hire, get hired, or find talent internally in their organizations.

It says it has found a a unique way for users to understand what their professional reputation is via anonymous rankings.

The service monitors an individual user&'s online reputation by calculating a‚ SkillRank for both the user and their peers. The calculation uses weighted, anonymous endorsements and algorithmically-derived‚ metrics.

So users anonymously vote for others, helping‚ Mixtent‚ identify where someone actually stands in their industry according to their peers.

The company&'s infrastructure is built on top of a LinkedIn API but also connects with Facebook to assess relationship strength.

It had been operating in public beta for the past several months and says the usage, viral growth and data accumulation have all been positive.

Thus far, the company has had 600,000 unique visitors to the site, although only a fraction of those have wound up voting. The average user has about 20 votes.

CEO Jonathan Gheller told me that while professional recommendations and referrals are currently the most effective way to find new hires or get hired, most professional social networks require that you contact users directly to ask for leads and recommendations, which Gheller calls &''socially awkward.&''

&''[For us]‚ the key is in understanding what you are likely to be good at, what your connections are likely to be good at and how relevant connections and questions are. Also, our system learns and improve as we capture more votes,&'' said Gheller.

Gheller named job boards‚ Monster.com and CareerBuilder as well as online recruiters‚ Success Factors and Taleo as the company&'s main competitors.

So far, it has had one round of funding of under $1 million from undisclosed investors.

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Companies: CareerBuilder, mixtent, Monster.com, success factors, Taleo

Companies: CareerBuilder, mixtent, Monster.com, success factors, Taleo

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum Markets Media, which she joined in 2008 from Dow Jones/MarketWatch in New York. Her work has appeared in the The New York Times, the Associated Press, Portfolio Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Barrona4‚¬a4„s. She has won awards from the American Society of Business Publishers and Editors, the Magazine Association of the Southeast, the Mississippi Press Association and the Atlanta Press Club, and was a finalist for the Pacemaker Prize for excellence in news reporting.

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