Connections. Making them is a part of our work and personal lives. The machines we design, build and use wouldn’t perform very well, or at all, if it were not for their connection to other machines and their connection to us through their interface.

As humans, we strive (for the most part) to connect with other humans. In business, it’s about connecting with customers interested in buying the product we are selling, or vice versa. It’s about reaching out to the company that can provide us with the part or machine we need to get the job done. It’s about learning more about that new technology that could make an operation more efficient or help improve the bottom line.

In our personal lives, understanding the need for humans to connect is no more obvious than in the explosion of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others have seen phenomenal success from simply providing an easier, almost instantaneous, way for us to connect with one another. It’s the latest in a long line of technologies that have had such success by helping human beings connect with one another, from the telephone to television to the Internet.

The same is true of the evolution of connecting the machines that aid us in our everyday lives. Cable gave way to fiber optics, allowing for the transmission of greater amounts of data over fewer lines. The phone cord was replaced by the cordless phone, then the cell phone, making it possible for us to travel out of the kitchen or living room without losing the ability to take or make a call. Plugging our computers and other devices directly into the phone or cable jack is becoming a thing of the past, as it is now possible to stay connected on multiple devices through Wi-Fi connectivity.

Quality has always strived to bring you this connectivity as well, helping our readers stay connected to information and to the marketplace. In that tradition, Quality begins a new venture this month with RealMatch, a new recruitment platform that connects employers and job-seekers in a whole new way.

RealMatch started out in 2007 with the vision that “the Internet is the job board,” and set out to provide employers with results and job-seekers with an easy-to-use job search. RealMatch uses two key, advanced technologies to drive its approach— Real-Time Job Matching™ and TheJobNetwork™.

Real-Time Job Matching uses industry-specific terminology, profile information and employer requirements to automatically identify quality matches between employers and job seekers, eliminating the need for time-consuming searches. TheJobNetwork brings together local and trade publications, media organizations and associations, and job board sites, as well as niche job sites, job aggregators, search engines and those phenomenally successful social networks that keep us connected socially, “producing 3-5 times the qualified response compared to the leading national job boards.”

Look for more on RealMatch in the pages of this month’s Quality, and check out Jim Smith’s best-practices article, “13 Steps to Get Ahead.”

Enjoy and thanks for reading!