Can a computer scientist and geneticist make a successful job site?
I guess we’ll soon find out in start-up NotchUp, whose founders hold degrees in those disciplines. (They claim to have “collectively recruited hundreds of candidates,” however.)
The site is currently in beta and invite-only. I joined recently. Your LinkedIn profile conveniently serves as your resume, or your can do it the old-fashioned way. The technology is pretty impressive for a beta. You pick a price for being interviewed and payments are made via PayPal.
On the employer side, there is no fee to join and “when you find an individual you’re interested in, make them an offer to interview. If they accept, they’ll share their contact details with you so you can finalize the details of your interview. You don’t pay anything until the interview takes place.” The site also offers a 100 percent refund for interviews-gone-bad, as well as stats and feedback on candidates from their previous interviews.
Techcrunch calls this a “really good idea.” Longtimers may be a bit more skeptical. Industry pro Susan Burns says, “which employers are going to be lining up to pay for interviews?”
According to the site, companies such as Google and Facebook are on board. In the year-one burnout that was Jobster, however, such brand support didn’t mean much in the end. Remember their initial Starbucks and Microsoft backing?
One thing that is not in doubt, though, is their viral marketing strategy. NotchUp offers a 10 percent payout if you bring in your LinkedIn contacts. At the click of a button, everyone in your circle gets an invite, and if they join and interview, the cash register rings through the first year of joining.
On the surface, this looks like a tough concept for many to grasp (and feel comfortable about) on both sides of the hiring table, but, as with all start-ups, judgment must be reserved over time. That said, I have little doubt NotchUp will be a hot topic at the water coolers within the employment industry.
Their about page says the only current winners in the recruiting process are job boards and headhunters. They’ll get debate on that one. But through this journey, there’s bound to be one big group of big winners: Bloggers.
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:57 am
So Joel, how much do you think you would pay me to not “sell” your info to companies - perhaps that is another biz worth developing!
January 23rd, 2008 at 11:10 am
The more I think about this the more disappointed, and quite frankly angry, I am with LinkedIn for supporting exporting of profiles without consent, and in mass! It would be great to hear from LinkedIn on why, how much of a kickback they’re potentially seeing and what their Users think. The LinkedIn community is truly the best social network for business. It would be quite sad if they began to “sell out” all the goodness they’ve delivered thus far.
January 23rd, 2008 at 11:54 am
Hi Susan,
I think you’re missing something. Linked in is not exporting profiles, nor is Notchup importing profiles without consent. You have to give consent by entering in your linked in username and password. Notch-up is importing e-mail addresses with the consent of the original user, but it is that person that is choosing to share NotchUp with you.
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:02 pm
But do I have control over someone else sending my name to NotchUp simply because I’m in their network? I realize I have the option to respond to NotchUp but don’t feel its appropriate for someone to export my contact info for this purpose. Is this accurate Rob? If not, please clarify. Thanks
January 23rd, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Yes you are correct. I doubt however that NotchUp would keep your e-mail/contact information to use at a later date. They’d get flamed if they ever did that. This dilemma you have is with the person in your linkedin network, not linkedin or notch up. I would either delete them from your linked contact or send a message to your contact(s) asking them not to include you in future notifications outside of linkedin.
January 23rd, 2008 at 11:41 pm
It is great to see the indudtry innovating with the digital generation. Speaking of the digital generation, Jobster boasts they are the leader for… Well, many things. Their service states when you post a job through their site it is cross posted to their 650+ growing network of sites. In fact, when you post a job, it says it is live on Jobster and Google Base. Check out google base - Jobster isn’t even a source on the from down list. Try a keyword search for Jobster - do you see the millions of jobs? Didn’t think so.
January 24th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Intersting enough we tried something like this in Holland last year. With emphasis on something. We had one company paying you per minute of a job interview.
How did it work? Simple, because of this they got an insane amount of free media attention. They hired I think 5 or 6 java developers paying only 3000 or 4000 euro’s for all the interviews. On average the cost to hire for a java developer is over 10.000 euro’s a person.
Many said that a lot of people would just go there for the money. They said only few and those were gone in 15 minutes to half an hour, costing not much money.
Also, and you need to know the Netherlands in this case, it was special because they are in Groning. That’s in the total north of the Netherlands. One of the few places where you can actually buy a house for not much money bacause there isn’t that much work and it’s the regio with the highest unemployment in our country (about 10%, against 3% nationwide).
You have to realize, we’re not that moving as Americans. We can actually go by bike from the most north to the most south in a day (the well trained that is). So we do everything by car and we never move. Working in the North, the fact there are actually IT companies there, was for many a new thing. This also made it succesfull, because several people would love to move back up, but didn’t know they could.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
As an employer that recruits via job boards often, i find the concept interesting. However, i am worried that many people will do strange/dishonest things because of the financial incentive. I believe this gets away from the underlying premise of bringing together job seekers and employers. And it certainly gets away from what LinkedIn is all about.
I prefer the free model at http://www.goliathjobs.com. (i am not endorsing them. I am simply stating our satisfaction with their free service). Their model is completely free and job seekers are pre-verified. In addition, they post our jobs directly at any schools & alumni associations we request. We started using them in December and have been very satisfied. At first we thought it was too simple but then realized how much we prefer it.
We will check out Notch-up but have no intention of paying for interviews. I would rather pay a head-hunter and have a turn-key scenario.
January 25th, 2008 at 8:49 am
You don’t need to pay NotchUp anything. If the profile was imported from LinkedIn, you can search for some text in the resume via Google and chances are that you will find the person’s LinkedIn profile.
January 25th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
It will be interesting to see where the masses move between NotchUp and TheLadders:
NotchUp charges recruiters
TheLadders charges candidates
January 26th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
If your goal is to get “passive” job seekers, chances are they will not go for interviews just because of the money because they are already doing well which is why they are not active to begin with.
Your “average” or more active candidate will interview all day for the money.
People are more multi-dimensional than just their profile and candidates get hired based on multi-dimensional criteria. The alignment between these two perspectives is where judgement comes in.
You will never remove human judgement in hiring and once people understand how to “game” the process, it will neutraize what makes this idea unique.
January 26th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Kudos to NotchUP team for this bold experiment. Time will tell how successful or not it will be. I guess there may be an untapped market for this type of employers and candidates.
My first gut feeling is that this model looks absurd.
January 27th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Why would people who are in demand and making a good amount of money want to waste a day interviewing for a few hundred dollars? Especially if they aren’t actually interested in moving. For anyone that’s truly a good candidate, they would rather get paid to get HIRED.
That’s where PROSUMES.COM comes in. Better business model, in my humble opinion.
Granted, I helped launch the company but it just makes more sense.
http://WWW.PROSUMES.COM
January 28th, 2008 at 7:19 am
NotchUp Founders Royalists??
I just tried to sign up to NotchUp. On the registration form I was disturbed to find that the Republic of Ireland was not listed in the very extensive list of countries. I can only assume that the founders are Royalists and refuse to acknowledge the Free Irish State.
Maybe they should read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Free_State
January 28th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
If someone qualified, high in performance, and satisfied in their current job is the ideal target, it seems like those who respond to the NotchUp solicitation are the *second* most valauble contacts - those not responding to even the NotchUp solicitation would be the most valuable
January 28th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
The site navigation was slow, cumbersome and generally didn’t work for me.
January 28th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
I am a ‘target’ contact, I’m happy in my current position, but I’m always keeping my eye out on how to better myself or advance my career. I think the money issue may get in the way of valid interviews, but if you note, there are interviewing ratings for the ‘candidates’ so I would assume if you don’t take the interviews seriously but just do it get paid, that will eventually come out in the rating system if the employers use it correctly. I think it’s a great concept, professionals, who are in desperation of finding a job, will probably make great hires if they are offered a chance to advance their career. I’m all signed up and excited to see how this goes, but I also understand some of the questions or doubts, new ideas are hard to sell.
January 28th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I mean, professionals NOT in desperation for a position….sorry
January 29th, 2008 at 12:22 am
I don’t trust anything that doesn’t give me an opt out from all the spam they’re sending me. I’ll just blackhole their domain on our mail server I guess.
One of those Web2.0 “spam everyone and get popular services”.
Why sign up for these spam generating services? Are people that lonely they need all this constant influx of spam from these “social network” sites?
January 29th, 2008 at 3:22 am
I’m floored by the number of people who love/hate the concept but don’t spend a moment of time reading–carefully–the Terms of Service.
Compare it to Googles TOS/Privacy Policy.
There’s a couple of points I think are getting over-looked:
1) You cannot see what your privacy settings might be until you register and agree to the TOS
2) They’re not responsible for what recruiters / third parties do with your resume or email address
3) If you cancel your account it’s “marked as deleted” in their database. Not deleted. Marked as such. Got it? Good.
4) If they sell your information, they’re not responsible for anything that happens to it downstream; the only way you can get off of those mailing lists, etc. is to contact whomever they sell to, and whomever they sell to, and so on and so forth. Plus, those people may all have “cached” versions of your information, so if they get a data snapshot of NU today, you cancel tomorrow and they get a new snapshot and sell it–guess what? Those companies will do a merge to remove duplicates–they’re not going to go out of their way and REMOVE you unless you know how to track them down.
There’s money in the list they’re generating.
5) Yep, it’s easy to use that LinkedIn slurp they’ve got set up for you. And, of course, all of your information that is respected and protected at LinkedIn… Well, different set of rules now.
Pay attention to the TOS and decide if giving up your information is really worth it.
http://www.userglue.com/blog/2008/01/27/notchup-privacy-down/
January 29th, 2008 at 3:29 am
Sorry, compare the TOS to LinkedIn’s TOS / Privacy Policy.
January 29th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Sounds like a stupid idea. I do not think jobseekers will spend time with anyone in this busy world when they are not looking for a job. There is another emerging job site named http://www.leapways.com. They have some similar idea. They are planning to launch a interview service.