BountyJobs, an online recruiting marketplace that gives recruiters and companies the flexibility to partner with each other if their need and resources are a match, recently received $12 million in venture capital funds. I spoke with CEO Jeremy Lappin about how the funds will be allocated and why the site has proven so successful.
“We’re seeing a ton of success,” Lappin said. “The system is growing so fast. It’s doubled for six sequential quarters. We’re literally placing thousands of people annually now. I think Greylock recognized that and wanted to get involved, and we could definitely use the funds to continue to build out our product and help us grow our business and expand internationally, and just make it a better service.”
Lappin said that there are many different types of recruiters utilizing the site from a variety of companies.
“There are many recruiters that use this for all their business, and some that use this to supplement their own personal practice. Some are at very large companies, like MRI and Robert Half,” Lappin said. “There’s also a lot of retained people that use this to supplement their retained business, so they have their contingency arm.”
Lappin added that recruiters are seeing big fees as a result, an average of 22 percent, which is getting the site a lot more attention.
“There is no more effective way to access passive candidates than Bountyjobs,” Lappin said. “Headhunters actually make more placements because they don’t have to spend half their day developing new business. The ability to get on the vendor list of companies that we have on the site takes 30 seconds instead of five to six months.”
So what makes BountyJobs different from sites like Dayak and TalentHire?
“The activity on our site is substantially larger than anything else out there,” Lappin said. The number of job requisitions is higher, the liquidity, the number of placements that we make is probably ten times the size of anybody else, the transparency of what’s going on on our site, the simplicity of use, the quality of our search capabilities. Our system is a full enterprise solution for large companies to hire staffing. It fundamentally make companies more efficient.”
Lappin said he thinks BountyJobs is an excellent tool that every company should use to supplement traditional recruiting techniques.
“There’s no way that this does not supplement traditional search because it makes everyone involved so much more money, and it gets employers more talent. I think you’ll see because of all the barriers this breaks down, employers will put more jobs out to search and ultimately people will gravitate towards it.”
At the moment, BountyJobs has about 700 companies actively placing jobs on the site and a few thousand recruiters sourcing for these positions. He also said that BountyJobs claims 100 of the Fortune 500 companies as clients.
Popularity: 36% [?]
July 27th, 2008 at 8:04 am
The one thing I can’t quite understand about this site is the efficiency claim (for companies). I’ve been on the website through a friends account. Many of the jobs have multiple recruiter requests and several dozen resumes submitted. Vs. using a third party recruiter, companies have to sift throug all the resumes, contact the individual recuriters, set up interviews, etc. Other than having one contract (which is never really a problem if you have the right candidate) I actually find this process far less efficient. No question that this increases the companies work load. If I’m off I’d love for someone to address this…
October 13th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Actually, depending on the circumstances, Ryan, I believe you are off with this. Most in-house recruiters use a number of headhunters for their search needs. I’ve been on both sides, and I can only tell you that I’ve seen in-house recruiters so disorganized that they have to ask the headhunters for specific info to be in the subject line of the submittal resumes – that way they are able to sift through their in-boxes and identify the candidates more efficiently. This site puts a stop to all of that. All the resumes submitted for a particular job order are in one spot, along with the candidates’ resumes and the intro letters from the headhunter. There’s a drop down where the employer can choose where the candidate is in the hiring process-the headhunter can see this as well. There’s a messaging system that is very efficient, as well as a means to post a notice on a particular job that will automatically be sent to any headhunters involved with that job order. There’s also a way to automatically attach a notice to all jobs from the company (ex – if the company has a website where they require all candidates to complete the online app or testing, etc).
Unless the company is using just one outside agency or is using an RPO, this site is the best I’ve ever seen at streamlining process and generating good, solid talent. It’s up to the employer as to how many headhunters they have working on a job order at a particular time or how many resumes they’ll receive – they can easily block additional requests, as well as deny them. And there’s a great tool to use on the HR Management side as well. It allows the HR Manager to track in-house activity and much, much more.