Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

When talking with Andrew Sauter, CEO of Flashpoint Social Media and founder of a new referral tool called FriendRecruit.com, you wouldn’t think he’s resentful about being terminated from CareerBuilder shortly after pitching CEO Matt Ferguson a business plan for a site called BrightFuse. After all, it’s been almost a year since he was let go, and he’s taken a lot of those great ideas that were incubating during his tenure at the job board and launched them into a fresh spin on referral recruiting.

But if you prod Sauter a little more, a very interesting, albeit slightly rankled perspective on what really happened behind the scenes at CareerBuilder before and after BrightFuse’s launch begins to unfold that lends some back story to FriendRecruit’s design.

Sauter tells me that he began at CareerBuilder as a sales rep working in the Recruiter Business Unit. He was tasked with flying around the country presenting business proposals to CEOs, recruiters, and HR managers, an entirely different job climate than the former tech expert was accustomed to.

“HR and recruiting is a totally different beast,” Sauter said. “From the MAE level and up, we really did try to understand the needs of the HR department.”

He said the idea of social networking kept coming up again and again in conversations he had with recruiters. Sauter took those ideas back to CB headquarters and presented them to Matt Ferguson. Initially there was some push-back, but soon he found himself creating a social network with the CEO’s blessing. Thus BrightFuse evolved.

“BrightFuse was kind of a failure in my eyes,” Sauter said. “One of the problems was there were too many hands in the pot trying to mold it into what their personal ideal social network should be. At almost every board meeting someone else had idea that had to be implemented. Many executives also didn’t understand why we were doing it because there was no revenue model. Ironically, there were certain ideas they didn’t support me on, that they ended up doing after I was gone and have done little else. I literally handed them a business plan and a road-map for the business and they said, ‘thanks, see-ya!’ and that was it.

One month later, Sauter said he was shown the door by Richard Castellini, VP of Consumer Marketing. “In a way, I felt like they stole my idea,” he said.

Now almost one year later, Sauter said he realized that developing a new social network wasn’t the answer. The answer was coming up with something that tapped the hundreds of millions of people that are flocking to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn every day. He thinks he has come up with a way to utilize these vast passive job seeker networks and to transition them into word-of-mouth recruiting.

“FriendRecruit is a Facebook application that feeds your jobs onto your companies’ employee profiles,” he said. “Then friends of that employee, or friends of friends can actually apply and send their resume to jobs directly on Facebook. You can then give a bonus to the employee for a hire that comes through their profile. The basic idea is that you can use your employees’ existing network on Facebook to promote your jobs.”

Sauter said that there are companies that can build a custom job feed for you, but this application is different because it gives employees an incentive to install the Facebook application. Everything can be tracked from FriendRecruit’s dashboard, or recruiters can opt to have the resumes dumped directly into their ATS.

This idea, Sauter added, is less threatening or time-consuming for employees who are too busy to follow standard referral procedures or who fear looking for jobs online and would prefer visiting an employer’s Facebook page instead of a job board.

Sauter said the revenue model is pretty straightforward at this point. “We are only concentrating on enterprise clients. Essentially they pay a one time installation/development fee for a customized application made to work with their company’s current ATS or resume system. For the next two months we are continuing to offer lifetime updates on the application for free. After that there will be a minimal monthly charge for maintenance and updates. In the future we would also like to develop a ‘light’ application that any company can use and only pay a small monthly fee.”

At the moment FriendRecruit is limited to tapping Facebook for referrals, but Sauter said that will change when they choose to add functionality for other social networking sites. He also plans on including a makeshift ATS for employers that will allow them to search for candidates through their employees’ existing networks.

Sauter added that FriendRecruit is entirely self-funded, but that they are now considering raising capital to fund expansion and will be investigating potential investors soon.

And there’s no doubt that his idea will get tongues wagging considering the untapped potential of these burgeoning networks.

He said, “I think this could not only be away for companies to attract top talent, but also a much more cost effective way than spending thousands of dollars a month on job boards.”

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