Thursday, November 13, 2008

Cutting Out the Middle Man

A few days ago, I wrote about a website called "Blue Chip Expert," which purports to be like a "MySpace for Job Seekers."

In doing a little more Googling, I found that this isn't a unique concept ... either in the U.S. or abroad. For example, I found two United Kingdom-based sites, Zubka and Jobtonic, that fulfill similar functions. They engage job seekers, referrers (like resume writers, recruiters, or other job seekers), and hiring managers or recruiters and provide a pay-for-performance model that rewards referrers for connecting job seekers with hiring managers and recruiters.

It reminds me of another site that dates back several years, Who Do You Know for Dough. I never did earn any commissions from that site ... but I never did have any clients that fit their openings particularly well either. (I see that the site is currently serving job seekers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

Have you had experience with one of these sites? I'd love your feedback.

1 comment:

  1. Saw your post and thought that you might be interested in what we have developed which might be described as the 2nd generation on referral recruitment.

    Prefio.com (http://prefio.com) is focused like a laser beam on a defined sector (commercial property / commercial real estate) and in the few weeks since we launched we already have hundreds of great referrers participating - all of whom are genuine vetted practitioners in the commercial property sector. There are many "quality" elements that we've built into the business but would want to bore you with them here. Absolutely central to our success has been to make the model compelling to HR Director and corporate recruiters in our sector and a key part of that has been building a really credible referrer base of relevance and scale.

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