That said, LinkedIn doesn't do the best job of allowing employees to anonymously signal that they are looking for a job. I think there's space for you to make an impact, but I think your payment model will hold you back.
"The cost to obtain a qualified resume on LinkedIn was less than CareerBuilder; $18.33 per resume versus $175.50."
http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/cost-per-r...
I don't think pricing is going to be the problem here.
The $18 per resume there is after human screening removed the bad resumes. Pleasepoachme charges $10 per match - and as far as I can see all they do is a text match on the requirements.
In the post you linked to, he had to review 39 LinkedIn resumes to get 11 qualified candidates. Based on the Pleasepoachme rates, looking at 40 resumes would be $200. Assuming 11 candidates were found, that is $18 per qualified candidate.
A lot of people are weighing in on the opinion that using agencies costs significantly more. As a Tech Recruiter working for one of those agencies, let me add some weight to your argument.
Regardless of how niche the job I am trying to fill is, I will get hundreds of applicants and speak to dozens of people in order to send three suitable CV's to a job. The main reason most employers justify large recruitment costs is down to the fact that recruiting is a massive time sink. Finding the candidates, screening each applicants CV, trying to get a hold of those of potential interest, spending approximately an hour with each suitable candidate, etc.
The impression I get from this poachme as a potential customer is that I would be paying $50 to see 10 candidates where the only info I have exposure to is a company name and a paragraph or two from the candidate on why they think they are great. I get close to the same level of info direct from Linkedin purely by searching peoples profiles and that doesn't cost a penny.
I'm itching to see a start-up disrupt the recruitment industry and change the hiring model for good. Unfortunately this isn't it.
And it's waaaay out of date these days.
Make tying to LinkedIn an option and it might be worth something for those of us who don't really see the value of it.
Is it? How much do (large|small|startup|<in market x>) companies pay for recruiting? In my experience, referral bonuses paid to employees are thousands of dollars for a single candidate. In aggregate (staffing, advertising, sites like LinkedIn and pleasepoach.me that provide some quality of filtering) it has to be a lot.
It comes down to how well pleasepoach.me can match candidates to your organization per dollar versus other methods.
That's interesting! Curious what you think about mine if you have time? :) We just launched publicly. I imagine you guys must have people who are working on something similar to us as well. Here's a writeup.
Your site interests me, but I've no idea what you do. I need to provide an email address to find out. This is not a good value proposition for me.
Could you perhaps make your site more informative, please? Thanks.
I built a prototype for a similar idea about 18 months ago - it imported your linked in profile, your network could write skill specific references which back-linked and allowed recruiters/employers to search for skills/experience/geography/salary range they wanted to generate an anonymous short list of candidates in seconds; they could browse shortlisted CVs, read references and they only paid when a candidate agreed to release their details to the recruiter. Great idea eh?
The problem was, just about all the recruiters & employers I talked to about it (in Australia) weren't that positive. Their reasons were: * network effects - it only becomes useful once plenty of candidates were in it. * many recruiters already had their own database of candidates that they didn't want to share or duplicate. * many recruiters needed near immediate response (they had 48hrs to fill a role). Waiting for candidates to respond to a request was a negative for them. * some recruiters saw it as a threat and didn't want to support that kind of system. * Companies often wanted a full service solution so while this could generate a quality shortlist for them, many wanted hand holding.
HR is ripe for disruption but execution is everything. What does your app do that paid access to searchable linkedin profiles doesn't?
1. About the name: Non-native speakers may not know what "poach" means. I've lived in California for four years in the past and I was confused.
2. The cartoon fox looks like it's about to steal my mouse. It looks like you're trying to sell me lockpicking tools...
3. I think you should better explain what recruiters get out of this versus what LinkedIn offers.
4. Your landing page is really two landing pages: one for the people (they're the product), and one for the recruiters (they're the customers). I think you should better seperate the two, or just drop one of them altogether.
I've seen this approach used on a number of other sites that are seemingly successful, and am debating the single landing page approach for a project of mine, so I would be interested to hear the pros and cons.
This isn't that bad until the first horizontal line (except for the fox), where it's clearly targeted at the users, with a smaller link for companies. But I don't think it works below the line.
I think they should focus on the users and assume that the recruiters are professionals willing to jump through more hoops.
People scan sites for unfamiliar services very quickly. Having the pricing so close to the free service is likely to confuse some subset of readers.
A grocery store leads distributors in through the back and consumers through the front. They have different needs and if you want to maximize your short introductory moment, it benefits you to tailor the experience.
Somebody pushing resume's is motivated to figure out each site. Not the usual driveby broswer conversion.
Recruiters will do all that for me for free, and pre-screen everyone, so it is the same net result to me, at least on the front-end of the hiring process.
FYI, answering this question here isn't the point - your site needs to clearly tell hiring managers why it is better for THEM. You won't get a chance to open a dialogue with them when they view your site.
As a hiring manager, I've known a very few (but very good) contract recruiters who will actually do this. In short, most (contract) recruiters are sales people who are motivated to have a transaction occur.
As a hiring manager, I rarely find that there interests are aligned with mine.
Having said that, I am also not sure if this pricing works or not.
I was thinking $50 to look doesn't sound appealing - maybe $500 to contact as many candidates you like, one at a time until you hire one.
1) Let recruiters see the value before making them pay (e.g. wait until people want to reach out to somebody).
2) Come up with payment terms that don't discourage use. You want people to pay you and then use your service religiously. Per-use pricing forces people to ration the extent that they use your service which gets in the way of maximizing the value you provide them.
Take a lead from dating sites - tease and squeeze.
I'm a 21-year-old who just took a leave of absence to concentrate on Kout.me ; how is it that I'm even a target of these people yet?
I got a call from a recruiter once who said "So Rails, is that like Java?"
Of course I am happily employed full time already so I am turning offers down. However, I don't think being contacted is a bad thing. At the very least I am building a list of email addresses of insiders from reputable startups that I can draw from if I ever am on the search for a new job.
If the recruiter doesn't have excellent technical judgement (few do), the approaches basically pay the same.
It seems way to easy to implement a third column to this offer: Companies! Find out which of your rat bastard employees is about to abandon ship for only $50 (per month). Get email notifications as soon as one of your employees logs into our site and use our handy Word template to fire them automatically!
Most employers with half a brain know that they will lose employees if a better offer comes along. Most of them also realize that at any given time, people are exploring their options. They also realize that the vast majority of them will stay put and won't leave without signalling in some way and it's really not a productive use of time scanning the web trying to figure out who might quit next.
I've worked for some pretty stupid people and even they wouldn't bother doing this.
OK, there were a few times when we said in a debrief "how did someone so clueless ever get hired at XXX" but that's hardly a positive influence :-)
Most importantly, have fun with it ;)
If you block people at the same company, that could be a good way around it for sure.
Do you think salary is the only thing that motivates people wanting to leave? Ancillary benefits to the job may be greater motivators for current employees to switch jobs, no?
Personally, other motivations for me include: - Being able to work with a team with diverse skills, who're smarter / more talented than me and can help me to improve myself - Working in an environment where people care about doing quality work - Having a decent amount of leave and a reasonable work day (~8 hours or less) - Having varied and interesting work, or at least not repeatedly building variations on the same theme - Doing something that is good for the world, or at the very least not evil
When I first saw this on HN, I thought, "Sweet! If I can browse through the candidates and only pay $50 per email, I think this could be manageable!" I immediately started to look for where I could begin browsing before I realized I needed to enter my CC #.... There wasn't even a free trial... It was straight up, "Hey! You don't know how good/bad our candidates are, but give us $50 and just trust us!"
My suggestion? Make it like the dating sites like many here have already suggested. Let me browse your PF and see your qualifications. Why not set a bidding system on the 5 emails sent out a week? That way you can even rank how good each candidate is and what the demand for them are.
All in all, current model for me is no bueno. For all I know, you're grabbing people off CL.
Besides, U$50 isn't much compared to the fees recruiters charge. Even if you have to contact 20 candidates before hiring someone, $1000 is still cheap compared to, say, 15% of $100k.
I think the concept is good, but reading this as the first words in the site sparked a mental "I like my job, no thanks." response, and would have just closed the tab if it wasn't a HN submission.
Wanting to get poached if there is a good opportunity doesn't mean hating one's job. Instead if I hated my job I'd try to run away from it within three months, and wouldn't expect to get poached within this timeframe.
How do I know if this site is active or not? This site looks to me like a proof of concept. I mean the creators are testing out if it would work based on the number of registrations. May be they would be working on the actual promise now. This could be a classic launch first and iterate example.
"Pleasepoach.me is built to give people who don't like their job out an option to transition quicker and easier. It's also build with the belief that companies don't want people who don't want to work there - so this is better for them!"
I guess that depends if you can keep them interested first.
I suppose there are hiring managers who prefer to hire unemployed people but I suspect they prefer desperate job applicants.
More importantly, though, it was quickly clear what exactly the site did and how it worked. I'm impatient, so I appreciate that.
Also, startups and small businesses most likely cannot afford this service.
One idea: Offer a "honey pot" service to companies to see if their employees are trying to be poached.
