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Brothers and Sisters

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Even though I have been delving into online retailing in the last few months, this has not distracted me enough to forget about recruitment. I explain:

When a florist delivers a bunch, it means that it has dispatched the product and that the courier has come back with a confirmation that it reached its destination. Now, you will want to think that this is proof that the intended recipient has received the flowers and is already feeling pretty special, right?

Fact is, sometimes the flowers were not received even though they were delivered in absolute good faith, e.g. the person could not be found and the flowers were left at the back of the house, or someone who was not the recipient just got them, etc.

Delivery and Receipt are not the same. This being the case, Is the service you are delivering being received?

- Are you delivering traffic, churn, eyeballs; whilst recruiters want placeable candidates?

- Are you part of a recruitment service delivery team who is so far removed from the client (because of the way your company is organised) that you cannot see its impact on them

My mini-quest for the foreseeable future is to change from ‘we deliver flowers’ to ‘we ensure flowers are received’. I am sure logistics technology can help with this.

Do you have a mini-quest of your own?

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myhome is closing, as you know… 30-odd people seem destined to lose their jobs before the end of the financial year

By looking at my LinkedIn account, there are 12 people on the system (that I can see within my network anyway), most of which are IT professionals (architect, developer, product manager). I assume the technical team have worked with bleeding edge tools. I doubt they will be long term unemployed.

Go have a peek, and if you recruit any of them leave me a comment

Have a good Tuesday.

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company name: notchup

based in the US, currently in beta mode. you can apply for registration or get referred (send me your email if you want to go straight in)

the idea: give candidates cash for taking interviews with employers and recruiters; members are also encouraged to spam, i mean refer the site to people that might be interested in joining by given the inviters a % of the money made by the invitees in one year.

the user experience: clean design (although someone commenting on the techcrunch article reckoned that the layout was a ripoff from google’s grandcentral. uploading your profile from linkedin is meant to be easy too, though I did not manage to connect. On the other side of the equation, employers get to see a blind profile which they can choose for interview and lay out the cash

The site offers 100% money guarantee, not sure about the terms of reimbursement though.

It will be obvious to you that the model can fall on its bum before it comes out of beta if there’s abuse, lack of talent or buyers. I am wondering tho if you as individual agency or corporate recruitment department would be prepared to materially reward candidates at interview, shortlisting or placement stage of the process. Or, are you already doing that?

Hope you have a safe weekend

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Hope you all had a fab beginning of 2008 - personally, I had a ‘fat’ beginning to the year, after all the holiday food that I am still trying to work off..

Just to bring to your attention what might be the type of online operation we’ll see more of in the coming months if it works for their stakeholders, Recruitment portals or markets are intended to aggregate employers and recruiters and take the friction out of a what is still very convoluted, and therefore costly, exchange. A couple of players coming up with soft and hard launch dates soon:

- VacancyBid, you can catch Danny Nerezov, the 24-year old CEO, on Facebook any day of the week. From their site:

VacancyBid is a Sydney based company which exists to lower the cost hire for employers, and create maximum revenue opportunities for recruiters.

- NeedRM; I met CEO Michael Rhodes many moons ago about this initiative, so I guess the business model has been reasonably worked. The tag line for the company from their homepage:

NEED Recruitment Market is a recruitment revolution that has the capacity to change global business dynamics. As an efficient recruitment marketplace that sits between employers and recruiters, NEED delivers real value to traders by harnessing the speed and global reach of the Internet.

I will be watching with interest to understand how they go to market and how well received they are specially in the context of:

- the continued growth of the BPO/Managed services deals between employers and one agency which brings its own exchange platform, thus locking out unauthorised delivery by other agencies

- the continued scarcity of talent, e.g. recruiters wondering “why do I need to go and bid for work which may not be overly profitable if I still have job orders I cannot fill?”

- the fact that these markets may rely on externally sourced data to reveal its effectiveness, that is employers/recruiters have to go back to the system and flag an engagement as closed (person placed)

In some ways, recruiters are already bidding for work using the classifieds model: if the see company abc publishing an ad for an accountant on a job board, I won’t be surprised if they receive a few calls from agencies canvassing the demand on an ongoing basis.

As I said, the marketplace is still partially intermediated. There’s a few challenges, I certainly don’t have the solution. My bet is technology alone will not diminish friction.

have a great year

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