NotchUp is a new recruitment site that is currently in beta, but you need to be invited to get in. You supposedly get paid to be interviewed. How much? You supply your current salary into a calculator, e.g. $150,000 works out to $630. Yeah, right.
I got an invite and imported my LinkedIn profile and connections. Great idea, but NotchUp isn’t the first to do this. The first hiccup for me is that it wouldn’t take a 4-digit postcode and there was no field for the country. Typical American form design, I thought, so I added a zero, giving myself a location perhaps in New England, except that 03030 doesn’t exist.
Helpfully, I wrote to NotchUp and suggested that they should open up to international applicants given the LinkedIn import facility and to fix the form. I invited about 200 of my LinkedIn connections, as I will supposedly get 10% of their first year’s salary if they find a new job through NotchUp. Sweet. I can imagine that some of the LinkedIn stalwarts may never need to work again.
I heard back from Customer Support:
Thank you for your interest in NotchUp. We are currently accepting registrations from the United States only. We are looking forward to expanding our site worldwide, and we expect that to happen during the first half of 2008. We hope you will check back with us.
To add insult to injury, my login has now been disabled. What a waste of time for me and others who may meet the same fate! 😥
LinkedIn has a very powerful recruitment backend that isn’t well-known to ordinary mortals and I get the occasional enquiry from recruiters owing to this. USAns, do you think NotchUp’s model will work? With the exception of some highly specialised occupations, I can’t see this model working for the bulk of the population.
The LinkedIn profile import facility is a double-edged sword. If I were an employer who liked a profile in NotchUp and didn’t want to pay to proceed, I would simply use Google to search for a unique sentence and find the person’s LinkedIn profile.
TalentSpring (my company), JobFox, and ItzBig are three companies working on making hiring more efficient. Now NotchUp is also doing some interesting things in this space.
The first three are working on advanced ways to job seekers to their ideal job opening. And employers to their ideal job candidate.
TalentSpring goes beyond that to rank resumes within an industry. We do this to benefit Job Seekers by getting the attention of employees. Job seekers rank well in areas they are passionate about and where they have invested in their work experience and education.
Since job seekers will rank well in areas they are interested in, we can bring large numbers of employers back to that job seeker. Specifically, we email a wide range of employers of job types that the job seeker considers ideal. This way the job seeker wins because they have their ideal types of employers actively listening to them. (Ranking resumes gives us the power to accomplish this)
Bryan Starbuck
CEO
http://www.TalentSpring.com