I work at LinkedIn, so I think I'm reasonably qualified to provide my opinion. I'm certain that this won't work well. Charging $5 per profile view ($50 per 10) is simply outrageous. Most profiles will be junk or irrelevant - recruiters work very hard to sift through the chaff. Even of those that ARE relevant, there's a small chance they'll wind up working at your company. You'd have to have an unprecedented algorithm here. It's unlikely that you do, given we've had engineers working on optimizing search for recruiters for years.
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.
That's not comparable at all. Or rather it is, but it makes LinkedIn look exactly the same price, with a bigger candidate pool.
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.
Opposed to how pleasepoachme works; here is a free experimental web site we created; http://www.jobrupt.com. Jobrupt is for job seekers to initiate a job application by asking publicly the companies to create or open a job position for them by telling how they can add value and why they are the best candidate. Could anyone provide me with some hints or ideas if jobrupt would help anyone? Or is the idea too unrealistic?
Charging $5 per profile view ($50 per 10) is simply outrageous.
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.
Glad to. It will have to wait until I get home this evening however as my archaic work machine runs IE8 and you don't appear to support it (don't blame you!).
i worked for MS for a while and learned how many people are actually stuck with older browsers (office versions and OS versions) due to work/IT processes taking longer than consumer upgrades... well, sorry about that :)
there's a feature currently not visible on the site, but i'd be happy to demo it, it allows instant-searching our profiles, as a recruiter...
I use LinkedIn and I can safely that my profile is pretty inaccurate in a couple of areas - mostly pertaining to contract work. Oh, I did the work, but LinkedIn doesn't adequately represent my network.
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.
"Charging $5 per profile view ($50 per 10) is simply outrageous."
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.
However referral bonuses are paid only if your proposed candidate works through trial period (e.g. 3 months). You are paid for fish in the net not for fish in the sea.
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.
Hehe, yes, we're making all that good stuff actually this weekend. :) We felt tired of working on little details and wanted to immediately push out to get some feedback. But we've realized we need more detailed information and how-tos available also. I'll email you when we put it up!
I'm not trying to crush your startup dreams but you should stop right now and immediately talk to 20+ recruiters or hiring managers about your app before you invest any more time or money.
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?
I like the idea, +1 for originality. Just some thoughts though: Not that I have much experience from the employer standpoint, but the fact that I have to keep paying (even if it's $50) each time, will always leave a constant reminder that I'm spending money. That, coupled with the fact that I'm not sure what quality of candidates you'll be showing me (and I KNOW how bad headhunters can be trying to cram someone where they don't fit, just for that commission) seems like you'd have trouble getting anyone to fork over $150+ on this. Not that I have better specific suggestions, but trying to get one big lump sum might work better, as it's easier to spend once, as opposed to multiple times. And one last thing, I don't how long ago you launched, or if you already did this, but i'd try to find as many alpha tester companies (give it to em free) and candidates as possible, cuz if I just spent my third round of $50, and I"m seeing the same people, kiss it GOODBYE, and I'll be sure to warn my friends. Like I said though, you could be there already, I don't know, it's just a thought that crossed my mind.
Actually, in recruiting you pay nothing until one lump sump when you hire someone. Here, you pay EACH TIME, and it adds up (even if it adds up to less than 20% recruiting fee, it still feels like constantly paying)
Agreed. But even though I'm recruiting developers right now, I didn't sign up. The value prop is unclear. I'd happily pay $50 to contact a solid candidate, but from the way they describe it I feel like I'll be paying $50 to see a list of 10 people I probably don't care about.
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.
Just curious about your fourth point above... Why do you think two landing pages would be better?
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.
I'm not really an expert on landing pages, it just seems to me that coming up with a good landing page for one set of users is hard enough...
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.
We would love if you could also give some hints about www.jobrupt.com; a free web tool - in beta, for people to initiate job applications. (pls excuses for the design and language)
I think two landing pages would be useful due to the discussion of price on the homepage. When I first quickly skimmed it I was wondering why they were charging job-seekers so much.
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.
I support dual landing pages generally when serving two networks.
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.
As a User, I absolutely want to see the value proposition for the Company. Who am I marketing to? What filter will they have? etc. I liked having it all on one page.
Somebody pushing resume's is motivated to figure out each site. Not the usual driveby broswer conversion.
As a hiring manager, this does not make sense. Why should I pay $50 just to make initial contact with one person, and then still have to do the full recruiting and interviewing process?
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.
"Recruiters will do all that for me for free, and pre-screen everyone."
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.
Good points, does the website charge for anything besides the connection? They aren't that clear. A headhunter could cost 10% or more of whatever I'm going to pay some guy (lets say cost would be ~10k) edit: and have my hire, or I could pony up $500 to meet some people and hopefully make a hire. I don't know if that's how it's being run, but that's the advantage I see.
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.
I agree. There's no way I'm giving over my credit card details and being pre-billed when I have no idea if there is even anyone registered to be poached.
Take a lead from dating sites - tease and squeeze.
I got a call from a recruiter recently. Turns out he thinks I'll be a great candidate to be the new CEO of some algorithmic trading/financial services company in New York City...given my decades of experience in the field. MBA required.
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?
You should tell him you'll take it as long as your severance package once they fire you because you have no clue about what you're doing is at least 7 digits. Then if you got the job, make sure that your first act is to ensure that recruiter will never be employed by that company again - that alone will probably make the cost of the severance package worth it for the company in question.
I got a LinkedIn request to interview for a hedge fund manager position in Boston, mid-market crash. (Me: platform dev & user engagement in Seattle). They're like sharks in water seeking any hint of blood.
I usually get one or two job offers a month, but I always get my contacts via one of my web app projects that I built as a sample of my skills. Surprisingly the offers aren't from ignorant recruiters, and are mostly legit offers from decent startup companies.
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.
They're desperate, and they get paid a lot if everything goes well. They could carefully screen each person for exact suitability, throw out bad matches and bring in only a few good ones. Or they could throw huge numbers of resumes and see if any stick.
If the recruiter doesn't have excellent technical judgement (few do), the approaches basically pay the same.
What I don't understand is: why don't the recruiters that do carefully screen people just wipe out those that don't? Are there enough companies that are too clueless to hire a good one that the bad ones still get enough results to keep doing it?
I believe the answer to that is the market segmentation. There are so many different type of segments (by programming language, years of experience, company size, industry etc.) that it is very hard for recruiters to spread across too many different segments. So they stick with a few, work them for years, build up a huge network and get really good in these few segments. But of course there is still lots of room in other segments for less qualitative focused recruiters to make a buck by just playing the numbers game.
I think this is brilliant. And I think that it will be successful as evidenced from the strong opinions in this thread. Strong opinions help products spread. The fact that some people hate this app is only evidence that they'll tell someone else how much they hate it; which can only help you. I'm a big fan of polarizing products.
I agree, it is super polarizing. The fact that it was ranked at #1 at HN for quite a while is proof of it. I am excited, that someone tries to tackle the passive job seeking market. The market for active seekers with indeed.com, simplyhired.com, monster.com, careerbuilder.com etc. is already pretty crowded, but nobody has really cracked the passive job seeking market. Granted that it's current form has its flaws (I assume it is just a first version), but this could be huge.
Pet peeve: Are these really "job offers"? (I've seen similar terminology used when companies contact people due to their open source projects and that bugs me, too.) I think a more proper way of describing this is that companies are offering interview opportunities.
This is connected to an employee's LinkedIn profile, so why wouldn't an employee just change their contact settings to "I am open to career opportunities"? I know a lot of people that have that setting on, even if they are very happy with their job, and I don't know of a single person who has gotten flak for it from their employer.
Very true. However, the impression I've gotten from recruiters emailing me is that most of them are just sending uncustomized emails to a lot of people who match some keywords. If that is the case, then contacting 100 people instead of to 25 people means an extra hour of work. I don't think it's worth paying $5/contact to avoid something that takes so little time.
Conversely most e-mails from recruiters get ignored. I'd be far more likely to take an e-mail that I know someone had to pay to get to me seriously, on the assumption it'd likely be better targeted.
That might be an argument for premium job sites like TheLadders advertised as ($100k+ jobs). It seems like they've backed off on that branding, though. So maybe that doesn't work out well in practice?
If I wanted to look for a job anonymously, the last thing I'd want to do would be to sign in with my LinkedIn profile. I'd probably rather make an extra email account somewhere and use that.
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!
Honestly, I'd like to know how often this actually happens.
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.
I think that goes completely against the whole point of the website, it's a platform where you can let people know your interested in finding a new job without your employer finding out about it.
I went to sign up as an employer, but stopped since I didn't want to fork over $50 before even seeing what quality of engineers you have. I'll bet you'd get a lot more employer interest if you let people inspect the goods before entering a credit card number.
Even at larger companies this is a problem, if you're not part of huge team all with similar skills and specialties. The company I work for has ~3000 employees nationally, but if you combine geographic location, education, the type of work I do and skill set, you'd be be able to pick me out from those 3000 fairly quickly.
When you sign up, they have a question "does your company have less than 10 employees", which is presumably to deal with this issue. Of course, 10 is a pretty low cutoff for this question.
Really. I can't think of single time when knowing where a candidate is/was working influenced me or any other interviewer on my team. It simply doesn't matter.
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 :-)
Cool idea! The biggest risk of volunteering yourself to get poached is that your company finds out BEFORE you get poached. Everyone loses :-(
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?
I agree, ancillary benefits could be just as (or even more) important than salary; in my case salary isn't even in the top 5 things that are motivating me to change my job - even on the low side of the market rate for developers you can have a very nice standard of living.
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
Yeah, that's all great, but how do you advertise that sort of thing? I mean, as far as I can tell, it's again the "who you know" network- if you know someone at the company, and they trust/respect you enough to be honest about it rather than going for the referral bonus, (and/or if they are honest enough with themselves to not talk up or talk down the company they work for... I am shocked every day by how loyal some people are to employers that can only be described as abusive.) you can find out about working conditions.
But, you know? things are already pretty dang good for those of us that "know people" - If you have a large and functional network, you don't need job sites, and you don't need recruiters. It's been half a decade since I've gotten a job through a recruiter where I didn't pre-arrange things with the decision maker before the recruiter even saw my resume. (quite often for contract gigs at large companies, even if the decision maker knows you and wants you, there is still a body shop in the loop.)
The whole point of recruiters, job sites, and that whole industry is to try to move beyond "It's who you know" and while that is a laudable goal, I don't think they have made a whole heck of a lot of progress, in part due to the intangibles you describe, but eh, I think that communicating the intangibles about the employer to the potential employee has all the same problems of communicating the intangibles of the potential employee to the employer, and neither problem has been solved.
Blocking people like that would simply let people compare two lists and give you confirmation on who that person is from the discrepancy. That would be bad.
Since the emails are anonymous (e.g. q8XR1BB2TokDXslewseDlGc9E@pleasepoach.me) and your name isn't provided, there's no way your company can find out if you're on the site--unless it's just you and your co-founder :(
Is it that frowned upon in "industry" to look for other jobs? I'd like to think that whatever manager I might work for wouldn't be irate if he found out I was looking at moving on. This may sound like a naive question and it is. I've only had internships and am soon to go full time at a very large company.
bad employers can think they own you. if they find out you're looking or are going to quit, they can react very poorly. especially if how they find out is seeing your resume on a job site (or worse, if a recruiter brings your resume to your current boss).
"don't work for bad employers then" yeah pretty much! but you need to eat and pay the rent while you're looking for your next job so any way to both get your resume out there while not alerting your current boss is desired. this website is definitely not that (though really, most websites aren't if that's your concern).
It is, but only from the perspective of a passive seeker. As a passive seeker, you are not under time pressure to find another opportunity immediately. Receiving 1-5 offers a week that you digest in addition to you actively looking at job boards of companies you really want to land (Google, Square, FB, Twitter, Dropbox...) makes a great combination.
Putting aside all the costs of how much it costs to recruit a talented engineer/designer, I think the current monetization model these guys are using for the site is terrible for gaining traction.
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.
Yep, we thought about that. We only provide a way for companies to contact you through an anonymous email (similar to Craigslist) so we decided it wasn't a key feature.
Yeah, but I don't think it would be difficult to match experience and projects to a person, especially if the company is small. I love the idea, though.
And given a lot of people use GitHub or their own blog as their primary method of showcasing what they can do, the anonymity this provides doesn't seem as useful as it might first appear.
As someone who would consider signing up to be poached, I would really want to know more about these "high quality job offers" before giving you my personal information.
FWIW, this isn't especially interesting to me as someone trying to hire engineers. I can look at resumes on LinkedIn all day long for free. Why should I pay you $50?
Presumably because only a small percentage of people on LinkedIn are actively looking for jobs; also, I think you need a premium account on LinkedIn if you want to contact a lot of people who aren't on your network.
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.
Nitpicking: "Don't like your job?" feels too negative IMHO.
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.
To start with, let me tell you its an ingenious idea.
but,
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.
You need to clean up the homepage copy. Multiple errors inbound:
"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!"
As a hiring manager, why would I hire people who advertise themselves to be poached?
In a couple of months, I'm not really sure if they will still be interested, or if they are already on the site again.
I guess that depends if you can keep them interested first.
Isn't it normal to hire people who are already employed but looking for work? How would someone is who looking to get poached any different than someone looking for a job the "normal" way?
I suppose there are hiring managers who prefer to hire unemployed people but I suspect they prefer desperate job applicants.
It took me a while to figure out what I don't like about the design, but I think it's just the yellow highlight on "anonymous": it the throws off the colors and visual balance.
More importantly, though, it was quickly clear what exactly the site did and how it worked. I'm impatient, so I appreciate that.
Generally speaking the best jobs are given through word of mouth and knowing the right people, so you'd still be far from getting the cream of the crop positions. I think the HN crowd can be more ambitious than this.
Also, startups and small businesses most likely cannot afford this service.
If the job market for the target audience is so great (which it is), a service like this doesn't make sense. You'll only attract employees who are not competitive.
Also, grammar check your landing. Even the first sentence has an error.
Great idea. Filtering linkedin contacts who'd like to be poached. I'd like to sign up but I can't work out how! The login link doesn't take me to a register link. The big red poach button seems to do nothing.
I mistyped my e-mail address, so, presumably, the confirmation will bounce. There's no mechanism I can see to change it, even though I can still get to the Settings page.
Unless that's an "aggregate data only" service (you have 3 people trying to get poached), it undermines the entire premise of the site. Even then, for small companies, it can be easy to spot the guy who doesn't want to be there anymore, if you know that someone is trying to leave.
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.