Online employer-recruiter exchange.
Steve Levy, aka Vin Dieselevey, gave me a quick tour yesterday of a new eBay style site that allows hiring managers to sell their searches to recruiters. It seemed exciting to me.
Company X posts a job and a fee for filling it. Recruiter X says "I know someone like that" and offers to work it. The company then decides, based upon the performance data for that recruiter, if they want to engage the recruiter for the search.
When a placement is made Bountyjobs.com takes a 25% cut of the recruiting fee (for having brought in the business).
The fees can be good (into the 15-20K range) and can be negotiated higher once your online reputation as a supplier puts your services in great demand.
Problem for Bounty: What would stop anyone from discovering an employer via the site and then doing future business offline? Deez says that isn't a problem (and he can explain in the comments because I didn't get it).
I found the rating system limited. For recruiters, you see the number of jobs worked against number of placements. And for employers you see the number of jobs posted against the number of jobs filled.
I'd like to see comments that tell you that employer X moves so slowly on the interviews that you lost your candidate to another offer before she could hire and pay you a fee.
Deez claims, reasonably, that lousy hiring managers will have poor jobs-posted to jobs-filled ratios and this will send enough of a warning to the recruiting public.
Still, if I was a regular participant I might start a blog offsite called The Bountyjobs Backchannel. And, Deez says, "Go right ahead."
Contact Steve Levy at steve@bountyjobs.com or 646-329-9827 for a tour. It's worth the time.
And, yeah, full disclosure: Vinnie is an online pal, but aside from that, I think a company like this is something everyone in our business should see first hand.
