Thanks for your comments - see my reply to Martin.

Wish you all the luck in cracking the job referral space - it’s a tough one.

Cheers,
@rigesyounan

I know this space very well. I founded a company called 2Vouch.com and this was a job referral platform. Unfortunately this venture failed for a few reasons, GFC (timing), business model etc The main reason it failed IMHO was that we were asking people to change their behaviour, to log into a dashboard from an email that was sent to them from the platform which matched jobs to profiles/referrers via a matching engine ( we used Zovren for parsing and semantic matching ) and make referrals to their people in social networks via email, twitter, facebook or Linkedin.

We launched around the time Zubka.com and little before Jobvite, another problem aside from the above was that we didn’t have $20m venture funding like Jobvite and fundamentally we were trying to build a consumer brand.

I would like to see someone pull it off but as you note many have failed in the past. My inkling is that it needs to be an simple elegant email based system, with sophisticated tracking etc -sounds easy but very difficult business to execute.

Thanks for dropping in.

@rigesyounan

In order for this kind of concept to work there’s a requirement for a fairly sophisticated technology platform to support the workflows behind clients, account managers and the crowdsourced Talent Scout Network.

Here’s a recent blog posting we posted on the topic:

http://blog.notchup.com/2010/08/crowdsourcing.html

Over here in the States, there are a few firms playing with the idea - Jobvite’s trying to power internal referral programs, LinkedIn’s experimenting, Referio’s in beta, etc. There’s a history behind all of this: Refer.com, Jobster, H3, were all attempts to use the crowd.

Why will things work out now, when they failed in the past?

Part of the optimism with the new round is the growth of the social web, and the opening up of API’s from LinkedIn, Facebook, etc all. I think the biggest stumbling block earlier attempts tripped over was that it took too much effort for an individual to come up with quick matches, all for the _chance_ to make $500 bucks or so. It was too hard, and the model was unknown - the former prevented the latter from happening (success breeds awareness, social media tipping points, etc etc).

By matching job reqs to profiles from your personal networks, these new models may succeed in getting the crowd to assist in doing what so many corporate recruiters don’t have the bandwidth or budget for: research. A vast army of sourcers, leveraging the crowd to increase high-quality referrals. If it takes off, it could impact agencies, especially the ones that take the “throw it at the wall” approach to presenting candidates. This may not be a bad thing, in the end.

All that said, VC’s have poured over $100 million dollars into start-ups trying to attack these problems. Refer.com was co-founded by the co-founder of Picasa and Compete - no slouch there. It may take more than making it dead easy to make matches to get the crowd talking.

Since you requested examples of using the crowd in Recruiting, take a look at our case on Slideshare. In my opinion slideshare is a very important storytelling tool and very useful in spreading your stories (and vacancies).

http://www.slideshare.net/Fronteer/fronteer-strategy-is-hiring-4611089

Looking forward to hearing what you think of it!

It is companies like Yvonne’s which hold the true potential for companies to leverage the recruiting power of crowdsourcing through a process of “open innovation”.

As co-founder of Brainrack.com, a company similar to Ideas Culture(crowdsourced brainstorming & idea generation), I have worked with Fortune 500 companies to create challenges for the purpose of recruiting. We target college students and one of the companies we consulted was not interested in the ideas that “open innovation” would provide. They just wanted to host a challenge in an effort to build awareness of the company as a cool employer and to sort out potential employees by their ability to provide innovative solutions.

It is very young but rapidly growing competitive market. Companies in Europe are already fairly friendly with the idea of using crowdsourcing to recruit but it has not yet gained traction here in the USA.