Readit NewsSo maybe you might want to consider flipping your process. Make it so I can see what skills the companies are looking for and then make it easy to send a message to my friend with their contact info, in a way where you can trace the recommendation back to me.
One UI feedback for your website - On your contact form for companies, text isn't visible when the form field is not in focus. The text colour matches too closely with the field background.
Edit - Also, on submitting the form, the success/ confirmation text did not appear in the visible window. I had to scroll up to see it
As (almost) always, it's so ubiquitous that the German language even invented a word for that fact: "wegloben". Loosely translated as: praising someone away.
Why is it broken? Because while it's certainly possible that someone would recommend the best people they've ever worked with in the rare case of a sudden bankruptcy, chances are usually far, far higher that people try to recommend the weaker ones they had to let go in times of hardship to others, simply because they want to be nice and soften the blow.
Been there, done that. Multiple times.
If there's _really_ someone excellent, you move heaven and earth to keep them around in your own team.
Another interesting phenomenon we see is that people don't generally recommend people from their current emplpoyer, they generally do from previous ones or their college friends.
If so, that seems slightly odd that I'm going through my top 10 friends on linked-in, vouching for them so that they are now going to get some a cold email(s), but I have no insight if those 10 people are looking for jobs and want this email at all. I'm pretty much saying to my friends "Hey, I just gave your info to this random company so hopefully I'll make some money off you." (And yes, it is true that I'm "helping" them get a job, but the people I'd vouch for don't need help, in this market they can get a job very quickly)
I will admit that some aspects of what I mention above are true in the "screen-share call" example you gave above, BUT it's the fact that the screen-share alternative is clunky/painful which makes it more socially acceptable. The automation/scale of your new approach starts to feel more spammy.
When you say "No recruiter mails" on your website, what does that mean exactly? Who is the subject of that sentence and who is the object? Subject: weekday recruiter? in-house recruiters at tech companies? contingency recruiters? Object: me the voucher? the person I'm vouching for?
Note: I'm not trying to be mean or negative, I'm just trying to understand the full feedback loop, so I can be empathetic to all parties, especially my friends. :)
On the "no recruiter mails", I just realised that it might be confusing. What I meant that just because you vouch for someone, it doesn't mean that they will get bombarded with spammy recruiter mails. I think that means object is the person you are voucher for and subject is contingency and in-house recruiters at tech companies.
"Install chrome extension to APPLY"
No thanks.
We have two parties who don't want their time wasted, but want to get together as quickly as possible if it's a good match, while maintaining their dignity and their privacy.
The industry is permanently grappling with ways to make this process scalable. The road is littered with the dead hulks of companies that felt like they had cracked the code. Yet still a huge chunk of the industry belongs to plain old middlemen - recruiters - or even to word of mouth and other age old human behaviours. That reflects the fact that so far, no-one has really cracked the code, and there is often still benefit to both parties in having someone in the middle.
All of the questions that you ask are totally valid and can be viewed as just part of the dance of bringing job and talent together.
My personal belief is that the solution is out there, it's just quite complex (human are complex). It probably involves:
- karma of some kind (randos can't arrive and start pushing their friends/colleagues in front of employers without restriction)
- rate limits (if you've put forward 20 people, maybe you need to slow down until some of them have been "processed")
- candidate care limits (employers probably can't access more "candidates" until they have courteously dispatched any existing ones by hiring them or providing a formal rejection, ideally with feedback).
- saving face (graceful ways for candidates to be told their salary is out of whack, for them to push back on referrers who are spamming them out too widely, for employers to make candidate feel they were a good second place, as opposed to a failure, etc. etc., all the social lubrication that makes the world go around.
In short, the whole area of recruitment will always be fraught and fought over because there's no much damn money to be made.
But no one IMO will meaningfully "win" in this area until they deliver a platform that has deep, rich set of human-oriented behaviours and functionality that really dig in deep to what it means to be a candidate, an employer, a referrer, and treat everyone with courtesy and (yes) financial reward as required.
Just as StackOverflow became successful because it catered to the exact question and answer communication patterns that are suited to programmers seeking help, some recruitment platform will succeed because it caters to the communication patterns that are associated with gigs finding talent and talent finding gigs.
Source: many years spent building corporate recruitment systems.