Roast my idea - Uber for job recruiters

[Sagemoney]

1) The IDEA


A recruitment website that uses freelance recruiters with experience in their field to vet and process job seekers for clients(IE: website developer recruiter for website developer jobs)


2) The PROBLEM


The recruiting process as it stands is old and general satisfaction with recruitment varies tremendously, A simple google search with “ recruiters are” yields evidence of that dissatisfaction. Most are ignorant about the fields they recruit for and are only after money.


3) The SOLUTION


Create a service that gives your everyday worker a chance to make a few bucks by becoming a freelance recruiter for their field. If you’re a programmer you sign up, give your schedule etc and will be registered as a freelance recruiter in the system. When a potential job seeking programmer finds the job you will be matched up and set to interview the person based on various criteria(skill level, time in the industry, programming languages etc) if all goes well the person will be recommended to the company and a potential match will be made. The freelance recruiter will then be compensated. This is a high level overview but I hope it explains the gist.


4) The RESULT


You will have a fully automated interview/freelance recruitment agency similar to uber.


5) The MARKET


Anyone looking for a job and anyone that has a job


6) The FASTLANE model


Need: People will always need a job, this ensures a much better recruitment process and provides tremendous value for both seeker and client potentially allowing the client to save money on HR and internal recruitment.


Entry: Starting a recruitment agency is easy as pie, developing the software will take some time of course


Control: ???


Scale: Anyone with or without a job


TIme: The beginning would be very tough, with no one to help in the vetting process of freelance recruiters but as time passes imagine a similar model to uber, An army of freelancers







7) The BUSINESS model


Job searchers get jobs, recruiters make money on the side and the company gets an inordinate amount of contracts making moolah.



8) The EXECUTION challenges


The biggest hurdle the company would face is making sure the recruiters are who the claim and they’re not just passing along candidates to make money.


9) The BRAND idea


Get connected to your perfect job with an experienced professional in the field guiding the way!


10) The EXIT strategy



Sell to one of the large staffing agencies or linkedin

 

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[CDM]

If I own a company, why would I use your service... which will provide me with people who may or may not be able to recruit... instead of the 1000 recruiting agencies already in existence?

As an aside, I hate recruiters and HR in general. Most useless department in any company as they obviously don’t care at all about employees.

 

[DaveC]

Generally, businesses are the ones who pay for recruiting. The general complaints that I hear is that its still hard to find qualified candidates and that recruiters charge too much. Its not clear how this would reduce my costs, reduce the time to get a good candidate, reduce the risk I hire the wrong candidate, etc....

 

[STF]

It seems like this is passing the unknown off to the contractors who do the interviews. The crux of it is trust and competence. Who would vet the people doing the interviews? How many people would need to interview the person? It's tricky because probably your company would need to vet the interviewers to make it valuable. One option would be to pick one industry that you vet candidates for, maybe tech, and let all recruiting companies use you?

 

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[Thoelk]

As an aside, I hate recruiters and HR in general. Most useless department in any company as they obviously don’t care at all about employees.

Being an ex-HR professional, I'm sad to read that.. yet I understand where it's coming from nowadays. In my opinion HR is one of the hardest departments to work at. You are all part of the same company, yet your 'colleagues' who come to you are the most demanding type of client there is. They are "too busy" to get involved with stupid HR things, until they need some documents fixed... All of a sudden, their HR-responsible should jump & praise the employee and get everything sorted ASAP. 90% of your time at HR is devoted to sh*t-files and the responsibility you have towards both your company and the people in person is enormous.

In my humble opinion HR as a working place is in an even worse place than IT concering the service-relationship between colleagues. BUT if you have a superb HR-department and you deliver your work with a relentless smile, you and the company will thrive.. I've left HR now 2 years ago in my company and people still come to me/link me back to when I serviced them and transferred my good reputation to my new workfloor.

Calling it the most useless department is exactly what's wrong with both the society & the corporate world at this given moment. If a current colleague is insulting HR for some stupid reason once again, I always challenge to run along the department for only 1 day... And all they reply is: "Meh, no challenge in that...".

On topic: I feel like HR is one of the markets with the biggest potential for automation. HR is probably the most human-labour intensive subdomain in an enterprise within the "knowledge" domains. Next to that it's also dominated by regulations, administration and mainly women... Not to state anything discriminating, but there are lots of tech-opportunities here (And I'm investigating if it's worth giving a shot).

Yet I do feel that your proposal won't work. As stated before, the benefit for the company is rather dull... And make no mistake, an artificial recruiter to do the first "cleaning" is just around the corner...

 

[LittleWolfie]

I found this idea while searching for background info, as I'm looking to try out being a technical recruiter again with the extra knowledge I gained.

Generally, businesses are the ones who pay for recruiting. The general complaints that I hear is that its still hard to find qualified candidates.

It is not that hard to find candidates, if you pay at or above market rates. The problem is the companies have a fixed budget (which is fine) and then won't lower their expectations to fit.

Good luck getting someone with five years experience to work for a JR developer level salary, that's an actual job advert I've seen.

The problem is with no idea of the work requirement, manager + recruiters alike use x years of experience a s a proxy for ability (How can you gauge a coder's ability if you don't know how to code. However they then don't offer a salary based on those number of years, something has to give.

They really should be hiring a comp consultant + recruiter/headhunter but they don't want to pay the upfront fees.

Generally, businesses are the ones who pay for recruiting. The general complaints that I hear is that its still hard to find qualified candidates and that recruiters charge too much.

I did candidate sourcing for free, and still never heard back. So I guess those companies, can't have a problem with too much.

1) The IDEA


A recruitment website that uses freelance recruiters with experience in their field to vet and process job seekers for clients(IE: website developer recruiter for website developer jobs)

While this is good, you will run up against the how do I validate for jobs I don't have and how do I sell this. There was a couple of nurses who tries to set up a recruitment agency for nurses,since they could gauge the experience of nurses far easier than other recruiters could. They were loved by nurses, built up an extensive database of interested nurses and their CVs. However non of the clients they approached believed that nursers could recruit, because they were nurses not recruiters. Note that the ex-HR person above couldn't see the advantage of having web devs screening for web devs.

Now, I should in theory be in a great position to recruit devs.(Well backend anyway)

I can get their attention easily, I know what they mean by != , never confuse java and javascript or c,c#c++. I know a lot of the issues they face with recruiters, which are well stupid. What I can't do physically, I can always outsource.

I'd be willing to take lower commission (and fixed draw) so the hiring managers, would get people better suited with a lower turnover,pay less in recruiter fees(and thus be
able to have higher profits or offer a larger salary. Since I know I can do the job 6x times better than the average recruiter, I can charge a third of the price, and still make the same money.

That is before I consider all the automation options available, I can use to make things better. (I know what the top problems with ATS are, and there is an open source one, which I can code) I made an attempt to flog an improved ATS to recruiters, however there was no interest.

Now if I could reach hiring managers, and show them of the value I could add to them. I would just be able to use those skills to make myself/my own agency rich.

Who would vet the people doing the interviews? How many people would need to interview the person? It's tricky because probably your company would need to vet the interviewers to make it valuable

At that point, you may as well just have the people doing the vetting of the freelancers, vet the candidates and skip the whole freelancer part.

One option would be to pick one industry that you vet candidates for, maybe tech, and let all recruiting companies use you?

I wanted to do that but more for back-end developers (maybe API). Although my idea was to sell to the hiring managers, it could potentially be as a pre-screen for recruiters. However unless their internal recruiters, you start adding in extra layers of miscommunication.

Would you pay for higher quality candidates?

On topic: I feel like HR is one of the markets with the biggest potential for automation. HR is probably the most human-labour intensive subdomain in an enterprise within the "knowledge" domains.

That is certainly true, which means a recruiter that is controlling the tech has an advantage over all the others.

And make no mistake, an artificial recruiter to do the first "cleaning" is just around the corner...

While, this is certainly true, this is one of the areas most liable to suffer from false positives and negatives.

If the system is fail-negative then you lose out a lot of perfect talent and everyone is using the same system, so you all suffer, then find out the people without the tech are out competing you all.

If on the other hand you fail-positive, then you start matching people who can't do the job, and current recruiters are not very good at identifying if people can do the job or not. So you end up with a terrible turnover.

Did you know resumes are one of the worst screening tools in existence? Did you know they were invented by Da Vinci in 1482? They were promptly forgotten about we hen something better came along.

That is how outdated current hiring practise are. Recruiters need to be dragged kicking and screaming ... into the 1800s.

 

[HenryL]

One possible challenge is simply getting quality users on the platform. The easier part is finding job candidates. A harder part is to find qualified freelance recruiters. The hardest part would be demonstrating to paying clients (ie. the company) consistent quality candidates.

Also keep in mind that recruiters provide a certain guarantee if the candidate doesn't pan out. This means that they may provide another candidate free of cost - can your model handle that too?

 

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[LittleWolfie]

. The easier part is finding job candidates. A harder part is to find qualified freelance recruiters.

If that were true, then there woukd be no skills shortage would there? Recruiters do seem to struggle with finding candidates.

 

[HenryL]

If that were true, then there woukd be no skills shortage would there? Recruiters do seem to struggle with finding candidates.

Fair point. It appears that there are challenges in BOTH finding suitable candidates AND consistently, adequately skilled recruiters

 

[LittleWolfie]

Fair point. It appears that there are challenges in BOTH finding suitable candidates AND consistently, adequately skilled recruiters

I can easily find suitable skilled candidates, once I know what the job details are. Identifying the ones Looking for work is a bit harder (and more expensive, e.g. LinkedIn mail messages.)

I agree on it being hard to find skilled recruiters, I'd suggest using people who understand the candidate side and training them or matching them to the selling to the client side people.

Given the number of capable people who recruiters can't place and then they get a job, or stupid offers recruiters make, I agree that it is hard to find skilled recruiters. I suspect that the talent shortage is firmly due to recruiters poor pattern matching abilities.


I don't think it will be that hard at all to find freelancers with experience in the various sectors to provide the vetting, of course that requires investing money in this endeavour.

The challenge is persuading employers that candidates are not going to take a pay cut to come work for you in a 3 to month permanent position. It's interesting to note that headhunters manage just fine. What's also fascinating is the company that found relisting an identical job with a higher salary resulted in fewer, higher quality candidates. The psychologists suggested that it was because people suggest

TL/DR

Hire an I/O psychologist, someone with experience in the area your recruiting for,a used car salesmen, a cold caller(ideally form the same used car place) a headhunter and an admin guy and you have my dream team of recruitment (make sure none of them are recruiters, because their all terrible at it or so good you won't be able to hire them away.)

That said I think if you eliminated comission and replaced it with salary, you would get a higher calibre of recruiters.

 

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[LittleWolfie]

G The general complaints that I hear is that its still hard to find qualified candidates and that recruiters charge too much. I

I could easily find good (developer)candidates at 0% commission and say $50,000 for 25 placements, at what 148 candidates pipeline per placement that's around $13.52 per candidate.* Plus one candidate might be useful for another role in the future.

I would not even need an exclusivity arrangement, because I would be that much better at getting candidates than the opposition.

This is possible because A) I understand developers,what makes them tick, and can tell you quickly if your job ad will pout them off, then rewrite it in a better manner.
B) Scale
C) I know how to use BCC on email and are not to lazy to skip it
D) I wouldn't obsess with ATS and other poor quality screening tools beloved by resume people
E) a common complaint is that recruiters don't check the age of system they are looking for experience in and end up asking for more years of experience than exist(because they are not technical) well this is easy for me to either know or find out.

Of course this assumes your offering a market rate, you can't hire senior devs for Jr salary, unless your willing to hire people know one else want.


The problem is convincing the hiring managers of this ability. The people who can find good candidates and the people who can find paying hiring managers are rarely the same. That's why a lot of companies look to the referral system.