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There Are Great Ideas, There Are Poor Ideas, Then There’s NotchUp
Ever go on a job interview, leave and say to yourself, "boy that was a waste of two hours!"? Well if so, have I got the startup for you. NotchUp is going to pay you to sit there at that interview. Depending on your experience and education, you may never want to actually take a job, instead you could just go from interview to interview making large amounts of cash and just play your Wii the rest of the day.
I am guessing I’ve been on over a hundred interviews in my career. Most during my finance/accounting days going from agency to agency in a three-piece suit (yes, vest was required) in Manhattan before the Internet came along. I couldn’t imagine any of the companies I met paying me to come meet with them.
The truth is that for the premier companies (including those on the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work) any schmoe would give a hip just to get an interview. And the companies know it.
Furthermore, without a partnership without the current large job boards (including The Ladders) to get users, and without signing a large number of employers, it’s going to be a very difficult uphill battle. Recruiters do a job and get paid, other companies go direct to employees. I couldn’t picture Google taking down their top 40 openings and putting them on NotchUp instead. Especially since Google said they get something like 1000 applications for every open position. There is NO incentive for a company to work with NotchUp.
That’s not the end of the story either — if you spam your LinkedIn contact list with invitations, you get a rev share on anything your contacts bank on interview revenue. For you home gamers, I’ve received four spams so far. Their terms also state that the company is liable to pay you and NotchUp cannot be held liable if the company doesn’t pay.
Techcrunch reporter Erick Schonfeld disagrees with me stating, "NotchUp is a really good idea. It turns job hunting into something more people will want to do in a way that makes them feel good about themselves. Even if you don’t get the job, you get paid for your time." It’d be interesting to learn about the number and quality of interviews Erick has been on in his career.
Could this work in a few specific areas — sure, I see two. For finding a person to fill an unwanted job and for those with very specific skills or very high in demand people. However, I can overcome both of those areas easily. Today, every blog has a job board (us included) and a company should reach out to those blog boards that match the positions they are looking to fill. This will not only most likely be less expensive than using NotchUp, it will get the company more visibility. The second area would be those superstars who every company wants to hire. There’s only one issue here, most of them won’t care enough about the money to even register at NotchUp.
I want to like this product but in its current state, I can’t. Perhaps if they turned it into a signing bonus, then we might be talking about something more interesting as a sustainable business model. So help me understand if you believe this is a better idea than how I see it and if so, why.
My company Leapways.com is also focusing on Job and career market. The main difference we have is it is 100% free of charge for both employers and job seekers.
We will be soon launching an Interview Service which is aimed for the hiring managers. The idea is to take some pressure out of the hiring manager (who has plenty of other things to do). We will worry about the filtering process. The bottom-line is we will take the interview and certify a candidate.
Rani
Vice President
LeapConcepts
Well, it looks like the honeymoon is over for NotchUp. They appear to have some competition. There’s a new site called Applicant Tree which is offering a very similar service. [link to Press Release] Instead of paying you to interview, they’re going to pay you every time a company wants to look at your résumé. They might be on to something. You get paid without the hassle of having to get all dressed up in your monkey suit.
Headhunters suck. Job board are almost pointless. There is such a drought of talent in NYC right now that I would willingly pay to interview candidates because poaching is typically how you land the best candidates. That a website makes this process simpler is brilliant.
Disclaimer: I don’t work for NotchUp, I’m the CTO for a website based in NYC. I’ve wasted unknown number of hours interviewing people not even remotely representative of their resumes.
Sign me up.
You, sir, are an idiot. You didn’t take the time to read the brief article, but you DID take the time to proudly explain that you’re an idiot who’s too busy to read the article, then you expect anyone to write a synopsis for you? Awesome.
Uh.. what? Granted, I skimmed a little of this but I at least read the first half. I don’t get it. Why are they willing to pay you? What do they get out of it?
I’m sure that will be necessary so someone cannot just keep inteviewing forever. If the company you interviewed for does not feel you did it in the right spirit, they could give you a negative reputation … there’s got to be checks and balances, which in no way says that it will stop people from gaming the system but at least block it a bit.
Why would people who are in demand and making a good amount of money want to waste a day interviewing for a few hundred dollars? Especially if they aren’t actually interested in moving. For anyone that’s truly a good candidate, they would rather get paid to get HIRED.
That’s where PROSUMES.COM comes in. Better business model, in my humble opinion.
Granted, I helped launch the company but it just makes more sense.
http://WWW.PROSUMES.COM
Why would anyone use Notchup? Because not everyone graduated from a “Top 25″ school as required by your elitist website.
…I’m going to try signing up, but under an assumed name and of course I will use a throw-away hotmail address in case it turns into a bunch of spam. I would like to hear about anyone who has made any money interviewing via Notchup. Maybe it will work. I like the idea of employers trying to ’steal’ me away from my present employer and me getting paid for it. If this allows employers to get more competetive this way, then it’s exactly what the market needs.
I thought the idea was to get the job and then get paid. Why propagate people into creating extremely great looking resumes just to go on interviews and get paid? Counter productive.
In anycase a company that can’t design their own web site but instead goes ahead and steals from another company (www.grandcentral.com), can’t be to original themselves.
Notchup? I think not. Notchdown to you guys!
And you, sir, are apparently a little tense. I hope you’re relaxing this weekend.
And you, sir, are apparently a little tense. I hope you’re relaxing this weekend.
I’m floored by the number of people who love/hate the concept but don’t spend a moment of time reading–carefully–the Terms of Service.
Compare it to LinkedIn’s TOS/Privacy Policy.
There’s a couple of points I think are getting over-looked:
1) You cannot see what your privacy settings might be until you register and agree to the TOS
2) They’re not responsible for what recruiters / third parties do with your resume or email address
3) If you cancel your account it’s “marked as deleted” in their database. Not deleted. Marked as such. Got it? Good.
4) If they sell your information, they’re not responsible for anything that happens to it downstream; the only way you can get off of those mailing lists, etc. is to contact whomever they sell to, and whomever they sell to, and so on and so forth. Plus, those people may all have “cached” versions of your information, so if they get a data snapshot of NU today, you cancel tomorrow and they get a new snapshot and sell it–guess what? Those companies will do a merge to remove duplicates–they’re not going to go out of their way and REMOVE you unless you know how to track them down.
There’s money in the list they’re generating.
5) Yep, it’s easy to use that LinkedIn slurp they’ve got set up for you. And, of course, all of your information that is respected and protected at LinkedIn… Well, different set of rules now.
Pay attention to the TOS and decide if giving up your information is really worth it.
http://www.userglue.com/blog/2008/01/27/notchup-privacy-down/