NotchUp Archive

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.