NotchUp – Let the Jobs Come To You
January 26, 2008 by Jason Bean
Filed under Business & Career
I just received an invite from someone to a new website service called NotchUp. Currently in beta, here’s what the website says about itself on the About Us page.
NotchUp is 100% free and takes less than five minutes to join. To get started, simply register, create a profile (which is similar to an online resume), and set an interview price. Your interview price is the price at which you’ll talk to prospective employers. Once you’ve created your profile, companies will search it and make you paid offers to interview if you have the skills and experience they’re looking for. Accept the offers you’re interested in, go to the interviews, and we’ll collect the money and transfer it to you.
We offer the following tools to make using NotchUp easy:
- The NotchUp calculator helps you calculate your optimal interview price, based on a variety of factors.
- You can instantaneously import your LinkedIn profile into NotchUp to use as your NotchUp profile.
- Your name and contact details remain hidden from a prospective employer until you accept their offer to interview.
- Your profile is unsearchable by your current employer.
At first glance it appears to be your general job recruiting website, but it’s got a little bit of a twist to it. It appears you can actually get paid for interviewing with companies. I think this is pretty interesting because I’m very happy where I’m at and what I’m doing. Things are going well. I’d hate to have a fantastic opportunity pass me by though because I was necessarily looking. The other challenge is that my time is valuable, NotchUp appears to let me hear about opportunities and be paid for my time if a company ends up wanting to talk to me about an opportunity. Pretty cool.
Since the site’s in beta right now you can’t just sign-up, but if you’re interested in putting your information into it and see what happens, just let me know by sending me an e-mail asking for a NotchUp invite and I’ll send you one.
Oh, the other good thing is that it can connect to LinkedIn to pull in your profile there so you don’t have to retype any of your pertinent information.
Why would people who are in demand and making a good amount of money want to spend 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
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/
Russ,
That’s a really good point. I hadn’t thought of things that thoroughly, but honestly I’m generally not too worried about things like that either. Pretty much any of my information related to my career already exists in multiple places online with all the other old school job boards. Thank you for sharing though because it’s something we should be thinking about.
Sure, I can understand and appreciate that, but consider about whether or not NotchUp sells your information.
You don’t see a dime of that, and you probably cannot remove yourself from alllllll of those lists, really.
I hope you, and others, at least use an email address that you can kill in the future.
That is something I do regarding e-mail. I always provide a theoretically disposable address for anything I sign-up with online.
TalentSpring (my company), JobFox, and ItzBig are three companies working on making hiring more efficient. Now NotchUp is also doing some interesting things in this space.
The first three are working on advanced ways to job seekers to their ideal job opening. And employers to their ideal job candidate.
TalentSpring goes beyond that to rank resumes within an industry. We do this to benefit Job Seekers by getting the attention of employees. Job seekers rank well in areas they are passionate about and where they have invested in their work experience and education.
Since job seekers will rank well in areas they are interested in, we can bring large numbers of employers back to that job seeker. Specifically, we email a wide range of employers of job types that the job seeker considers ideal. This way the job seeker wins because they have their ideal types of employers actively listening to them. (Ranking resumes gives us the power to accomplish this)
Bryan Starbuck
CEO
http://www.TalentSpring.com
My company, Leapways.com, is also focusing on Job and career market. The main difference we have from other sites is that it is 100% free of charge for both employers and job seekers.
We will be soon launching a Technical Screening Service which we are aiming for the hiring managers across Corporate America . The idea is to take some pressure out of the hiring manager (who’s real job is not hiring). We will take the ownership of filtering the candidates. In other words, our representative(s) take the interview and give a report report on the technology skills of the candidate. During the technical interview we will rate other skills like communication etc.
Our interviews are real world technical architects, working in IT field for more than 10 years. That makes a huge difference. “We will help you to hire the RIGHT talent” – That is our motto.
Regards,
Rani
Vice President
LeapConcepts
I just found what could amount to NotchUp’s first major competition. Applicant Tree offers a very similar service, but for a lot less. Sure, they’re paying less, but they’re paying you to just have companies LOOK at your resume as opposed to you having to go through all the hassle of getting dressed up in suit for an interview. Heck, I don’t like to comb my hair too straight if I can get away with it. LOL.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=ind_focus.story&STORY=/www/story/04-11-2008/0004791206&EDATE=FRI+Apr+11+2008,+05:59+PM