Thanks Jason!
Jason over at Recruiting.com notices the Business 2.0 article on TheLadders.com.
Like a lot of folks, our new business model takes a moment of reflection to fully understand:
I have never been crazy about charging people to help find them jobs but if people have jobs and want to pay a service to keep them abreast of what else is out there, well I guess that's ok. Maybe a system where if you have a job you pay and if you don't have a job, you don't pay.
And we run into this all the time: "Why charge the job-seeker, why not charge the company?"
Well, we tried that model at HotJobs and it works just great for the middle market. The problem is, with $100K+ jobs, everybody wants these jobs. And with the internet, it's awafully easy to actually apply for them on the free job boards. Which means that high-end recruiters get inundated with resumes from dish-washers and inappropriate applicants. And recruiters actually end up hiding these jobs from the job boards (and even, in our research, from their own internal company sites) to avoid this resume spam.
So we charge a reasonable fee ($150 / year) to go out and do the searching for you. We call thousands of recruiters each week, we comb corporate job sites, we look high and low for every $100K+ job we can find.
Now some folks can say that they don't like charging people to help them find a job -- and when it comes to the $5,000 a pop "we'll guarantee we'll find you a job" crew, I couldn't agree more whole-heartedly.
But I think it would be a shame to let the nation's best, most-educated, and most succesful talent, continue to flounder on their own instead of creating a service that provides them in one easy place, access to all of the jobs we can humanly (and technologically) find.
By our calculations, there's $450 billion in job-hunting pain at the executive level each year. If we can help shorten the typical VP job search by just one day, we'll eliminate $3 bn in pain in our country. And for our typical subscriber, that means an extra $700 in their pocket!
All in all, it's a great chance, thanks to the internet, for me and my team of 60 to help the leaders of all the different professions of this country get into their next role in life faster, easier, and with less angst. I sure hope, and I certainly believe, that we're up to the challenge!
