It’s taken me about 6 months to begin writing this piece because just when I was about to start, BountyJobs upgraded some features and I wanted to be able to test drive them before commenting. I guess that’s what it’s all about….always be in Beta.
So this post will deal with the initial signing up on BountyJobs as an “Employer”. I won’t go into signing up as a “Headhunter” because I don’t operate in this space, but I will tell you that I have two Headhunter friends who had a VERY difficult time getting ahold of someone at BountyJobs to sign up. No return calls or emails. They have since signed up, but it wasn’t easy.
Now on to the concept for those of you who haven’t used BountyJobs.Com before. The idea for me was simple: Centralized Vendor Management.
BountyJobs.Com gives you a chance to work with multiple vendors, outside of your preferred suppliers, without having to sign a new contract, do an intake call, tell them about your company, blah-blah-blah…the whole new recruiter song & dance. Some companies actually use BountyJobs to manage ALL of their vendor activity (or so I’m told). So the potential here to save time is great, but let’s go further to see if it really does….
BountyJobs makes you sign their master search firm agreement which is similar to whatever you use, but outlines that they are the middleman and assume no risk but will process the payments and take a cut of each one — from the pocket of the Headhunter. And the cool part is, you get to set the fee: 15%, 20%, whatever. So you can actually cut fees without having to negotiate contracts with Headhunters. If they want to work on your job at 10% they will. If not, they work on other jobs. By the way - you can ask BountyJobs to add into their contract some of your legal terms and they will. Everything is negotiable…just the way a free market should be. It took us a couple months to customize the agreement but that was our process not theirs.
Once we were up and running they were helpful in getting our first 10 jobs posted on the system. They push for you to put multiple jobs because the more that get filled, the more money they make. That’s the model.
I was excited when the Headhunters started requesting the right to work on my open jobs. I’ve used a lot of similar services like Guru.Com and it’s always exciting when the bids start rolling in.
Although I loved the concept and the ease of use, as soon as the bids started coming in I started to notice a key flaw in this whole idea — the quality of the Headhunters will make or break my experience.
It was really clear to me from the start that some Headhunters were thorough in the explanations of who they were and why they wanted to source candidates for us, and then others didn’t provide any information. But that’s where my right to choose comes in. Since it’s an open market, I get to select which companies (or independent recruiters) to work with and which one’s will get the “rejection notice”. It’s kind of like selecting candidates in my applicant tracking system. And if I really wanted to be picky (and had the time) I could call and interview each vendor — but that’s not the point here. The point here was to save time and make it a more efficient process.
This was the experience I had on the first day of use with BountyJobs.Com. My next post will include more details on days that followed. As always…stay tuned.
The opinions expressed on this blog are mine and mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of my employer.
