catching up with notchup
July 7, 2009
No job site in recent memory has had a more impressive opening act than NotchUp, the site that pays job seekers to be interviewed. A write-up in sites like Techcrunch in Jan. 2008 and a brilliant (or annoying) marketing strategy that made LinkedIn its bitch sent the site into buzz nirvana. But things have quieted down a bit according to Google Trends and Compete.
Now that the smoke has cleared, is NotchUp a bad business model or just a victim of a bad economy and a balance of power that has drastically shifted in the favor of employers who don’t have to pay to interview top talent? Surprisingly, it may be neither.
“We’re working on our third iteration of the product, due out in the fall,” said company had Jim Ambras. “The company was started as a way for start-ups in The Valley to be able to interview engineers at Google, for example, who normally wouldn’t give a new guy the time of day.”
Indeed, the site’s demographics are very tech-focused. Approximately 11-12 percent of its users are in or around San Francisco and 10 percent are in the New York City area. Ambras says there are north of 130,000 members. He was less exact about the amount of dollars paid out to interviewees, but put the figure in the “tens of thousands.”
The site has also evolved since its launch from being a pure middleman between candidate and company and has embraced the role of sourcer. Clients, whose start-up CEOs are too busy to comb NotchUp’s database, pay a $1,000 fee upfront and NotchUp delivers them at least four qualified candidates. NotchUp will then reach out to candidates to coordinate an interview and negotiate payment. Between 30-50 percent of candidates accept an interview. Click here for more on how the process works.
We’ll have to wait and see what the fall brings in terms of NotchUp’s next steps, but the site seems locked in as a niche player, as opposed to a Monster-killer, at the moment. Certainly, there is no market for paying entry level accountants to interview and the model may not work in a culture like healthcare, but for pockets of the world where tech start-ups thrive and poaching the best-and-brightest planted firmly in places like Facebook, NotchUp may be onto something. The sudden burst of attention was likely unwarranted.
“We’re happy with steady, slow growth,” said Ambras. “Our marketing has been largely word-of-mouth and using technology to go as viral as possible, like plugging in your Gmail contacts.” (LinkedIn has since stopped them from allowing users to mass e-mail their contacts.) The company has an affiliate program that pays 10 percent of interview fees for the first year.
The company received “Series A level” funding at its start, but it is not currently seeking funding.
