A MySpace Just for High-Level Contract Workers
Scott Langmack, a veteran of PepsiCo and Microsoft, was interviewing for a position as a Chief Marketing Officer when the CEO of a top Silicon Valley e-commerce firm started to complain. Those complaints about the CEO's struggle to find great new talent led Scott to turn down the CEO's job offer and instead start his own social networking site.
Blue Chip Experts, based in San Mateo, California, is designed to help CEO's and other hiring managers better connect with top-level job seekers. The twist? Admirers of those job seekers earn cold, hard cash for helping make those connections.
Langmack's firm will pay thousands of dollars to any user who connects a user of Blue Chip Expert with an employer. Blue Chip Expert is focusing on some of the 12 million or so contract workers in the United States. Specifically, Blue Chip Expert wants to focus on the segment of those free agents who are the top-level software engineers, creative directors, and other such consultants. Why? Because these people rarely post their resumes on job boards so they're very difficult for employers and headhunters to find.
How does it work? First, you you create a Blue Chip profile that outlines your skills. Second, you invite friends to register at the site. If one of those friends gets hired through the site, you get a cut of what their project fee is. If your friend receives a $200,000 project, your cut is $4,000. Not bad, but it gets better. Let's say that your friend isn't hired but someone that she invited is and that second friend receives the $200,000 project. Then the friend that you invited gets $2,000 and so do you. Did someone say multi-level marketing?
Critical to the success of this new venture will be the ability of employers to find the right talent. That depends on a quality search engine and lots of quality, registered talent. Blue Chip's search engine allows employers to search by former employers or schools and even ranks them according to perceived quality.
The quantity of profiles issue may largely depend on headhunters referring candidates to the site in return for potentially significant royalties generated when the site matches up those candidates with projects. To headhunters, this sharing of revenues is common and often referred to as a split, where one headhunter finds the candidate and another finds the employer. If the headhunters work together, they split the resulting contingency hiring fee. "We get 50 resumes a day, most of which we can't use," says J.W. Ferneborg, a headhunter who helps Langmack. "It's going to be golden to refer them." One positive sign is that the Association of Executive Search Consultants, which is an association for headhunters, has recommended the site to its members.
Leave a comment