Become a recruiter for your friends

(Sorry long post.)

Today I was emailed about a new job referral tool in the Australian marketplace, Hoojano in semi private beta. As far as I can tell has stayed under the radar of almost everyone, a Google search yields 38 results. OnRec blog have covered it in a limited fashion, along with James Christian Ladd. The site is a referral service allowing you to refer your friends for roles and if the employee hires your get paid a bonus.

I spoke with Mike Willkinson from Hoojano today about the site and their plans.

Firstly the site is in a “friends and family” beta, probably almost an alpha to be honest. The current T&C’s are interim until the bugs are working out of both the system and the service. The site will be in this beta stage for about 6 weeks during which time Hoojano will not be taking their 20% commission as an incentive to get people & advertisers to use the service. Mike also mentioned that payments are currently being handled one on one through a manual process, basically Hoojano are making direct contact with all advertisers to ensure that are fully aware of the T&Cs and how the service works.

Like with all beta sites it’s missing things but there is potential.

I signed up and started playing with the service and initially was going to dismiss the site as yet another referral tool. Yes we have some cool AJAX technology but on the surface nothing revolutionary. But I then discovered the “import your contacts” function.

Cool, I’m curious.

Initially this just makes it easier to select a contact and refer the job to them.

But wait there was more, steak knives no. But still more. You can edit each contact on the site, update their desired salary, skills, keywords and education. Build meta profiles on your contacts to help automatically match them to jobs in the system.

From this new data the site will automatically start matching your contacts against jobs in the database, called the Head to Head feature, I love the way it works. You can pick a contact and automatically jobs that suit them will be found in the system. Even better the site will email you with new jobs that match your contact’s skills.

If you find a job you think fits your contact you refer them to the job. Then sit back and wait for the money to roll in. Well ok, they actually have to be hired for the money to flow but you get the idea.

Bingo I can now run my own little recruitment company connecting my contacts with jobs, a social network recruitment brokerage service. The best part is I get paid for this activity! (Laurel Papworth are you paying attention?)

For people with valuable contact lists this could significantly change the way recruitment take place in Australia!

User, or Registered Member as they are called, can directly apply for jobs, so this is not just a referral service but also seems to act like a traditional job board. It is not clear on how the bonus payments work in this scenario.

Some of the improvements I would like to see:

• Clear information about how payments will be made, following the beta, as mentioned this is still in the works but some information up front or in the FAQs would be good.
• Are there or will there be escrow services with regard to employers so as a refer so I know that I will get paid.
• What is the privacy protection for referrers and candidates, over time the data in this system will be very valuable.
• Information on how does the site comply with Australian privacy principles. The privacy policy refers to the principles but it is not clear enough how the moving parts work.
• The basic job search capabilities are a bit limited, and confusing.
• It needs an easier way to manager my contacts, the UI is difficult to navigate but looks good. Form over function?
• Following on the contacts UI is a bit slow to respond to command, with my average sized data set how will it performance for people with large contact bases.
• Linking my contact to a service like Plaxo, LinkedIn and other professional social networks.
• Allowing me to export my contacts, cause once I have updated the site with all this very rich meta data about my friends why can’t I take it with me? This would also allow me to update the meta data of my contacts quickly and re-import to update the data.
• The site will need lots more jobs to get traction, Mike, assured me this will come and right now they are focused on building the site and learning how it will be used.
• Some of the above items could be covered in the very long T&C’s section, which also still seems in development, but I have to say is too confusing for my simple mind.
• Finally a blog to connect with the community.

Overall Hoojano is a very cool start and worth a serious look.