Written on February 29, 2008 – 11:00 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Young professionals, ambitious students and recruiters who are disappointed in the effectiveness of LinkedIn or Facebook, could look for better times at iHipo.com: ‘the High Potential network dedicated to empowering international careers’. It’s the place for young people with international ambitions to connect with human resource managers who roam the social networks of the world to find talented youngsters.
Companies are looking for the best people, regardless of their nationality
The founders, three recent graduates from Germany, the Netherlands and Singapore, believe to follow a globalization trend on the world-wide job market. Arnout Wagenaar: “Companies are looking for the best people, regardless of their nationality. Also, people have a growing need to work internationally.”
On iHipo, there are two kinds of profiles: as a business you can post jobs and search for new talent. As a professional, you can search for jobs and friends in your industry. There’s also the Knowledge Base with over 2,000 international HR contacts and interview preparation material. Further features include a Google maps mashup to geographically highlight the iHipo community, a Facebook application and a number of new networking tools.
I guess it must be a struggle to be successful in this job specific area of the web. It’s a niche with hundreds of players, and they’re are all trying to lure young talents into their professional network. Yet iHipo seems to do a pretty good job. The Singaporean company launched in July 2007 and managed to attract close to 1,000 registered users and 160 job offers by international employers in the first week. They were mainly successful in the US and South-East Asia and now plan to expand to Europe.
Well, this week iHipo has received some more capital for their European conquest, since they’ve closed a seed round of funding by Thymos Capital and the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA). And with the latter backing them up, they can face everybody. The MDA are those tough Senior Management rappers you might know from the YouTube video that was viewed more than 200,000 times:
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Written on February 3, 2008 – 9:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
At the end of last month, NotchUp shook up the blogosphere with their revolutionary new approach on job recruitment. TechCrunch reported about two ‘Peerflix refugees’ who found a way to stimulate people that are actually happy with their jobs to keep their eyes open for new job opportunities. How? They get paid for showing up at a job interview. The service launched in stealth, but generated an enormous buzz. Not just because of the brilliant idea, also the easy way to set up your account surprised some people - users can simply import their LinkedIn profile - and the viral campaign worked perfectly. Users receive a percentage of the money job recruiters pay to speak with somebody they have invited to join NotchUp. That officiously motivated people to send around invitations. Not everybody liked it, yet you know what they say about bad publicity.
We now bring you an interview with co-founder Rob Ellis. He and CEO Jim Ambras worked together at Peerflix - Ambras was the VP of Engineering and Ellis was the Director of Operations - and both have a background in the tech industry. How did these two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs come up with the great idea?
I got so frustrated with making cold calls that at one point I nearly offered an engineer 100 dollar just to listen to my phone pitch
Ellis told us about ‘the’ moment: “When we worked at Peerflix, Jim tasked me with recruiting a team of engineers for him. It was incredibly hard to find people to even pick up the phone and listen to me. I got so frustrated with making cold calls that at one point I nearly offered an engineer 100 dollar just to listen to my phone pitch. I think it was around then that the lightbulb in my head went off, and I realized that what initially seemed like a crazy idea was actually pretty smart if applied the right way.”
So he and Ambras decided to give it a shot. Ambras built the NotchUp site and is now in charge of leading the company. Ellis is responsible for the marketing and product design. They had a dream start, yet what are their expectations for this year? Will they actually turn the market upside down? Ellis: “We hope to prove that there’s a better way to approach the job market. It looks like people really like our idea. In the past six weeks, over 85,000 professionals have registered for NotchUp, with thousands more signing up every day, and we’ve around 1,000 companies - including almost every major technology company - contacted us to say they’re interested in using NotchUp to recruit.”
We’ve received a great deal of interest from companies in Europe that are interested in using NotchUp to recruit top talent
I was one of those 85,000 users who subscribed because I had to test it for this blog, yet I had to lie about my ZIP code since only American citizens were allowed to join. So I said I was still living in New York. Turns out I can change that now, since NotchUp dropped the focus on the American market last week. Ellis: “We actually now accept applications and registrations from professionals in over 180 countries and have several thousand European members. We’ll be rolling out a much fuller set of tools to support international professionals in the next month or so. We’ve received a great deal of interest from companies in Europe that are interested in using NotchUp to recruit top talent. We hope to be able to accommodate them as soon as possible.”
I think they’ll do a good job promoting NotchUp in Europe. And not just because Ambras has a lot of experience launching successful European sites. As the VP of Engineering at AltaVista, Ambras was responsible for leading the development of AltaVista’s international sites and building/ managing AltaVista’s European engineering team. That experience will certainly pay-off, but the main reason for their success is that everybody who uses NotchUp wins. Who wouldn’t want to join NotchUp? You have the chance of getting a great job offer OR you get just paid for your time. Or like Ellis says: “The way people look for new jobs and companies hire is broken, and we’d love to help fix it”.
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