Jobylon Bounty Crowdsources Headhunting Through A Facebook App

    Are attitudes towards Facebook shifting where users will start using it more for job seeking? Stockholm-based social job board, Jobylon, has now put a major focus on their “Bounty” jobs where users can refer their facebook friends for jobs, and receive ‘bounties’ in return. The result is an interesting take on recruiting – sort of a crowdsourced headhunting Facebook app.

    The way it works is pretty simple. Users log into Jobylon as a Facebook app, where their algorithm automatically matches their friends (and your friends’ friends) to jobs, based on their studies or occupation on Facebook. If the matches look good, you can refer a friend to a job, which is sent as a private Facebook message. If they accept they can forward their details to the employer, and if your recommended candidates get hired, you get rewarded. Of course you can also apply to these jobs yourself, but the cool hook here is the reward system.

    The majority of these cash prizes already posted are in the range of SEK 10,000 – SEK 30,000 (€1,183 – €3,551), but employers don’t necessarily have to give anything to post a job. Alternatively employers can pick their own prizes, so iPads and other prizes might get thrown into the mix. This is potentially interesting for consumer internet companies, like Spotify, that could give away free subscriptions as a reward.

    “It’s supposed to be extremely simple for anyone to send a recommendation to a friend – or to a friend of a friend – and even easier for the other person to accept or deny. This is only the tip of the iceberg for us. From here and now its going to be a lot of work when it comes to the actual algorithims and finding the suggestions. We also want to build much more intereactive templates and also tools for the employer to actually distribute the ad,” says Abedi.

    Jobylon only pushed Jobylon Bounty out on the web a week ago, so it will be interesting to see how it works out for employers. Compared to traditional headhunters (who usually charge an upfront fee and a couple months salary) an iPad mini is pretty cheap deal for potentially a lot of exposure. Jobylon already runs a job board where this “Bounty” concept has been tested. And it apparently works. Abedi gives the example of how just last week there was a Swedish company looking for an engineer with a bounty. Three days later they had three interviews and made a hire.

    I’m curious how the service will work out in practice since the Jobylon Bounty app will promote more viral hooks. Some users may take more of a “shotgun” approach of recommending lots of unqualified people for jobs, who may still go through the application process. In this situation the hiring manager may still have to go through the same amount of bad applications as a traditional job posting, but at least they will still be able to potentially get access to the talent locked up in the “passive jobseekers” that didn’t realize they have better opportunities elsewhere.

    And secondly it will be interesting to see how Facebook works as their main platform. Abedi tells us they built the platform on Facebook so it can scale and grow much faster than on LinkedIn or just through email, but I think a lot of people are suspicious with anything regarding new employers and their personal “Facebook” life. In the future they will be adding tools to import other networks, like your LinkedIn contacts or Facebook contacts.

    Abedi explains, “Its a couple things we saw with our classic job site. We gave the option of logging in with Facebook or LinkedIn, and the interesting thing is that the majority of our users actually chose Facebook, which is interesting in itself because its a job site. But the other nice thing is Facebook’s reach, you can actually recommend your second degree network, so your reach becomes quite large by just inviting a couple of friends.”

    “But that’s a bet that we are taking – that Facebook will take a bigger space in this industry.”