Jobylon Crowdsources Recruitment Through Finders Fees

    Searching for a job or trying to fill a position has forever remained a slow and unrewarding process. But by mixing in crowdsourcing and social features, a Swedish startup, Jobylon, thinks they have the model to fix recruitment by putting a social application on top of Facebook and LinkedIn, and then using the crowd to find the best leads.

    The company points out that their emphasis on referrals also manages to target the passive candidates that can be difficult to find. And for active job seekers, Jobylon provides value by putting together information on vacant jobs and employers all in one place.

    Logging into the Jobylon app on Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ll find a list of jobs you can apply to, or recommend to a friend. Some jobs may even have a “Bounty” (or finders fee) given to specific positions, which are paid out to referrers of candidates once the candidate is hired.

    But aside from the referral rewards, they’ve full featured job search engine that saves jobs and search agents, and pulls up relevant jobs based on your LinkedIn and Facebook profile. In their just-released update, they’ve also launched Friend Search, where you can search for open positions based on your friends. This is designed to make it easy to see where your friends are working, and then reach out to your network and ask questions or set up lunch or coffee.

    CEO Aref Abedi says, “So far, Jobylon Bounty has been at a very early stage. Having said that, we’ve already had around 50 bounties out on the site, with a total amount of almost 1 000 000 SEK/NOK for people to collect. Around a dozen of these have led to hires, from account managers to senior engineers; all have been passive candidates who have not actively been looking for a job.”

    Right now Jobylon is only available in Swedish and Norwegian as they continue to work on their “Bounty” concept. Abedi says that the Bounty concept has proven its potential during their test phase, and they’ve gained a huge amount of knowledge when it comes to referral behaviours and best practices.

    Users may be sketched out with Facebook being mixed with job hiring, but Jobylon says that it does not post anything on your wall, or send your or your friends’s personal information without your permission. And when they do pull it up, they say they will only use basic information from your Facebook profile, such as your name, work history, education, list of friends, your friend’s work history, and email.

    Will users connect their social networks to a job search tool? We’ll see, but it’s good to see some innovation in the recruitment area.