Comments on: JobsByRef – Search for jobs in stealth mode

By: Sanjay

Sanjay — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:33:25 +0000

Thanks for covering JobsByRef.com. You have raised some very valid points in your article.
1. User engagement and referrals.
If you looked at recent crop of referral based job sites, these worked towards making each person a “recruiter”. So the referral was a simple minded exercise many times – apply if you want to or refer a friend. This does not help much because from an employer stand point, one stranger referring another is quite useless. To get useful results from this kind of referral, you need very tight-knit,niche groups that are highly engaged and know each other’s likings and capabilities.

On the other hand, if you start with the employees of the company (which is the current, real-life working model), each employee has to think carefully before referring someone because if things dont work out, there could be repurcussions for him within the organization (there are disincentives for indiscriminate referring). Our model is based more on this approach. The engagement here is still very focussed on the job/career. I have written about this in a series of articles on my blog (blog.sanjaydattatri.com)
2. Are we doing too many things?
After talking to many companies and placement agencies (before we started), we realised that there was no single silver bullet solution to all the problems with job sites today. We believe that only the convergence of a whole lot of currently disparate applications can significantly improve what we call the resume:recruit ratio (that is the number of resumes that need to be read in order to recruit one person). That’s is why we have taken this approach. If you have noticed, after naukri nobody else has succeeded in this space. This is mostly because others are either clones or very narrowly focused.

3. Minor point. The stealth mode is more than hiding info from current employee. If you are in stealth, companies searching for your profile will only be informed that there are X number of people meeting their requirements and the company can contact them through jobsbyref.com. No portion of the profile is shown. So the companies are able to contact these people without knowing who they are. Now the person in stealth can choose to respond and reveal himself or not. JobsByRef.com, kind of, acts like their personal career manager.

By: Sachin

Sachin — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:54:35 +0000

Just checked the site…is very nice and what they seem to be trying to do is different. Different from the naukri, monster and timesjobs that I have used. Looks like they are trying to solve the problems that exist in the current crop of job sites.

I have hired people using naukri and other job sites out there, other than being a good repository of resumes, there is nothing else that they provide is useful. Recruiters end up doing all the work in sorting, filtering, finding a suitable resume from all the downloaded resumes from these job sites. And any delay in this process effects me as a job seeker too.

The good thing I see the folks at jobsbyref are thinking and trying to do something different. Don’t know if it will work. Will give it a spin and see. Good luck to them.

By: Rohit Kapoor

Rohit Kapoor — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:19:07 +0000

They seem to be scraping postings from other sites… Where do they get the openings from?

By: Rohit Kapoor

Rohit Kapoor — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:16:12 +0000

Job sites have to transactional…there is no other way..

If I am looking for a job, all I care about is job openings.. I just want to apply to as many relevant positions I can…

I don;t care about career advice…

Naukri is successful because they have the reach… more jobs than any other site.