(January 31, 2008) Notchup is the company that opened the market for pay to candidates Recruiting. The face of the deal is that candidates should e compensated for their time in the hiring process. It's positively 21st Century.
As employers compete for ever dwindling pools of talent, the laws of scarcity will manifest themselves. It's simple...scarce things cost more. As they get scarcer, the way they are managed changes. As the value of the waste in chip manufacturing grew (more and more precious metals), they stopped using dumpsters and started using armored cars.
In every other arena, employers routinely spend money to guarantee supply. It's common practice for the first sessions to be billable in professional consultations. When you interview a good doctor, lawyer, therapist, or accountant, you always pay for the first interactions. It's a normal and predictable evolution that candidates should and will be compensated.
We expect an uproar from the Recruiting Industry.
The primary inventory of the industry, on all sides, is human beings and their data. The industry currently operates on the principle that workers are so plentiful that their time and data are worth nothing. Much of the waste and corruption in the business can be attributed to the fact that inventory is valued at zero. And, this is supposedly the Human Capital Industry.
How completely 20th Century.
Like salmon fisherman pining for the days when the rivers were flush, expect to hear recruiters complaining. Expect their hiring managers, who have been shielded from the truth like mid-western anti-environmentalists, to gripe, whine and refuse. Expect companies who don't value the time of their candidates to begin to suffer.
It's a sellers market, recession or not. It will be a seller's market for the foreseeable future. We are witnessing the changing of the guard.
It's not clear if the NotchUp folks have the right positioning, adequate resources or the ability to scale properly. The idea is not dissimilar from H3.com (rumored to be up for acquisition). Take a smart process and try to use it to limit the flow of information through your service. Notchup may not be as fortunate as H3.com.
If their view (Notchup, that is) prevails, the real hassle will be issuing 1099s (the tax form) to all of those candidates. Companies will start paying for candidate time sooner or later. The administrative burden associated with this notion will be hamstrung and complicated by primitive tax code notions about who is or isn't an employee.
And, that's really what all of the fuss will be about.
A 21st Century company is best understood as an ecosystem (or coral reef). It has complex, nutrient based relationships with all sorts of life forms. Value flows where it is needed.
The more primitive view, that a company is like a medieval fortress with only a few classes of inhabitants, is, um, medieval. When you have serfs and slaves, you don't have to pay them for their time. When you have rich relationships with independent actors, it's a different story.
John Sumser. - © 2008 Two Color Hat, Inc. Santa Rosa, CA
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