When I wrote that I don’t see NotchUp as a direct competitor what I meant is that they’re not a college job board. We compete against them like we compete against other indirect competitors and that list includes such formidable competitors as Monster, Careerbuilder, HotJobs, daily newspapers, headhunters, etc. Any organization that helps organizations with their recruitment needs is a competitor but only college job boards are our direct competitors.

Great article on a really good subject.
A couple of short snip-its of value I see in this and appreciate your bringing to the conversation:

This, in essence, can reduce the number of unqualified resumes coming in so the in-house recruiters can hit the nail faster and easier. It also has the potential of reducing fees to agencies for positions a company’s in-house team should be able to fill. Thereby steering the external partners to focus on the real impact positions. Looking at this outside of the day to day business impact, this potentially will separate the wheat from the chaff in agency recruiters by forcing them to recruit value added positions. In doing so, the recruiters will need to really know the landscape.

For the in-house recruiters, this could be problematic though because the underperforming recruiters will now have one more tool that will hide their incompetence.

My caution or request to Notchup is, screen the referrals too. While typically quality ‘A’ players beget quality, there are or will be those who will try to use this as a supplemental income and refer almost anyone for the referral fee.

Finally, Mr. Rothberg, I recommend you look again at who your competitors are. I would spend $ on interviews of highly qualified candidates than $ on a generic posting that will yield me 500 resumes I need to weed through, track for OFCCP etc, and hope to get a couple decent hits from.

Enjoy

My biggest concern about NotchUp is their apparent ignorance and perhaps deliberate disregard for the anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM. Perhaps they’re taking the acronym literally and feel that it means that they’re allowed to spam and to make it easy for their users to spam people like me, but the law actually is designed to enable recipients of unwanted, unsolicited commercial emails (UCE’s) to remove themselves from the mailing lists of the senders. The emails that are being sent by NotchUp to promote their service have no mechanism to unsubscribe, no CAN-SPAM notice at the bottom with a postal address, and my replies to their reply-to email address have gone unanswered and unheeded. They’re playing with fire and I hope that they stop for their sake and also for the sake of my Outlook inbox.

I didn’t mind receiving the first email from their service to ask me if I’d be interested in getting paid for an interview. I thought it was interesting and well written. Short, sweet, and to the point. Even the second email wasn’t annoying, although I wasn’t happy that I couldn’t find a way to unsubscribe but I figured that by replying with ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject and message body would get me off of their list. No such luck. After several more of their emails, I am getting sick of seeing them.

As the owner of another job board, I have no desire to be paid to interview with one of their clients and I have even less desire to receive emails asking me if I want to be interviewed. I did not ask to be on their mailing list and they’ve made it difficult and perhaps impossible to be removed from their mailing list. If I were a potential client and received one of their mailings, I’d take my business elsewhere.

I don’t see them as a direct competitor so I’m not trying to skew public opinion against them. I’m just hoping that someone at NotchUp is paying attention to this list and will take the necessary steps to bring their business model into compliance with the federal anti-spam laws.