Forget Headhunters, Startups Use FriendFeed to Recruit
Finding a job is a startup is tough, if you don’t know where to look. In college, I had dreams of working at a startup and getting paid little to no money and having no benefits and working ridiculously long hours, all with the vague chance that I would get some eventual payoff, and I think that’s where every eager college grad is looking forward to.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a good resource pool to find a job at a startup. The likes of Monster.com and Hotjobs turned up nothing but insurance salesman and retail managers. Now that I’ve been around the likes of the web 2.0 world for 2-3 years, I’ve learned a number of things and know the right places to look for work, but to help people out, I decided to create a Web 2.0 Jobs room on FriendFeed where employers can post jobs and employees can go to find jobs. While the “room” is hardly a full-fledged resource, I think it’s a good environment to be seeking employment and also hire employees.
FriendFeed Is Free, High-Quality Hiring for Startups
The types of people likely to be on FriendFeed are the astute, constantly connected, early-adopter, web 2.0 crowd and exactly the crowd you want to be working at your startup. And for entrepreneurs, you want to make sure your employer is a participant and leader in the social media conversation. It’s a win-win on both sides, and it’s a free forum where there aren’t any strings attached to hiring and recruiting.
Hopefully with FriendFeed and the opening of the social media world we’ll see more resources like this opening up, those that are free, highly effective, and allow both sides to win. Right now, hiring a headhunter costs 20% of the final salary of an employee. If you’re paying your employee $60,000, you’re going to shell out $12,000 to the headhunter, while instead you could be spending that $12,000 on advertising for the company which benefits the employees, shareholders, and everyone involved.
Hello free social media, goodbye 20% commissions to headhunters.
