Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jeremy Lappin on January 15, 2009 at 11:51am

Jerry,

We are indeed doing "thousands" though we don't release actual numbers for obvious reasons. In terms of performance, we have some headhunters that have sent hundreds of resumes and never filled a job, and some that have sent just a few and filled multiple jobs. Many of our headhunters have filled more than 10 positions.

Hope that helps!

Jeremy Lappin
CEO BountyJobs

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jerry Albright on January 15, 2009 at 12:06pm

Thank you Jeremy. We're glad you stopped by to let us know what's happening with Bountyjobs.

Congratulations on your success. Erica also just called me personally. You have a great person on the team there!

Jeremy Lappin said:

Jerry,

We are indeed doing "thousands" though we don't release actual numbers for obvious reasons. In terms of performance, we have some headhunters that have sent hundreds of resumes and never filled a job, and some that have sent just a few and filled multiple jobs. Many of our headhunters have filled more than 10 positions.

Hope that helps!

Jeremy Lappin
CEO BountyJobs

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by John on January 15, 2009 at 12:36pm

Jerry,

It still sounds like he is shoveling it. I could say I am filling thousands of jobs too. I personally don't buy it, especially since one of reps that I spoke with a while back said they are filling abut 70 jobs per month plus they only have like 1500 jobs posted and as they say over 10,000 recruiters.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Joshua Letourneau on January 15, 2009 at 2:24pm

Hey, Jerry - You receive my "Brass Balls" award today. Anyone who knows me is aware that I've also been quite outspoken about what is amounting to the 'transactionalization' of recruiting in mid-late 2008.

I can't imagine a world where you are now banned from speaking with current Clients out of fear that Bounty will "fire" you. My instinct is to say, "What? As a VMS, you're going to fire ME? Without me, you don't exist. In fact, I'm firing you, effective immediately."

I've employed a counter-strategy that has been devastating (literally) within my niche . . . and has resulted in more placements in 1/09 than 1/08 (which is saying something.)

My new strategy is this: If you exist in my niche and you whore your jobs on any online VMS, you are an immediate target. Unfortunately for you, I will not nuke you or call in any airstrikes. No, it won't be so easy. Highly trained in the art of field craft, I will selectively pick off your top talent like a sniper, delivering long-range precision fire from concealed positions of little signature.

As a result, you will have more and more jobs to place on these VMS 'solutions', because I will ensure your retention program is full of "fresh souls".

In the end, Jerry, it's us who have the power . . . much moreso than any technology vendor or platform that wishes to siphon a small % of the entire global staffing spend.

I send this message while camoflauged as a bush among the elements. It will self destruct in 15 seconds :)

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Robin Gillman on January 15, 2009 at 2:32pm

When Bounty Jobs first came out, I took a quick look at it but passed for a couple of reasons (site design being one--looking better recently, wording of the contract being another, trust level and likelihood of it being worth the trouble to me personally). These were my own personal feelings and I do not want to infer any of my feelings upon anyone else. I know DFW Recruiters has had Bounty Jobs at their meetings, and I have not attended these meetings; I might have a different perception if I had.

I can understand why there might be more recruiters and less leads, especially with this economy and preference of most corporations to work with trusted knowns OR as one might say, "It's all about the relationship." Most corporations may not want to work with an unknown half of the deal because of branding, time, and overall financial messiness.

This is not to say this is the case with this site. However, perception is everything and eventually becomes actuality or reality in the end.

Julie Deane said:

Jeremy,

We signed up with them yesterday, I'll let you know how it works for us. So far, it appears a lot of recruiters are in there and not as many jobs.

Julie

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Gerry Crispin on January 15, 2009 at 3:06pm

Fascinating thread which, by the way, I shared with several corporate clients considering BJ. The power, IMHO, is with the jobseeker who, regardless of the platform and convoluted way in which he/she gets hired, ends up having made the right decision for themselves and performs as expected...otherwise it all falls apart. Everyone else in this theatre of the absurd called recruiting is a workaround

What was missing in this entire thread, at least for me, was a comment from the folks with the money-the corporations choosing to use BJ...not one weighed in unless I missed it. I didn't hear a peep about how it creates a convenient and open marketplace, how it reduces noise from packs of 3rd party recruiters whose claims about relationships are too often hyped to both the employer and candidate alike.

Perhaps there are no corporate folks lurking on recruitingblogs...but then I know that isn't true. Perhaps they really don't see any value to BJ, haven't had a hire and or, just can't bring themselves to admit to being lazy about vetting quality 3rd party help. Or, perhaps they didn't see any need to join the discussion, and they had other concerns about weighing in- after all some 3rd folks can be pretty intimidating.

Jerry, I think you are missing some comments from an important stakeholder. Their perceptions, and the data that supports their perceptions are going to impact the growth of this category- a technology driven market platform category that yes, takes a piece of the action...your action. If it compensates by putting you into the mix on more openings and subsequently increases your total placements, the fee is secondary. But the real proof of worth is going to be measured by the employer who acquires quaity candidates more efficiently (not simply for less money but less wasted effort).

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Rick Corey on January 15, 2009 at 3:24pm

Thousands of placements? I seriously doubt it. If you're looking for a good split placement network, take a look at NPA, The Worldwide Recruiting Network. I have been a member of NPA since 1990, and it is a solid, ethical organization. I've not only increased my business, but I've made some great friends. There are some in NPA who do only "export"... that is they don't have any client companies but just concentrate on generating good candidates for the rest of us. Then there are those (like myself) who do both import and export. I put candidates into the system for others, and I import candidates for my own job orders. I'm very specialized so I don't do an enormous amount of splits a year, but enough to make the return on investment very attractive. Some NPA members are doing $200,000+ in splits each year in NPA. Another advantage is that it's worldwide, so you can tell your clients you are able to handle their international hiring needs through "affiliate offices" (the other international NPA members).
It's a great organization and worth looking into. Check them out at: http://www.npaworldwide.com

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Joshua Letourneau on January 15, 2009 at 3:42pm

Gerry, intelligent and well articulated response - as always. You bring up a super point about the candidate having the power.

I may not speak for all TPRs' (surely, I don't!), but I am on record to admit it's easy to forget the truth of your statement. As I haven't had to post a job description on an online job board in a while, and I am fortunate to have a 'database' (value quite easy to overrate, of course), I 'typically' recruit the candidate who is unaware of an opening . . . or why it may be worth their while to take a peak. Yet, while the TPR has power over what Clients we choose to support, everything begins with the candidate. The candidate can exercise their own power by choosing to stay put in their current role eternally (meaning until they are consolidated or let go).

P.S. I'm still camoflauged as a bush :)

Gerry Crispin said:

The power, IMHO, is with the jobseeker who, regardless of the platform and convoluted way in which he/she gets hired, ends up having made the right decision for themselves and performs as expected...otherwise it all falls apart. Everyone else in this theatre of the absurd called recruiting is a workaround

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Lou Redmond on January 15, 2009 at 7:49pm

Gerry - I can speak from a contract recruiter on staff of a major CPG company....we used it and did not make a placement...actually hated it from the corporate side, as it did not reduce the noise of recruiters throwing paper at the wall.....too much work to try and develop relationships with recruiters to understand their style of recruiting and relationship building with candidates.

From a recruiters perspective, I hate pack-herd mentality. I want to have real conversations with real people, both from the client side, the recruiter side and the candidate side.

I personally do not work well, effectively or with integrity if I am throwing paper at the wall and not developing real relationships.

I'm not usually a nay-sayer or neggie-nellie, but I find it hard to believe that Bounty Jobs is consistently filling thousands of jobs. Can't convince me unless you "open the kimono" or show me the guy behind the curtain....

The concept of BJ is noble, however the use/application is awful; entirely too passive. Not how I will make revenue...Congrats to those who do.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Greig Wells on January 17, 2009 at 12:45am

I was happy with Bounty Jobs from the client side (see below for my feedback and critique of BJ). IMO the BJ concept is break through but still early in development as has a lot of room for improvement. I think to some degree you are splitting hairs by seeking to determine the total number of placements done by the BJ community. If you can do a few extra deals a year through BJ that is a no brainer for a free service. What reason can you give not to have BJ as one tool/platform you utilize. Of course you never out all your eggs in any one basket.

I've heard directly from my BJ rep that they have a 6 week waiting list of recruiters to get into the BJ community, they don't need more recruiters, they need more job openings and client development will always be the focus of their staff as I would want to be if I was a recruiter on the other side. That being said any smart business should have a Google Alert set up to notify them if they are being talked about and they should take the time to have someone respond since it effects their reputation in the market place.

DYK BJ pays out 97% on submittals made within the first 2 weeks of joining and that they pay 85% of the deal after you have made 2 placements with a client. The normal pay out is 75% which means 2 deals done on Bounty equals 3 deals done through a normal 50/50 split, which over the course of the year means you only have to 2/3 as many deals to earn the same money on BJ as elsewhere on split boards.

MY Bounty Jobs Experience from the Corporate Side:

We used Bounty Jobs at Pegasystems when we were hiring aggressively and it worked out great. We were able to work with and evaluate a lot of recruiting agencies all at once in a very efficient manner. You get a lot of submittals for hard to find position that you are willing to pay a 20% fee for from BJ. I would not recomend offering a low ball fee as you will only get the bottom feeder agencies to work on your job. Instead I recomend making your criteria very sepcific to make it worth paying a 20% fee. I found several small niche agencies on BJ that gave my positions a lot of quality attention and effort to filling them with success. On Bounty Jobs there is no way to tell which agencies are good and which are "resume spammers". I recomend you give everyone a chance and then you can easily disengage anyone that made submissions that clearly did not meet the requirements. Engaging everyone will result in you getting a lot of submittals that are not qualfied as often it is hard to identify the perfect candidate just from a written job description. To make the agency process work you really need to explain the opening to them and answer their questions; and this also shows the agency you are serious. Now to do this with 30-40 agencies on Bounty Jobs (that was just the agencies focused on my niche that I initially accepted to work with) would take way too much time. To address this and make it work, I put together a simple 15 minute webinar/power point presentation on our company and the open positions where I gave details on the openings and answered questions for all of the vendors. It took about 30 minutes to make the presentation and another 30 minutes to do it. Another tweak is to make your submittal criteria for Bounty Jobs Agencies very specific such as we only want senior software engineers from this list of 30 companies which completely eliminated the spam submittals. Then I set up job board agents for this same narrow criteria, this way I wasn't racing against the agencies to make sure they weren't just sending me somebody who just posted to Monster.com that day. The goal of using Bounty Jobs was to have the agencies find a "perfect" candidate from a direct competitor, someone that I could not have found on my own, and if they did that was a service we would gladly pay a 20% placement fee for. In our first round of using BJ I found a hadnfull of new agencies that I will work consistently for future openings through Bounty Jobs.

If you are going to work with agencies then Bounty Jobs is a very good tool which I highly recomend from the corporate recruiting point of view. I would be happy to speak with anyone one one one if you would like to know more. I'd even be willing to help you design the webinar (I use all free tools) and the power point presentaton as a free service in exchange for a nice recomendation from you on LinkedIn.

Thanks for listening!

Greig Wells

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Diana Luger on January 17, 2009 at 12:04pm

While doing some business development the other day, a Hiring Manager told me he posts his jobs on Bounty Jobs.

I checked out one of his jobs and 24 Recruiters were working on it. That gives you about a 4% chance of ever getting paid for your work! I wonder how many Hiring Managers would bother to go to work if they had a 4% chance of getting paid!

In my experience, often Recruiters on Bounty never even talk to their candidates. So, if you take the time to effectively screen a candidate, they have likely already been submitted by a rogue Recruiter.

If Bounty doesn't limit the number of Recruiters to a reasonable and fair number, they will continue to drive down recruiting rates across the board and hurt our industry.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jerry Albright on January 11, 2011 at 12:11pm

Good afternoon Robert.  Rather than have a splits discussion in this played-out thread - I'll join the discussion if you'd make it a new blog topic.  I do splits all the time and would love to discuss it.

Robert Green said:

I don't get splits.  All of the investment of time working for 1/2 of what you could be earning for a placement seems like a giant waste of time and money.  If someone is headhunting / marketing correctly, splits aren't an option.  Why would you?  Especially if I'm working for a headhunting company and have to already give up 30-60% of my commission, they are even more of a waste.  There's no easy street.  Just make phone calls and get job orders and fill them and stop wasting time and money on splits. If you're going to do that, just go work in an HR department.

• ▶ Reply

▶ Reply to Discussion

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next ›
• Page