“I am shocked, SHOCKED I SAY, that someone who runs the domain stackoverthrow.com would be disappointed with our latest offering. :)”
Nice one Jeff. that’s a great movie reference. :}
I really like SO - I have had some points of contention and I don;t always agree with you.
I’d also like to point out to the rest of the crowd that the fee for seekers is rather small and can’t be seen as a way for these guys to make money - that is NOT the business model. the purpose of it is to somehow “preqaulify” the candidates so that they can charge high prices for the other side. that is a totally reasonable thing to do - higher quality applicant pools will generate high fees.
My contention is that charging fees, though it may sound good on paper, is actually going to limit the applicant pool from ever having the best applicants and will likely end up lowering the mean “desirability” of the overall searchable applicant pool.
The builders of SO should be able to make money from it. Making improvements in the job matching world is a great idea. I think this piece of that puzzle is broken.
Someone asked if I had any suggestions for improving rather than just complaining or ranting.
well, it is a little difficult without knowing the other (buy) side of the business model. For example - are they paying per search, per search term, per resume, per contact/email? A lot of that is important. Is there really feedback from the other side that says they will only spend X when the applicant search is free, but will spend X+Y when the applicants pay?
The crux is how to maximize overall profit - and I presume SO staff are right in that they want to have some way to make the pool of applicants very desirable. One step is that they are SO users. The next is to figure out how to ensure that hiring companies are not wasting their time on people who are not serious about taking a job offer. One way is to offer very competitive salaries, benefits and great working conditions. That would entice a lot of people who aren’t even looking. Another way would be for people to be on the list initially and through some sort of feedback they would be put at the end of the list if they were found not to be “serious”. People can have the option of paying, and if they don’t want to pay they can throw their hat in the ring so to speak. I would wager that companies will still want to search the database of people who are mildly interested. They might want to spend that extra time fighting for someone or trying to get their attention rather than just taking the people who shelled out the $29/$99.
There is also the inconsistency of the people who spend the $29 or $99 who already found jobs who then DON’T take their name off the list voluntarily - they then fall into the same category of the others who didn’t pay - i would presume that they are off the market and paying companies DON’T want to see them, but yet they paid and they might want to keep their resumes searchable. How is that inconsistency handled?
I don’t know the best way to solve the issue - but I am convinced that this is not the users’ problem to pay for/solve - it for SO and the Buy side to solve.
