(There is some chit chat, Wise Man Say’s speciality. 15 minutes later…)

The Job Crowd. Let’s put that into a nutshell for the readers of Wise Man Say
Natasha: Think TripAdvisor for jobs. Employees will come on and put on a review, and job applicants read it. More exciting than TripAdvisor, the applicant can ask questions and interact with the reviewer. We are all about bringing employees and applicants together, and closing that information gap between them.

How did all this start?
Keren: (taking a moment) The question is, how do you know what a job is really like? The answer is you talk to people who are actually doing the job – they are the ones that know it best. And these days, it’s so easy to facilitate this online that we felt that there had to be place where young people could go in order to find out this information. It wasn’t really catered for, so The Job Crowd was born.

There is a big problem with the whole way the milk round is structured. There only a handful of companies that the graduates know about – the big banks, or the big Four accountancy firms or maybe their consultancy equivalents. So how can they make a good judgement on all those other great careers that might be out there? Or, for that matter know what a job at the top firms really involve?

A classic thing that gets us every time is the Times Top 100 companies. It’s voted for by the students, not by people working at those companies, so PwC win every year because they got the biggest budget marketing to students! Nothing against any of the companies there, but it’s a big problem when the marketing of employment opportunities are dominated by a few of the major corporates.

I mean, I’m actually an example of it. Before I got my job at Innocent, I had absolutely no idea that that kind of option was available to me! I only knew about banking, accountancy or law. Nothing at all on retail or FMCG or anything else. We think that there has got to be a way for a smaller company to exist along side big corporates and be presented as the viable options they are.

Natasha: Those 200 man employers – like Innocent – might be really fun to work with, but don’t get any coverage through the current system. We think a resource like The Job Crowd can really widen that choice for applicants looking for their first job.

It’s obvious there are flaws in the current system. How do you think the players in that system are going to react to you guys?
Keren: We get it. We understand why careers services might struggle to provide that type of in industry knowledge. They have to be a generalist because they are dealing with everything. And a company, when they draft a job description or produce copy on their career site, of course they have do their marketing bit. But that’s why we think it’s really important to have an independent resource to give applicants the ‘warts ‘n’ all’ picture of what it’s actually like to work in one of these industries.

Natasha: Our experience is that employers really like the ‘warts ‘n’ all’ – they prefer it – but often can’t say so. Employers actually don’t want loads of applicants who don’t know what the job actually is. Having spoken to hundreds of HR teams……they are all really positive about the site.They think that quality will be better because they won’t get loads of applications from graduates who don’t know what the job is.

Review site or Salary comparison?
Keren: I think both. We really like the engagement that takes place between applicants and employee, and the core of what we do is the context of what is said. Applicants can see the communication and make their own judgements. It’s like if you went and had a coffee with someone who works for Accenture – you’d probably find out a lot about what it is like to work there – much better than you would by going onto their corporate careers site. We are trying to recreate that type of interaction and experience online.

Now salary is important, it’s what graduates want to know, so we do provide that as well.

OK. Let’s say I work for one of these top employers. Why do I bother to write a review?
Keren: I think there are a range of motivations.

There are going to be people who just want to help graduates out. They knew what it was like when they came out and now they just want do their bit to provide a bit of guidance. Then there are those who want to be ‘gurus’, sources of expertise that people might listen to – the same reason why people write restaurant or book reviews. And finally, there are those who maybe really love or really hate their job! Or maybe they love their job but acknowledge that their expectations were misaligned upon entering upon it. I consider myself in this category – I loved my time at Innocent, but it was absolutely nothing like I imagined! I got lucky because it worked out well for me, but we need to find a way to tell people before they make that decision. It could prevent many bad mistakes being made early on.

So, I’m a cynic right? How do you stop astro-turfing?
Natasha: That’s a real problem we’ve thought a lot about. It hasn’t been a problem in actuality, but we know that one of the ways in which you can attack a review site is through – as you say – astro-turfing.

One way we do it, is to keep the questions factual. That way the reviewer has to really come back with factual responses – how long the hours are, how much the salary is and so on. We also vet what goes online and manually review the content to make sure that it isn’t inauthentic or suspicious in any way. Finally, we also have a good understanding of where the reviews are coming from – where we advertise or promote the site, and we get a good idea from the response rate if the reviews are genuine.

(Still being a cynic) What do you do if someone really hates his job?
Keren: We moderate. We see The Job Crowd as a constructive resource. If someone comes on and gives factual evidence of how bad an employer might be, then we would verify that but if it’s the case, that goes up. If someone comes on and just vents, where its not fact but opinion then it doesn’t help anyone, so we won’t put it up.

Natasha: And the other thing is that teams change all the time. So if you’re coming onto to the site with really personal complaints – let’s say about your boss or your work colleagues – that will be relevant only to your specific case and will be irrelevant as personnel change over time.

OK. (getting carried away now) Let’s say I’m Accenture. I’m going to send someone onto your site, and try to wipe out PwC with bad reviews. How do you stop that?
Natasha: We take an email address and verify anything which comes across as untruthful – and in fairness we have had a few! We do hold the right not to publish anything that we deem unhelpful or untruthful. Fortunately most of the time the combination of factual questions / answers and the sheer range of responses we get from each company mean that particularly negative (or positive) reviews stick out like a sore thumb….

Keren: ….for the moment, it’s not much of a problem, but you’re right as it gets bigger than we need to look at it. Anonymity is key, because otherwise we will just end up producing corporate rather than employee information, but we do have to find a way to ensure that we get genuine reviews on and not those that are trying to game the system in some way.

(Wise Man Say proposes some half baked solutions to this dilemma. Keren shoots them down with good grace)

Given that your market is Gen Y, was there ever consideration decision to build The Job Crowd on top of Facebook?
K: It came down to anonymity again. There are some applications out there that already try and use Facebook as a platform, but we didn’t want to be another BranchOut. We allow people to contact people outside their network and that can’t be easily done in any social network, given the fact that most of the people you are connected to are those know already. Myself and Natasha were both pretty fortunate coming out of University. We knew people in our personal networks who were managers, lawyers and so on – who could really help us in getting that first step right. But a lot of people do not have that network. Our system allows people to connect to people they don’t know and allow that interaction to take place. So it was important for us to be stand alone.

Do Talent Community Builders challenge your proposition?
Keren: We know that there are companies out there that are helping fill this space – this gap between applicant and employer. The employers themselves are doing it through their own means and we think that is great. However, it doesn’t solve the problem of corporate tallking to the applicant. It’s still going to be the party line. We are all about providing anonymous employee reviews, and not the corporate voice. We are actually complementary to those guys building Talent Communities, even though it might not sound like that!

How do make your money?
Keren: At the moment, we’re not! We’ve got funding to see us through our plan and at the moment our focus is to build that connection between employee and applicant. For the applicant, that will always be free – this is an ‘anyone can use’ resource for the job search.

Natasha: As for the employers……..if we get a consistent and growing volume of high quality graduate applicants regularly coming to the site, that’s going to be high value for employers. We’ll charge for employers to put content onto the profile, the kind of thing that they would do in order to compete for the graduate pool. We are probably going to have a tiered pricing model, so that different types of employers with different budgets for recruitment, can all have an opportunity to be exposed to this talent pool…

Keren: We are talking to employers to get them engaged and on what valued added content they want to get onto the site. And it’s really important for us that the long tail of smaller companies do not get missed out.

Why did you drop MyNineToFive? I kind of liked it
Keren: We did have a discussion about that……

Natasha: It was really memorable! But we had some feedback from graduate employers who did not want to think about their jobs that way. They thought it described the jobs too negatively.

Keren: Perhaps the irony didn’t communicate!

(Wise Man Say thinks there’s been too much polling going on…)

How long until world conquest?
Keren: Basically everything is going quite well, In terms of where we want to get to, it’s sort of a two year plan…

Natasha: We have a really strict plan – week by week, month by month, and so far we are on course. So two years time, we’re going to be there.

Keren, Natasha…it’s been a pleasure.
Keren: Thank you. It’s been great meeting with you.
Natasha: Thanks for doing the interview

Thanks to Keren Mitchell & Natasha Freeman, Co-Founders of The Job Crowd, makers of The Job Crowd. Find out more on www.TheJobCrowd.com and follow them on Twitter