You don’t beat about the bush on what referrals are all about, do you? It’s all about the cash – the dollar signs are right there!
Well…..that’s not exactly it. What we’ve found that whilst everyone likes the cash, most people who make recommendations do so to help their friends or co-workers out. We spoke with our many recommendors and the thought process seems to be more along the lines of ‘let me help my friend because he’s good and he’s starting to look’. So yes, it is about the cash, but it’s much more about helping out your friends and your co-workers.

….yes that may be true, but isn’t there a significant commercial opportunity through Top Prospect? Recruiters can monetize the contacts by making recommendations…..
Look.
(possibly getting exasperated. Wise Man Say is unsure)
I think most of our recommendations…in fact, all of our recommendations so far come from friends or co-workers. Now, I think over that time, recruiters will come on to the site and think about how they can make money off it. Often recruiters will have a great candidate, who may not be a great fit for the company they are currently working with. Now, I can see a situation where a recruiter might want to come onto Top Prospect and see whether there are any roles which that candidate might be suitable for. We currently have over 300 jobs on the system, all of them high quality opportunities with leading employers, so a recruiter could recommend that candidate through our system and make money that they otherwise would not have made.

Now we still think that most people will make recommendations based on their desire to help a friend or co-worker – so that is our core focus – but we do understand that some people might be attracted to financial upside and be motivated first by the cash reward.

$10,000 is a headline figure. That’s serious money. What was the thinking behind such a large referral reward?
Well there’s two things here. You’re right, ten grand is a lot a money (laughs) - it’s a real number and we wanted to motivate and reward people for using the site. But we also thought of it from a quality control perspective. A company with a role is not going to budget $10,000 for just any role – they are going to do it for a role for which they really want a top quality hire. Now if you do your research, most other methods of hiring will cost an employer $24,000 – give or take – so we are still 60% cheaper, but it’s still a real number that ultimately improves the calibre of the jobs that go on.

The companies you have on Top Prospect are ‘A-List’ organisations. Was that deliberate strategy or is there wider ambition to go mass market?
We wanted to make sure that the jobs that are onto the platform would be jobs that you would be proud to recommend to your friends. We wanted to attract the most impressive connectors or recommendors and if you came onto our site and found opportunities that you wouldn’t be proud to recommend, then you would not be too engaged with the site. We want you to think all the best jobs are here. So if the jobs aren’t interesting to you or your friends, then we don’t want them to be there.

er….how do you police that?
We try not to be exclusive, but if we felt that our network of connectors or recommendors wouldn’t be helpful to you, then we wouldn’t take on the jobs. We conducted an analysis of our profiles…..you know, who are the most common employers of the profiles we have on our system. It turns out that the 10th most popular employer was Facebook. Facebook has 19,000 employees and we 80% of those people in our system. That’s a pretty impressive group of connectors. Again, we don’t want to be exclusive, but we want to make sure that the social graph of our connectors are….complementary to the employer and the openings.

This has tremendous application other sectors, such as financial. Agree?
Yes. I’m not sure whether it will be next sector we target, but will definitely be one of the verticals we expand into. In our early stage, our approach was, ‘lets get all the best jobs in the high tech space in the Bay area’. We want to focus on that but we will expand that to the best high tech jobs nationally. And then we will look at other verticals that make sense to us and the financial sector is certainly one of those.

Walk me through it Rotem: I’m company, I want to put a job on – how does it work?
You’d work with our BD team, who would look at the jobs you have available and make sure the jobs that go on are a good fit to our connectors. If we think we can help you find the right people, we wil post your job on Top Prospect. Of all our 1.5 million profiles in our system, we score how relevant those people are to your job and then we send weekly updates to all of our connectors and say, ‘hey based on all of the information we have, we think that Mark, Nancy & Jim are good fit for the role X, Y or Z – what do you think?’ And then it’s up to that connector to refer them. The employer, you just send us the Job Description and we’ll make sure that the appropriate passive candidates are aware of that opportunity.

….and these employers needs to pay?
Right. You pay $10,000 for the hire. Shortly, we’ll have a small monthly fee for being on the site and having the job marketed to our profiles. Right now, no monthly fee, but in the near future, depending on how many jobs you have on, they’ll be a subscription fee based on that. But whatever it is, it will be marginal compared to the success fee.

Here’s a problem for you. How do you deal with job seekers finding out about opportunities via Top Prospect, and then applying ‘off platform’
…..clearly we are going to have some leakage. Truth is, if a candidate gets recommended, we believe we have got a better chance of getting you that interview than if you go through by another way. But if we are the first one to forward a candidate to that employer, we would expect to be paid, in order to get our connectors paid. In any system there’s going to be some leakage but over time, we’ll figure out how to deal with it.

Where are you now?
It’s early days. People are getting hired, we’re starting to see nice early traction.

One of my big concerns when I started the business was whether people would make high quality recommendations or just spam recommendations trying to make the ten grand. One thing we’ve found very quickly is that a recommendation is not anonymous. The recommendor and the candidate – because they are friends on Facebook or connections on LinkedIn before Top Prospect – have an existing relationship and there is a social contract that goes with that. If you recommend a job to a friend or contact that is blatantly not at the right level, or in some way obviously unsuitable, then there are consequences to that relationship. We’ve been very impressed by the quality of the recommendations…..or should I say, our clients have been very impressed by our recommendations.

Here’s a whale in the water for you. LinkedIn, they’ve got a referral engine coming out. What’s your take?
Look, I have great deal of respect for LinkedIn. We know their senior management team and they are a partner of ours. We’re looking forward to see what they come up with. Now, we do own patents on our business process…..we wish them the best of luck and we look forward to continuing our partnership!

How long til world conquest?
Well world conquest takes a long time, right? (laughs). It’s fun, were getting the right early metrics, but its not going to be an overnight success. But will happen. It’s the future.

OK Rotem. I think you’ve got to go.
Thanks Wise Man Say. Enjoyed the opportunity to chat.

Thanks to Rotem Perelmuter, CEO of Top Prospect. Find out more on www.topprospect.com and follow the company on Twitter

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