Liquid HR

Zubka Review II: The Vengeance

So I've received emails from Zubka offering me thousands of pounds if I refer somebody in a particular position. With such enticement, I went straight back to the Zubka website and was greeted by a logon screen with such giant characters and big buttons that even Web 2.0's standard for dumb and simple interfaces seems to have been eclipsed. I pressed on.

If you don't recall, Zubka's business model is to faciliate middle-men. It gets ordinary folks like you and me to make job referrals by offering us bounties for successful candidates. Not a bad idea, though I was uncertain where it would go during my first review.

Having returned to Zubka, I don't yet see any huge advances in terms of the website, but I'm not sure it really needed any. What's more important is quite simply whether people are posting jobs and referring candidates....so I plow on...

I see 479 postings, with an average reward of roughly 4% of the annual salary per job, and Zubka's basic fee is supposedly 8% of the job's salary - so half the bounty goes to Zubka, and half to the referrer. The average job looks like it has been sitting there for about 2 weeks, which means these postings are refreshed about 24 times a year. Therefore, it looks as if there's enough volume through the system here for the folks at Zubka to make a liveable wage.

So I suggest the formula is something like this: of the jobs that are posted (X), how many of those are real jobs (Y), how many of those are not filled by other means (Z), and finally: how many remaining will be filled by avid Zubka users (the magic number)?

If I'm incredibly generous with revenue projections, and conservative with costs (say 4 full time people), I can see them making a profit of about 315,000 GBP annually, but I think the real number is closer to about 100K, and could even be lower. While that's great for a lifestyle business, it won't satisfy the VCs. Given that they received investment from Benchmark Capital, and had over 2 million investment by Q1 2007, I think they're falling way behind.

I watched a video of one of the co-founders, David Shieldhouse, and he seemed to be singing music to my ears. "Disintermediation of the recruiting agency...needs to happen." But then he also indicated there was some surprise internally at the lack of takeup of their services. Then he indicated that a lot of recruiters are actually using Zubka, which is what I had guessed. He also said he hoped Zubka would help eliminate the non-value adding recruiters that "match one word on a CV to a job spec." What a wonderful vision! (See all of my earlier postings).

Well, you recall my rather bearish outlook on Zubka from a previous post: recruiters are really the only ones that are going to want to invest the time and take the cash-up-front risk. So really Zubka is just becoming a cloud computing service for the recruiters. That makes some money, but fundamentally means they probably won't be creating or recreating an industry in a way necessary to have explosive growth.

Well, I like to imagine that my projections and strategic readings were correct, so I'll go ahead and pat myself on the back. As far as Zubka goes - it's at best an incremental step in the right direction. But it aint the next big thing. Why? Well, I'm feeling a bit prophetic at the moment, so I'll let the Zubka guys give me a call and buy me a pizza before if they want to hear that. So far, I've gotten two free pizzas.

Why the recruitment industry often irritates me

Some time ago - before my day job, I assure you, I was interviewing for various positions, and was called for an interview by one particular company, BMS IT, in the UK. Now, normally I wouldn't name and shame in this fashion, but since I do review online Internet companies by name, I ask myself why a recruiter should be treated any differently.

So I sat down with the recruiter (he'll be unnamed) in an office in downtown London, and we had a conversation about the job at hand. It seemed somewhat relevant for my background, so points scored there. More importantly, we talked about recruiting as an activity. He expressed how baffled he was that recruiters didn't call back their candidates after talking with them, and seemed to really understand the perspective of the candidate. Music to my ears! Very professional. We discussed another position and said he would send the details of it after our meeting. I believe I also needed to follow up with perhaps another cover letter or version of my CV, or something of this nature. I did my part in a follow-up email. And I heard nothing from him...ever.

How can a person criticize unprofessional behavior and then turn around and do exactly what he has just criticized? Oh, life, and the injustices we see every day.

So that irritated me. What irritated me more was when somebody else from that office called me weeks later for a different position. I expressed what had happened and told the person on the phone, quite clearly, to remove my name from their database of CVs. That was roughly a year ago.

Now, what's really funny is that this company called me AGAIN about a week ago. The guy said he wasn't sure whether I would be the right fit, but might know somebody who is. I politely told him to email me the details of the job. How did they get my name? Have they seen my CV? My guess is that they have, because they never got rid of it in the first place. It's possible he found my name on linkedin.com ...but as far as I can see my phone number is not published there. I have to assume the worst.

Now, my instinct tells me these guys could get into hot water for ignoring my request. So my overall assessment of this company is:
1: Jobs (as published, for what that's worth) are pretty good.
2: Organizational skills are bad.
3: Long term relationships and intangibles (trust, etc.) -- well, read the passage above if you are still not clear on my view there.

Enough on that company.

Recruiting companies often simply behave like card shufflers. The stack of cards on the left are jobs. The stack of cards on the right are CVs. Shuffle left, shuffle right. Turn over a card from each stack. If there's a vague match, make a call.

Guess what? A computer can do that--and faster. And this is what got me interested in the online HR business so long ago. Now, my own venture is far from perfect (though not bad considering only one guy was ever really driving it), and my blogs may not have won prices for journalism, but at least my heart has always been in the right place: Eliminate the people that aren't adding value to the system because they are not helping people find jobs, and not helping companies find employees. Create a more liquid economy where companies are not rewarded for hording jobs and CVs, but for making the right match through real understanding of the candidates and of the jobs. Everything else? Leave to the machines.

Coming soon, a return to Zubka..