Problem: Hiring high-quality talent is extremely difficult, especially if you are a startup that doesn’t have broad networks to convince talent to join you.
Subscribe here to get access to the first 500 ideas from our blog. For just one coffee a month, you can have access to more than $500 billion dollars of ideas. What's not to love?
Solution: This business would serve as a networking platform to connect super-connectors with employers hiring (and willing to pay to hire) talented individuals.
There are already some competitors in this space. Earlier this month, I came across an interesting platform to help people get paid for helping their friends land jobs. Their website is “bounty.fyi” and it’s supposed to help startups hire talent through an open-source distribution network. As described by Tina Jiang, one of the co-founders of Bounty,
This project started because we were seeing other founders posting bounties or referral bonuses ad hoc on Twitter. They would offer thousands if someone intro’d them to a candidate they hired. Excited by what we were seeing, we set out to create a platform that would aggregate bounties in one place and manage the process end to end.
Here’s how it works if you’re interested in referring:
🔍 Find a bounty on our site or newsletter.
🎯 Refer candidates you know through our referral form, it’ll take < 1 min.
➡️ Share the bounty to increase your odds and get a cut of the sharing bonus.
💰 Get paid when your actions lead to a hire.
Here’s how it works if you’re interested in posting a bounty:
💵 Set your bounty amount. We'll handle paying it out.
🔗 Increase reach by adding a sharing bonus to incentivize people to pass on your bounty.
👩🏻💻 Triage incoming referrals in your dashboard.
✨ There’s no upfront costs. You’ll only pay if you end up hiring someone.
The traditional alternative to open-source, digital job recruiting are headhunters: individuals who make a living by finding high-quality talent for jobs and roles. As described by Statista, “From a market size of 151.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, the U.S. staffing and recruiting market is predicted to decrease to 119.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2020 due to the coronavirus outbreak, a 21 percent decrease from the previous year.” While there was a slight dip, the market is expected to continue to grow as the economy rebounds.
Other Quora estimates with more conservative assumptions argue that the headhunting market specifically is “at least $3.71 billion is spent on high-tech headhunting. My gut tells me that it's closer to $6-7 billion given the demand for tech talent right now."
Monetization: Percentage of hunted revenues.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)