Kyle
With the recent surge in job related startups, founders are getting more and more creative with resources for recruitment. We’ve seen great socially charged recruiting and job startups like Barrel of Jobs in Washington DC. We also recently interviewed Employtown in Denver, they offer a reverse job market that’s definitely worth checking out.
Today we’re bringing you the story of Australian startup Yolpme. Yolpme is a new recruitment platform that is combining crowdsourcing with social networking. Yolpme uses crowd sourced referrals through targeted media channels to find the best talent for companies.
To increase the value of the candidate and to make placement more likely, Yolpme offers referrers a referral fee of 3-5% which means that on a position that pays $100,000 the referrer could see a reward of $3,000. This is a value proposition to the referrer, definitely worth checking out.
Yolpme is also working to put a ranking in place for referrers so that referrers can’t just spam open positions. Companies will be able to see the ranking for the person giving the referral which will reflect on the potential quality of the candidate.
Right now Yolpme is available in Australia but they are hoping to expand to the US and Europe next year. We got a chance to talk with the team behind Yolpme. Check out the interview below.
What is Yolpme
Yolpme is an online recruitment platform for employers to crowd source referrals via targeted social media channels to find the best talent for their company.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Mike Costin – Commercial – Founder and CEO of ConnectCV.com with fifteen years executive level experience in advertising, marketing and online start-ups.
Roland Irwin – Product & Marketing – ten years’ experience in online production, digital marketing and business development with some of Australia’s biggest and most well-known brands.
Patrick Gallagher – Sales & Business Development – ten years’ experience in business development and management across sales, recruitment and digital start-ups.
Meng Zhao – Development Lead – six years’ experience in development (Java, HTML, PHP), management and hardware procurement across a number of online start-ups.
Where are you based?
Sydney / Melbourne, Australia
What is the start-up culture like where you are based?
No doubt a lot has changed in the past 2-3 years. Entrepreneurs are younger, more aggressive and more willing to take risks. Australian start-ups are clearly on the rise and it’s great to be part of this exciting period.
What problem does your startup solve?
Today referrals are the number one source in hiring volume. Good people are hard to find but people trust a referral from someone in their network over an unknown recruiter. Yolpme helps employers locate talent, by incentivising everyday people to use the power of their personal relationships and networks to connect the people they know with real job opportunities.
Yolpme is faster, cheaper and more powerful than traditional recruitment methods. Through Yolpme we have the ability to shift the industry to a common and effective new media solution.
The benefits of Yolpme are:
Cost Effective – traditional recruitment is incredibly expensive: on average they equate to 15% of the advertised salary. With Yolpme, employers set their price.
Find the right skills – it is hard to find the right skills/people (active or passive) when you simply don’t know them. Yolpme connects employers with people who know the right people enabling them to connect with hard to reach talent.
Cut through – existing online channels = masses of unqualified resumes. Yolpme has a smart rating system that reviews candidates as they come in and ensures they are appropriate for the job.
What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the start-up process?
Being able to move quickly. Having a fulltime developer on board has been pivotal in allowing us to make quick decisions and to launch the company relatively quickly.
Who are your mentors and role models?
You only have to look at the rise and success of crowd sourcing businesses like 99 Designs and Freelancer who have set the scene for disruption in traditional business verticals. It is companies and organizations like these that we look up to and draw inspiration from.
What’s one thing the world doesn’t know about you or your start-up?
The world ‘Yolpme’ is actually ‘employ’ backwards. We have to thank our marketing whiz Roland for this one.
What’s next for your start-up?
Build Build Build!
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