Referral Recruiting update

Back in November I wrote a piece talking about referral sites such as Zubka and Jobtonic.  Five months on I thought I'd see how these relatively new sites are doing.

Zubka launched eight months ago and it's first "referral cycle" was completed within the first month of business (rewarding one member £5,600 for successfully recommending someone they knew for a vacancy on the site).

The job board has close to 200 current vacancies listed.  It's a very global site and they inform me they have thousands of individual referrers registered, from a multitude of countries. 

The rewards currently on offer for referring a candidate to a Zubka role range from £1,200 to £8,000 per role.  These are in addition to the introduction reward Zubka pays to the person who originally introduced that referrer to the network. Between them, Zubka’s clients are offering £558,675 of referrer rewards on the site today.

Jobtonic have been going for six months.  The first placement was made via the site earlier this month.  The finder’s bounty was £375.  Zubka have fixed fees for the bounty whereas Jobtonic allow the recruiter to set the "finders fee" offered.

The Jobtonic job board has over 700 current vacancies listed.   The site only carries UK vacancies at present.  The current rewards range from £100 to £5000 per role and the total reward pot available at present is £215,196.

Both sites have a good range of corporate and agency clients and both charge to place an advert (on top of the refer fee).  With Jobtonic candidates can also apply directly on the site if they wish, the Zubka model doesn’t allow this.  If I wanted to apply for a job via Zubka I'd have to find someone to register and then refer me. The rewards are generally higher at Zubka, however, there are a larger range of UK jobs at Jobtonic. 

The price to post a job advert for both sites is quite low (around £25 on Zubka) so I guess you could afford to  advertise your vacancy on both sites - only paying the bounty via the site which gets you the candidate.

I think this type of referral recruitment is a great concept. When the sites came on the market I expected the majority of their clients to be corporates.  However, both sites have quite a range of recruitment agencies prepared to "give away" part of their fee for this method of recruitment.  However, with only two placements in 8 months between the sites it's an tool that is not being used to it's full potential.

Comments

[Alasdair Bailey]

Hi Louise,

Thanks for the writeup, it is indeed an exciting area to be working in and we're looking forward to some strong growth this year.

Just a quick note; the placement last week was our first from a referral. We've had quite a few successful hirings from direct applications already

Kind regards,
Alasdair