Facebook and referral recruiting

There's a new Facebook application I want to mention today.  It's called Zubka Jobs (Zubka is a job board that pays a reward to people for recommending a person for a job on the site). They have basically taken the shell of their process (person A sees a job on the site and thinks their friend, person B, would be right for it.  Person A recommends person B for it.  If person B gets the job then the hiring company pays person A a bounty of up to £5,000) and slotted it into Facebook.

The reason that Zubka has done this?  To target all those millions of (international) Facebook users who spend their working days popping on and off the site.  I think it's a neat idea.  To be honest it's not exactly revolutionary - they've just used Facebook's communication tools to help people use the application in the way they're used to communicating already on the site.  However, they have ensured that the application is properly integrated into their technology so that when a user finally logs in to Zubka (which they need to do to send the referral to the hirer) the confirmation of interest and candidate details etc are already in there waiting for them.  For recruiters (Zubka's clients) it expands the visibility of each job and provides a cheap, easy and immediate route into recruiting from social networks. 

This is the key really for referral sites to work.  People have to be viewing the jobs.  Jobtonic (their competitor in the UK) created something similar back in the summer.  They created a "refer-o-matic" application on Facebook which "reads" the user’s Facebook profile in order to display jobs most relevant to their location. Again, they have done this to increase the number of referrers on their site and to allow them to use the site in a way which most suits their web usage.

Whilst I'm on the subject of checking out new stuff on Facebook I wanted to mention this really nice idea from Gavin Ingham.  It's a group called "Success Frog".  Gavin is a motivational speaker (and ex recruiter) so it's no surprise to find he's created a group with the purpose of "to share our successes and wins and to create a wealth of positivity that motivates and inspires".  In my opinion, a lot more positive than joining the "Katie Melua's whining makes me want to rip my ears off" group.

Comments

[Paul Jacobs]

Hi - I can't seem to find Zubka at all on Facebook - the http://apps.facebook.com/zubka-jobs link doesn't work and I can't find any Zubka Applications when I search within Facebook. Am I doing something wrong?

[JoeRecruiter]

Great idea but does anyone have any experience with zubka?? The big quesion - Is it working??