Blue Chip Expert - Just another referral recruiting tool?

This last week four people have invited me to join their networks on Blue Chip Expert.  Looking at the site I see it's "a site for hiring managers to find highly qualified professionals."

The site says that it takes "a different approach" by paying "referral fees for people that are placed or hired within your network. Similar to LinkedIn but with added benefit of earning referral fees when someone hires from your network."  Sounds very similar to Zubka and Jobtonic to me.

So you find someone to send you an invitation (you can have one from me if you like) and then join up.  You then invite lots of people you know and they invite lots of people they know.  Then a hiring manager uses their "patent pending search engine" to find profiles of candidates that meet the job spec.  When someone in your extended network gets a job you get a cut of the fee.  The fee structure is a bit complicated but you earn between 2% and 8% of the eligible fees (and if I understand the FAQs correctly the eligible fees are 3% of first year’s salary a hiring manager pays to Blue Chip Expert).  So if someone you directly invited to the site  gets a job paying £100,000 the eligible fee is £3000 of which you get 8% which is £240.  If it's a level three contact you get £60  (If they only pay the first three levels the make a nice profit!).

There has to be a fair amount of activity taking place on the site before you make any money. 

Also, compared with Zubka the fees are really low.  If a £100,000 candidate you refer via Zubka is placed you make £8,000.  With Zubka you do have to do a little more than just invite your friends onto the site.  However, isn't that personal involvement what makes referral recruitment work. 

To me Blue Chip Expert is more like pyramid sales.  Anyway, as I say if you want to try it out please free to use my invite code. Would love to hear your feedback if you start using the site successfully.

Comments

[GBrown]

Hi Louise,

I have recently joined this site and am also very interested to see how it works out. I have spoken to one guy since joining who had gained his last 3 contracts from the site and he was a pretty senior guy.

Maybe it's not so bad!