Namyz - can it help find quality candidates?

Namyz is another fairly new social networking type-site.  It’s basically the recommendations bit from LinkedIn (although no doubt that’s a gross simplification).

To use the site you register and add some information about yourself and your business (my profile is here). Then you send emails to contacts you know (ideally, I guess, people who think you are great) asking them to write a testimonial about you.  There is also a scoring system a bit like ebay.  Interestingly, when I signed up I had 10 invitations waiting from people who wanted me to join their "reputation network" (ie, write something nice about them).  It turned out I only actually knew two of them. 

The idea is that you can also add links to your website and blog as well as posting links to other sites you want to share.  Then if someone finds you (more on how in a minute) they can read all about you, see the resources you are associated with and check out your rating.

It appears that if you sign up for a paid for account (which is quite cheap at $4.95 a month) they guarantee you will be found on Google – your link will actually appear in the sponsored listings.  If you stick with the basic (free) subscription you can be shown in the Google “natural” listings.  However, with a fairly common name you may not be very highly placed. 

It’s a service for people who want to ensure they have a positive “net rep”.  I personally rarely click on the sponsored links and I don’t like the idea of asking people to write a recommendation about you.  So, for me, my Namyz profile isn’t something I plan on spending any time on.

However, if you are often confused with someone else, or have bad “net rep” that you want to deflect attention from give it a go (however, can I ask that you actually ensure I know who you are before asking me to endorse you!).

Oh yes, bringing this back to recruitment.  To answer the question in my title (can it help find quality candidates) - maybe.  Obviously you won't get a full picture of a candidate as they will only have testimonials from people who rate them highly.  Unless your entire shortlist happen to be on Namyz you can't really "compare" candidates either. From a candidate perspective I can see why someone might invest time in this.  From a recruiter perspective I think it's too early days to find many candidates on there.