By Riges Younan

An Australian blog called The Didge was brought to my attention yesterday after they had posted a review on 2Vouch. I’ve posted a comment on the blog but it is currently being moderated, so I thought I would share my thoughts here too. Once you have finished reading this, Michael Specht has posted his view on that post.

My Comment here

Hello David,

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to review 2Vouch, it is a very considered post. My view is a good supply of candidates the job-boards major challenge will be to limit the increase in inappropriate applications and the increased time cost associated with screening and responding to those candidates. Our view is referrals will become even more valuable because they provide a great filtering and screening mechanism for companies looking to hire.
I agree that some industries are suffering and will continue to suffer from the current economic climate; this is why our market entry strategy is focused on customers within industries that will continue to experience a supply and demand imbalance such as Online, Digital, ICT and Engineering etc

As for referrals being only financially driven, why would people bother referring jobs to their contacts that have no chance of getting the job? This would only damage their reputation and social capital within their network, and ultimately lead to receiving no reward. So we don’t see this as an issue. In addition, we give referrers the ability to make a choice, either to take the cash referral reward or choose to automatically donate all or a portion of that reward to one of our charity partners such as Sids & Kids or Guide Dogs Victoria.

Our research suggests that one of our biggest challenges is to minimise the risk to a person’s reputation. Doing this will ensure our members feel comfortable putting their reputation on the line when referring a job to someone they know, and we are well advanced on a solution that we believe will mitigate this risk. It is important to note that referrers on the 2Vouch platform are unable to pass on the details of another person to an advertiser unless that potential candidate is interested in the job opportunity and authorises via the system that they would like to be put forward. We are very focussed on our member’s privacy and that is at the core of our whole process.

Cost reduction will be on the agenda for most businesses and sourcing a candidate that comes with a personal recommendation for ~3% of the salary and with a 110% money back guarantee you must admit is a very attractive proposition. So unlike existing online sourcing solutions we only expect our customers to pay when they receive value and that value is a candidate that they have hired or placed with one of their clients.

Lastly, 2Vouch has been founded based on over 12 years of global recruiting experience so we have developed a number of sophisticated online and offline tracking mechanisms that enable us to monitor the recruiting process. However, our fundamental belief is that the majority of people will always do the right thing, particularly when they know there is a referrer in the middle of the transaction and the potential damage to their online brand if they do the wrong thing.

David, you raise some interesting points around design and UI etc – I encourage you to sign up as a referrer and gain the full user experience as your feedback about our platform would be very valuable.

To your readers, if you are interested in trying 2Vouch out you can reach us at www.2vouch.com

Great blog – we enjoy the healthy debate and we are all for people helping the online recruiting industry in Australia evolve.

Best,
Riges Younan
Founder & CEO |2Vouch

Inviting people you know to Join 2Vouch just got a whole lot easier.

Now you can import your contacts from Outlook, LinkedIn, Gmail and a range of other systems and invite those people to join 2Vouch or forward job referrals to them.

All you need to do to invite people you know to join is:

• Sign in to your 2Vouch account
• From your Dashboard, click “Invite Contacts”

• Choose the kind of invitation you are sending… you can invite people who are well connected (like you) to become referrers or you can invite people you know who need to hire great people to become employers

• You can import contacts from Outlook, LinkedIn, Gmail or other systems so that you don’t have to re-type the details. Just click “Import Contacts”
  • A note here, if you want to import your Outlook or LikedIn contacts, you first have to save them as a .csv file… click here for instructions

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2Vouch now allows employers and recruiters who post a job to request referrals from their own network. This gives you even greater leverage.

So, how do you request the referrals?

• Sign in to your 2Vouch account
• From your Dashboard, click “post a job ad”
• Fill in all the job details and click Next
• You will see a screen that allows you to request the referrals

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2Vouch has just added the ability for our referrers to import their contacts to make it quicker and easier to send invitations and referral requests. Employers can also import their contacts to ask them to make referrals for jobs they place.

The system can import contacts from Outlook, Microsoft Mail/Outlook Express, LinkedIn and a range of other systems if you export those contacts to a cvs file.

So, to make things as easy as possible, here are the simple steps you need to create a csv file of your contacts:

Saving your LinkedIn contacts to a csv file:

* Go to www.linkedin.com
* Sign in
* In the navigation bar on the left, click Contacts

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