Nigel Beck, founder of New York based consulting firm Nigel Beck LLC, thinks OneWire is moving in the right direction. As other areas in recruiting are slowly becoming obsolete, namely executive search and headhunting, OneWire is not only overcoming the obstacles that the recruiting industry faces but is improving the entire process.

OneWire and a New Take on Recruiting

Recruiting ("search" if you're dignified, "headhunting" if you're not…) is a hopelessly broken industry. Recruiters, especially executive recruiters, extract large fees from companies then proceed to place only people already in their network. They ask for referrals, but more or less do nothing with them. Legendarily, recruiters (and, sadly, some employers and company advisers) retain a prejudice against candidates who are currently out of work by noting that a position is available to "passive candidates only" - that is, those who are not looking for a job. I mean, why actually hire someone who wants a job? So it was with interest that I read recently this profile of OneWire.

OneWire is a New York based start up trying to invert the "fit candidate and job together" problem. They have a specific structured data approach (I presume essentially a semantic web approach) to register candidates, then they charge recruiters to subscribe to this information. If recruiters can't fill the position, they can put a bounty on the position and turn prospective candidates into "recruiter's assistants". I didn't see any detail on the bounty size, but if its sufficient this can indeed motivate people to mobilize their social network and refer candidates.

Crucially, it seems OneWire is free to candidates. I like this approach. TheLadders, for example and by contrast, seems to me to have little incentive to ever place anyone as it charges fairly large monthly fees. In this economy, its unclear why any company would bother to post on TheLadders and get thousands of unfiltered applicants all of whom are paying high monthly fees (and perhaps purchasing add-on services like their resume writing service) to get out of their current role.

I'm obviously writing about this company from a standpoint of near total ignorance, in that I haven't spoken with the company, or acted as a recruiter or a candidate! But I like the thought that a well funded start up is going after this space even in this economy. The traditional recruiters are not getting people back to work. Job sites that are out there make lots of money off of the monthly fees they charge candidates, but unleash thousands of resumes on the company that posts. Applying some semantic smarts to the "fit" problem sounds like a promising way to go...Keep Reading.