By Sharon Hill

Somewhere between niche careers and niche recruitment services, you might find OneWire.com, which serves both ends of that spectrum with hopes of carving out a niche of its very own.

Launched earlier this year, New York-based OneWire is sort of a hybrid: a cross between a high-level job-candidate pool and applicant-tracking system. For now, its specific focus is management-level careers in finance – and it’s beginning to make a name for itself on Wall Street. The hiring service has close to 60 private investors, and recruits for every major finance firm, according to Marc Karasu, OneWire’s EVP of marketing.

The company’s current marketing focuses on finance managers who are ready for a career change. According to the OneWire site, more than half of the current candidates are VP-level employees. Unlike some exec-level job sites that charge monthly subscriptions to seekers, the service is free to candidates. For $15,000 a year, the hiring company licenses a single “seat,” which gives a company recruiter unlimited access to the candidate pool. The per-seat licensing model is intended to scale to fit the needs of financial institutions of all sizes – from the boutique investment firm that hires one executive to the global concern that hires hundreds or thousands. And while $15,000 a seat might sound steep, Karasu points out that it’s far less than the bounties paid to executive-search firms.

While the company serves the finance community exclusively at present, Karasu said that as similar lucrative niches are identified, the company might expand in those directions.

“OneWire is an elegant solution,” Karasu said. “Recruiters like our precision matching, similar to how JobFox creates information on candidates.”

We liked it as well. Rather than uploading their prefab resumes, job-seekers respond to OneWire questions that help them drill down very granularly on their experience, their roles and their expectations for future work.  The matching process provides hiring managers with a list of candidates sorted by scale.  For each position, the recruiter determines the “floor” of the match – the minimum percentage criteria the candidate must meet in order to be considered.

Candidates’ anonymity is assured. A hiring manager who would like to schedule an interview notifies the candidate by e-mail. That job-seeker then decides to identify herself or ignore the request.  He or she can also refer a qualified friend for the job, and perhaps earn a hefty bonus if the introduction results in a hire.

The ATS features for the employer are robust, with functions that include sending a message to candidates, approving for an interview, scheduling the interview, making an offer, and noting the offer’s acceptance. What is missing is an e-mail alert to the recruiter that qualified candidates have been identified.

We visited the OneWire site as a job candidate and found the system easy to use, and thorough. Military experience tools included all ranks of each branch; finance-board tests and licenses were preloaded; and we had an opportunity to say for which companies we hoped to work.  In fact, even if we weren’t urgently job hunting, we could simply note our employer wish list and wait until that dream job came along.

As a hiring tool OneWire.com is far more precise than any national job board. But does it stand out from other industry-niche job sites? The reaction we received was quite limited. Our calls to finance firms recruiting through OneWire resulted in just one response: a recruiter who told us that he had “nothing significant to offer” in terms of opinion.

If the future of recruiting is through niche sites that keep candidates and even hiring firms anonymous, then OneWire is a very good product. However, our concern is that anonymity is increasingly less effective and less the norm when one is trying to make his or her mark on the world.  Anonymity puts job-seekers at the back of the candidate pool as others market themselves through social media. The No. 1 method of getting hired is still through the network connections you make. You can’t do that anonymously.  

We talked to David Earle, CEO at Staffing.org, and a fan of the niche career site concept. “Niche sites have become very successful as a group because they narrow the field,” Earle said. “There are 78 million resumes online right now and the problem is the enormous amount of data.”

OneWire’s Karasu did tell us that the company planned to launch a social aspect on its site – exactly what, or when, he couldn’t say.

OneWire does help weed through a lot of that data and narrow down the candidate field for hiring managers. However, Earle suggests that too often, no matter how granular the process, common terminology creates natural confusion. “This is why people talk,” he said. “You have to have people talking to people to determine what each means by the term director, for example, and finally come to the realization – oh yeah, I’m the perfect candidate. We’re trying to do this remotely and it’s terribly hard to do.”

Earle suggested that OneWire build a community of 25,000 or fewer people and allow candidates to put up work samples and do blog posting over time. “If you choose to remain anonymous in this world, you will miss opportunities,” he said.

We have to agree. While the OneWire concept of an industry-specific recruitment site with a robust ATS system and a candidate process to clarify experience and career objectives may well be what recruiters believe they want, we don’t see it as necessarily the best process for the candidates or the recruiters.  A social aspect to the site would bring passive candidates into the fold. It might even create jobs.