Yet another job site has come online with the offer to pay job-seekers to post their résumés. This one, called MoneyBackJobs.com and launched last week by a San Francisco-based company of the same name (sans the .com), is promising job-seekers 5 to 7.5 percent of their first-year’s salary if they’re hired by an employer advertising on the site. Employers, meanwhile, can use MoneyBackJobs.com with little out-of-pocket cash outlay. They pay just $50 per job posting. But when they hire an employee from the site, they have to ante up 10 to 12 percent of the employee’s first-year salary.
“MoneyBackJobs.com has been launched with the goal of creating a more fun and hip job search tool than other ‘stuffy’ job boards and recruiting solutions that exist out there,” the company says on its Web site. “With dissatisfaction from job-seekers toward traditional recruiting agencies and job boards at an all-time high, it’s fair to say that the industry as a whole has become too rigid, too slow to change, and unwilling to think outside the box.”
Perhaps. But at least one industry observer, Mark Mehler, a partner in the recruitment consulting firm CareerXroads.com, doubts the concept will fly. It could be cheaper than using a traditional bricks-and-mortar headhunter, he concedes. Such outfits typically charge 20 to 25 percent of a first-year hire’s salary. But the concept seems to be a weird hybrid of a headhunter and a job board, he noted. “And I can post on a job board for 50 bucks,” he said ― without having to pay 10 to 12 percent of an employee’s salary if he makes a hire. Thousands of job boards already clog the Internet, which makes for a difficult marketing challenge. Finally, “it hasn’t worked in the past,” Mehler said of the pay-for-profiles approach.