Shelving the candidate board

A couple of months ago I created the reverse job board (blog post here) where candidates who we couldn’t currently help with opportunities could be listed either anonymously, or openly, and companies could apply to them. I thought it would be a good idea for a few reasons:

  • To help those folks get jobs
  • To help companies find fee free staff
  • To disrupt recruitment a bit, and change the idea of who applies to who
  • To showcase talent

Fail fast

Sadly, it’s not worked out, so I’m going to shelve it for now, to be revisited later when we as a company have more time and opportunity to diversify (I reckon in about a year). It’s not worked out because:

  • companies getting in touch were few and far between (3 from start to now)
  • companies still expected a level of service I didn’t want to provide as a free service
  • candidates didn’t update when they were no longer available, and chasing up would take time we currently don’t want to invest on a free service
  • not enough candidates were interested to make this a viable service

Could it work in future? Absolutely. I’m going to revisit this once Team Prime grows to a stage I can invest time into the idea that it needs. It needs a full time person I think, and therefore would need to cover the costs of someone running it, so it’d need to make around £30-40k a year within the first two years. I think that could be do-able quite easily with some ideas I have, but I’d need to spend at least 3 months getting it off the ground as a concept in it’s own right – and we’re too small to diversify just now.

Thanks to all who took part, it was a fun and very useful experiment 🙂