JobTonic.com - Community Headhunting

The D.I.Y. trend of Web 2.0 extends itself into the employment world with the launch 21 March of JobTonic.com, a headhunting site where companies post jobs and you can refer yourself or your friend for a job, getting the referral bonus for yourself.

With referral bonuses reaching up to £1000, the hope is that employers can find candidates for open positions faster using word of mouth, as well as saving the cost of an agency, which often charges up to 30% of the first year salary for finding an employee.

JobTonic.com works by registering the person referring a candidate, called a bounty hunter, who in turn provides an email address for the candidate. JobTonic.com then follows through on the application process, and pays the bounty hunter after a successful placement. JobTonic.com is currently servicing all areas of the UK, and has already placed candidates successfully. According to their recent press release, they already have over 600 jobs online.

I love the idea of taking an existing community and leveraging that to eliminate a middleman. I'd love it even more if they put JobTonic.com in a mash-up with an online community like LinkedIn . As LinkedIn currently exists, there's a professional network, but no employment opportunities are transparent. If community members had a pool of positions along with an incentive to use that network, it would cast a wider net for employers seeking candidates, as well as providing community members more of a motivator to work their networks a bit more. I'm betting that I'm not the only one with this idea, and will be keeping an eye on JobTonic.com for some sort of mash-up with an online community to occur in their future.