Now you can make money while you look for a job. A new South African social-networking website, Employmint.co.za, was launched this week and will be turning the recruitment business on its head.
Social-networking websites have changed the way people communicate over the internet, providing platforms for people to collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.
Following this trend, Employmint.co.za is an online community of job seekers, referrers and companies who work together to match skills to jobs.
You can register as both a job seeker and referrer and invite your friends to join.
If you find a job for a friend or family member, a company — also registered on Employmint.co.za — will pay you up to R20Â 000 as a “reward” for finding the perfect employee.
Rewards are normally paid after the candidate who is placed has been employed for three months.
Employmint.co.za has only been open to job seekers and referrers for four days, so no rewards have yet been paid.
Job seekers also get their own blog when they register, which they can use to promote themselves to prospective employers or share experiences with other job seekers.
“It’s about creating a community of employers and job seekers, which makes it worthwhile to check regularly. If I check and see a job that’s perfect for a friend of mine, I can not only help them find a job, but be paid into the bargain,” says Chris Rowe, MD of Employmint.co.za. “The site essentially incentivises job seekers to become dedicated head-hunters.”
As with all Web 2.0 sites (the name given to social networking sites or second-generation websites), the users themselves determine its success. Someone with many young professional friends who checks the site regularly can develop a small business out of this system.
Depending on the type of job and the size of the rewards offered, users can potentially earn an additional R5Â 000 to R10Â 000 per month.
“For someone with a large network of colleagues, friends and family, Employmint.co.za offers a great way to potentially earn a lot of money. The referral networks we are creating will become an extremely powerful tool in the recruiters’ hands,” Rowe told the Mail & Guardian Online.
Employmint.co.za is like a recruitment MySpace — the social networking site frequented by bands and individuals from around the world, which currently has more than 123-million users.
“We consider ourselves to be more of a social network than a job board. Even though the main driving force of the system is recruitment, the technology and processes are built around social networking and user-generated content,” says Rowe.
There are currently 160 recruiters using the Employmint.co.za system and just more than R533Â 000-worth of payable rewards for about 200 jobs posted.
Three hundred job seekers registered on Employmint.co.za on the first day, and 800 of those job seekers’ friends were invited — proof that the community will grow rapidly.
Rowe, who has been in the IT industry for 10 years, says the way Employmint.co.za gets job seekers to register is through viral marketing, meaning its community grows like a virus.
“All people who register as referrers or job seekers are given the opportunity to invite people they know to register. When a person that they have invited gets paid a reward, we pay the person who invited them a 5% commission of that reward. So, if you have a large network of contacts, get registered and invite them to join; their referrals will get you paid as well.”
At this stage, the early adopters of the service — on both the recruiter and job-seeker sides — are generally in the IT sector. But Rowe says that as the website grows, the types of jobs should even out across all sectors.
“We want to attract recruiters and job seekers across all industry sectors and not be pigeon-holed into the IT sector,” he says.
The highest reward at present is R20Â 000, to be given by Promatch Recruitment to a referrer who finds a senior developer for BizTalk.
Like any new system there will be those who try to abuse and exploit it, from both a recruitment and job-seeker perspective. But Rowe says Employmint.co.za has a strict system in place for determining the validity of the jobs posted, and uses a filtering system on applications and referrals to counter abuse.
Employmint.co.za is currently working on a partnership with a similar site in the United Kingdom in order to aggregate job data for job seekers in South Africa seeking work in that country and for those in the UK seeking work locally.