AN eBAY FOR JOBS? by Scott Budman
If you’re looking for old record players, Spider-Man lunchboxes, or Elvis memorabilia, there’s always eBay. So why these days, when many of us are desperately looking for work, isn’t there an eBay for jobs?
It turns out that’s the idea behind Jobaphiles.com. Find a job, and bid on it. Depending on your qualifications, and how much (or little) you’re willing to work for, the next job you see could be yours.
Originally, Jobaphile’s target audience was college students, looking to beef up their resumes and willing to work for cheap. But then the crash hit. Now, the website’s founders say the site is being swamped with people of all ages looking for work — and willing to bid against each other for those scarce jobs.
It makes sense. The web is where we live. Jobs are what we want. For better or worse, the two have come crashing together on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Better, because the Web 2.0 world seems to offer better access to available jobs — worse because, for every job connection I hear about through a social networking website, there are three stories about someone losing a job after their potential boss sees an embarassing photo on the candidate’s web page.
When we met with the Thai Nguyen, CEO of Jobaphiles.com, ten thousand people were on the site, trying to get their hands on a little more than 200 jobs. What makes the Jobaphiles’ experience a little more direct than giant job-search websites is, because of the bidding, you know pretty quickly if you’re getting the gig or not. Just like on eBay, you can follow the auction, find out if you got the job — and if not, move on.
Does it cheapen the process? Nguyen says it actually makes the whole thing more efficient. “Even in these times,” he says, “I don’t think you’ll find anyone who is gonna work below what makes sense for them.”
We’ll see. In the meantime, just beware, that in this wide-open world of recessionary jobs, what makes sense to you and me might be a lot different than what makes sense to a college student, looking to pay the rent.
We followed a web services job opening, and found the eventual bids ranged from 30 dollars an hour, to 200 dollars an hour. It’s still there, so I can’t tell you yet if the employer went for savings, or experience.
Think of it as a new paradigm: Instead of employers bidding over you, Jobaphiles.com asks if you’re willing to bid over them. I’ll be watching to see if the bottom falls out of these bids — that is, if employers will really hire the person who makes the most absurdly low bid — and how much traffic Jobaphiles will get when the economy improves, and web services jobs settle back into a smaller hourly range.
[For more Scott Budman stories, visit www.nbcbayarea.com]
Some markets are price-driven, some are not.
Generally, price driven markets are those where fungible goods are transacted, suggesting that talent and experience offerings could be treated like mere commodities.
That would be asking for well defined talent-and-experience categories, so there would be somewhere some “neutral” authority sorting resumes according to some qualification standard. Sounds Orwellian to me.
It’s different if the bidders are also submitting confidential resumes, together with the dollar bid, but in this case, why would the dollar component be disclosed? What’s wrong with contracts negociated between private parties, anyway?
Would you want to be operated on by a brain surgeon who bid lowest on the job?
it’s not really a job auction site, it’s a project reverse-auction site, and it won’t work.
We’ve seen stuff like this before in online employment. It doesn’t work. There’s a lot more time wasted digging through and dealing with the hassle than you save in the dollar cost.
It’s not really bidding on jobs – it’s cutting your prices to win business.
Jim, you bring up a good point.
That’s why I want to see if a site like this survives when the economy picks up, and employers aren’t quite as desperate to save money.
I’m sure they can reverse it for boom times when workers are scarce and the employers bid on the scarce talent.