I received an invite to NotchUp two days ago. The URL was broken and the link through did not work. It clearly was generated by the NotchUp site. Needless to say I was underwhelmed. Until they work out the bugs on the site, it probably will be a waste of time.

posted January 25, 2008

Well I do have an account at notch , courtesy one of the invites. During the process of building up the profile ,when I tried to invite some of my contacts., it automatically selected all contacts , I canceled the operation ASAP, not sure if that invite is sent to all or only to selective candidates.

Saujanya

posted January 26, 2008

HI Cezar,

I am evaluating it, so far it looks pretty good!

Eileen

posted January 26, 2008

I just received an invitation to join and I am not sure if I would be interested, even if I were looking for a new position. The premise seems ok, and I certainly like getting money, but I don't care for the faceless web site that you have to deal with. I am pretty sure I searched the entire web site and did not find an email or physical address. So if you want to contact them, how do you do it? I even did a whois search and they are using Domains by Proxy to hide all contact info.

My concern is that I expect they will want you to provide your banking information for them to transfer the funds. I don't give my banking info to a company without at least a mailing address.

I see that Jim Ambras, a founder, is on linkedin. So maybe he will read this and respond.

posted January 27, 2008

Great idea - something LinkedIn should have done a long time ago. They will lose the recruiters if they do not respond.

posted January 27, 2008

Interesting premise. I not sure how this would make you more likely to interview with a company. Wouldn't a hiring bonus be more effective? Most companies can't adequately phone screen candidates so this seems like it could be a big money hole.

Additional note: I can see the site is still an early beta. There appears to be script injection attack in the company name field, as long as you can fit it in 40 chars or less.

posted January 27, 2008

Any business that uses phishing to set itself up looks very dubious to me. The style is a clear copy of LI too. There is nothing to say that this company wont just disappear in 6 months with half of LinkedIn as contacts, and a portion of those having provided passwords directly linked to their actual 'identity'. Who knows what will happen to that data then. Sold to 'recruiters' for a fast buck? Worse, sold to hackers for the passwords? (I bet half the joiners use the same password as for LI anyway, even if they didn't think they provided the phishing data!).
Their Terms even seem to imply that they have the right to terminate and stop whenever they fancy - is this to limit the legal exposure for the founders?
Good luck to them if its for real. I signed up, didn't pass on anything that wasn't already public in LinkedIn and will wait to see if any mails come in. Since I am genuinely 'not looking' I can then decide if the money they 'offer' me to interview is worth the genuine hassle and time. I am sure they will not offer what I ask, just to tempt the level of interest.

By the way - ever been to a time-share presentation? They pay you with some goody or real cash and bank on being able to convert a few to invest. Its the same with paying to interview - be prepared that you could be converted if you take the money!

I already wasted too much time on this, for nothing.

my 2 cents.

posted January 27, 2008

I have enjoyed reading all of the responses. I did join NotchUp and I had no technical problems whatsoever.

However, I am somewhat concerned over the phishing aspect that John Dring mentioned - after all, NotchUp is supposed to pay you via your PayPal account, and they can test passwords against your PayPal and effectively have access to your funds there and the registered credit cards. To me that seams quite a tangible threat, and then come the intangible in terms of personal data for sale and so on.

In any case, I think what they offer is too good to be true. I don't see how a company would pay me $500 (what is the default proposed price) just for a preliminary interview. I realise there might be some potential interest if companies decide to cut the middleman (i.e. the recruiters) and save on their commissions, however I don't see this working, at least in the long term.

Anyway, there might be some initial surge of interest (as anything new, Web 2.0-based seems to spark a high interest in the beginning) and those who invite a lot of contacts might get some money out of the 10% referral fees - which on the other hand looks suspiciously akin to pyramids, eh?

posted January 28, 2008

Hello,

I am evaluating it, so far it looks pretty good!

Lidia
BeamYourScreen GmbH

posted January 28, 2008

Like most others I was invited loads of times tried 4 links managed to get on the site after several attempts, tried to look at the recruitment section and nothing happened after another several attempts I gave up. Will need serious work to get a foothold, I feel sorry for the candidates that are hoping something will come of them registering

posted January 29, 2008

To support concerns please find the link attached.
I am not going to join Notch Up.

Links:

• http://www.userglue.com/blog/2008/01/27/notchup-privacy-down/

posted January 29, 2008

This is tough for me--I think so many people are getting caught up in what they can make from a dollars perspective that they don't see what they're potentially giving up.

For starters, are people reading the Terms of Service that they have to agree to prior to registering? I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that most are not.

Let me highlight something you're missing:

9. NotchUp reserves the right to offer third party services and products to You based on the preferences that You identify in your registration and at any time thereafter; such offers may be made by NotchUp or by third parties.

Got that? You could get signed-up for a variety of mailing lists.

Say, does LinkedIn do that? Quick answer: NO

Moving on:

10. Without limiting any of the other disclaimers of warranty set forth in these Terms, NotchUp does not provide or make any representation as to the quality or nature of any of the third party products or services purchased through NotchUp.com or any other NotchUp Site, or any other representation, warranty or guaranty. Any such undertaking, representation, warranty or guaranty would be furnished solely by the provider of such third party products or services, under the terms agreed to by the provider.

Does anyone need more Viagra or \/1@gR/\ ads in their inbox?

But wait! There's more!

18. You understand and acknowledge that you have no ownership rights in your NotchUp account (“NotchUp Account”), and that if you cancel your NotchUp Account, all your account information from NotchUp, including resumes, profiles, cover letters, network contacts, saved jobs, questionnaires and email mailing lists, will be marked as deleted in NotchUp’s databases and will be removed from any public area of the NotchUp Sites. Information may continue to be available for some period of time because of delays in propagating such deletion through NotchUp’s web servers. In addition, third parties may retain cached copies of your Information.

"Marked as Deleted". Not DELETED, but you're marked as such. Further, they're not going to, on your behalf, ask anyone who may have access to your information to no longer use it--you'd need to track those places down and do that. Of course, if you can find out who has the list, and who they've sold it to and so on and so forth. And, all of those companies are quite reputable and easy to get yourself removed from, right?

Last, but not least:

19. Your email and other data that you submit as part of the resume will be made available to our recruiters and employers. NotchUp.com doesn’t have any control over how that data would be used. If you don’t want any such data to be displayed your only remedy is not to post any resume.

So, while your information is SECURE (which we should all be certain not to confuse with PRIVATE), they're going to make no guarantees to you that others will be scrupulous in how they manage the information that you are exposed to.

You can dig in deeper yourself, but you'll note that they don't even place an guarantees that you'll get paid! Hey, that's important--it's the big draw to everyone, and if you don't get paid, tough noogies!

So, when you sign-up for NotchUp, think about what you're really getting--and potentially what you are losing.

The instant you let them slurp up your LinkedIn profile, which by the way, has this lovely piece of Privacy Policy around it:

• We will never rent or sell your personally identifiable information to third parties for marketing purposes
• We will never share your contact information with another user, without your consent.
• Any sensitive information that you provide will be secured with all industry standard protocols and technology

You run the risk of quickly having that disregarded.

Proceed with caution; the TOS that I read prevented me from completing the registration and seeing what the Privacy Settings were downstream.

Links:

• http://www.userglue.com/blog/2008/01/27/notchup-privacy-down/

posted January 29, 2008

This site is all the rage it seems - people are talking about it at the watercooler, lunch, their desks....it's certainly got people talking! But that's about all it's worth - conversation. No HR department with recruiters worth their salt is going to actually PAY individuals just to interview. If an HR dept has to resort to that, then they need to fire their recruiting team and hire a new one. It would appear that the founders of NotchUp think that there is a huge shortage of engineers and that it is a privilege for companies merely to interview them. While the market is certainly tight and competitive, it's no desert yet and with the right people looking for talent, the right talent gets found, without any "fee" to the candidate.

All this said, of course I signed up - if a company is dumb enough to pay me to come and talk to them for 3 hours, then I would be even more dumb not to do so! :)

posted January 30, 2008