JobVidi Throws Its Social Recruiting Hat In The Ring

It feels like I’m being pitched a social recruiting service at a rate of about one a week at the moment, so hot is the space right now. That would suggest at least one thing: recruitment is still broken, at least in the eyes of starry-eyed entrepreneurs.

Today, JobVidi throws its hat in the ring with a new social recruitment offering that it claims makes the job-seeking process more efficient, interactive and discreet, and in doing so opens up a better stream of candidates for those recruiters who the startup hopes will pay to use the service.

In some ways, JobVidi resembles a standard jobs site type offering: candidates sign up, create a CV and profile, which forms the basis of any potential job matches, while recruiters post jobs and use the tools provided to sift through and contact potential candidates. However, where things get more interesting is the way JobVidi attempts to address a number of problems that job seekers encounter when using most job sites, namely the lack of response and feedback when applying for vacancies, the need to sometimes remain anonymous so as not to alert a current employer, and the inability to test the current job market without actually applying for a new job.

Sign up to JobVidi is via LinkedIn, so as to take some of the pain out of creating another CV, while candidates can add additional information that they may not feel comfortable including in their public LinkedIn profile. The company also argues that a sudden update to a user’s profile on LinkedIn can alert an employer to the fact that they are thinking about leaving, which brings us to one of JobVidi’s more interesting features: the ability for a candidate to remain entirely anonymous until they are ready to reveal personal details.

The idea here is to widen the pool of potential candidates by respecting a candidate’s privacy. “Not everybody is comfortable with their CV and personal details about themselves and the companies they work for being sent around by recruiters”, says JobVidi co-founder and CEO James Brookner.

To further motivate candidates, any job they do apply for through JobVidi is guaranteed a response. This could potentially be quite a big pull given that, according to the startup, candidates typically only receive a response and/or feedback for two out of every ten applications on average. “If the employer doesn’t respond to you within 14 days, our system will analyse the recruiter’s preferences and inform you of the outcome”, says Brookner. How valuable that algorithmic feedback will turn out to be is unclear, although any feedback is probably better than none.

Finally, potential candidates can take a softer approach to job-seeking via a feature of JobVidi that enables them to test the market for their skills and experience. They do this by submitting what the startup is calling a ‘Value Request’ to recruiters that Brookner says will let them find out their “general marketability and financial prospects if they were to decide to move”. It’s a stealthy feature — who doesn’t want to see what’s out there from time to time?

Other features of the site, though not all of them are differentiators, include the ability for recruiters to post jobs to JobVidi from LinkedIn or Twitter (using the hashtag #jobvidi) and a matching algorithm that ensures that recruiters only see relevant candidates.

The revenue model is paid subscriptions for recruiters once JobVidi leaves Beta. Along with Brookner, the startup’s founders are Nabila Sadiq, Vic Daniels and Graham Morris, who come from the world of online advertising, recruitment and technology. The company, founded in February this year, is based in east London’s ‘Tech City’, and has raised £100k in angel investment to date.