Notched Up: A different perspective on recruiting
As you may well know by now, I am a huge proponent of the LinkedIn Network. On account of my many LinkedIn connections, I routinely receive a fair number of invitations to join other business or social networks. For a variety of reasons, the likelihood of my accepting these invitations is rather small.
This is primarily because managing a professional network is time-consuming stuff -- albeit extremely worthwhile -- and so I cannot afford the time that each of them would require for maintenance. Additionally, these networks are primarily beneficial to me when they are broad and deep, as I have mentioned previously. Whereas I might join a few of these other networks in order to personally evaluate the features and benefits available, I am largely happy with LinkedIn’s functionality, and I can’t see any reasonable way to get all my contacts (or even a useful percentage of those contacts) to join all of these other networks. It’s hard enough to manage ONE professional network, much less 4 or more of them, and I’m certainly not going to ask anyone to do so on my behalf.
As it stands today, I'm pretty certain that I won’t make a big push for any other business network until the moment that I think LinkedIn is no longer useful to me, and a suitable replacement has been found. Thankfully, that time is nowhere on the horizon.
Recently, I was invited by several different contacts, over a period of about a week, to participate in a relatively new venture called NotchUp (http://www.notchup.com/). At first glance, I was prepared to ignore the invitations, because it seemed like more of the same social/business networking thing, but I decided to investigate a little, and found the concept to be quite intriguing -- if it will really work. This is a site that purports to give recruiters access to you, where you will be paid for interviews. Since it’s a very different theme from your standard social or business network, I thought I’d give it a try, and I’ve sent out a few invitations. It's pretty easy to get started, because the site allows you to import your LinkedIn profile as the baseline for your NotchUp profile. (Just another reason for me to stick with LinkedIn.)
It's an invitation only affair, so if you didn’t get an invitation from me, but you’d like to get one, just shoot me an email indicating such. I’ll be very happy to accommodate you.
If it really works, it would be a significant shift in recruiting, in that you once had to pay to get opportunities for job openings, which later became free, and which has now shifted to being paid for the opportunity to get employment.
For those of you who do embrace this, I'd be very interested to hear about your experiences with it.
About Logik!
Andrew S. Baker aka ASB aka Logik!
Andrew is an accomplished, hands-on IT Executive with a solid track record of providing timely and cost-effective business solutions using technology. With over 16 years experience in Information Technology, he has proven to be effective both as a Team Leader and as an individual contributor in designing, deploying, securing and maintaining enterprise networks.
His personal interests include Astronomy, Basketball, Bible Study, Chess, Comics, Computers,
Family Life Ministries, Reading and Strategy/Role Playing games...
Some of his contributions include several whitepapers on technology and Information Security, the UltraTech Knowledgebase, various postings to technology mailing lists and forums, active participation on LinkedIn Answers, along with a number of interviews for articles published in industry magazines.
A condensed version of
Andrew's current resume is available here.