A friend invited me to NotchUp today. It is a professional networking site similar to LinkedIn but claims that companies would pay to interview you.
I noticed the string q=user/password revealing its pedigree as a Drupal site, and decided to signup up.
Looking at the page source, it is clearly a Drupal 5.x site, using some custom modules. The theme is Zen based, and looks well polished and unique. The current incarnation is a beta1 running in a separate directory. The site feels very sluggish though.
On the backend, they offer to import your LinkedIn contacts automatically, if you provide the login info needed, and dangle a carrot with that saying that you get a 10% referral bonus on what others get from companies that interview them.
The site has been covered recently on blogs, such as VentureBeat, Dannyman, Techradar, Center Networks, as well as Tech Crunch.
Comments
Lior Kesos (not verified)
I got an invite today too.
Sun, 2008/01/27 - 14:04I also mailed them today after I saw that ?q= and check my usual ?q=user, ?q=node etc...
I sent them a mail saying they could get much more from their SEO if they use clean urls.
I think their mod_rewrite is off or maybe it's a .htacess misconfiguration.
I have a feeling they will be visiting your (wonderful) LAMP tuning tutorials pretty soon if their viral marketing is going that well.
Lior
Jim Ambras (not verified)
NotchUp on Drupal
Thu, 2009/02/12 - 13:38Yes, NotchUp is built on Drupal. We're very pleased with our decision to base our site on the Drupal technology platform. It took a while but we finally turned on clean URLs. For those of you who reported sluggish performance, we had a lot of capacity issues during our first week of launch, and since then we've added a significant amount of new server capacity as well as tuned our site.
We replaced our LinkedIn contact importer with a Plaxo-based invite widget, and can now import resumes in Word, PDF and HTML formats, parse them, and create a NotchUp profile.
We have some of the most promising technology startups in the U.S. making offers for paid interviews to our members, and hope to expand outside the U.S. later this year.
Jim Ambras
Founder and CEO
NotchUp, Inc.
www.notchup.com
Brad K. (not verified)
Why go to notchup when PROSUMES.COM is out there!!#@?
Mon, 2008/01/28 - 01:24Why would people who are in demand and making a good amount of money want to spend a day interviewing for a few hundred dollars? Especially if they aren’t actually interested in moving. For anyone that’s truly a good candidate, they would rather get paid to get HIRED.
That’s where PROSUMES.COM comes in. Better business model, in my humble opinion.
Granted, I helped launch the company but it just makes more sense.
WWW.PROSUMES.COM
Russ (not verified)
Privacy! Beware!
Tue, 2008/01/29 - 02:13Has anyone bothered to read their Terms of Use?
Or, for that matter, compare those Terms to those of LinkedIn?
So, you just signed-up at NotchUp--they just slurped your LinkedIn profile and now, if you weren't careful careful, that nice bit of privacy protection that LinkedIn offers you could be gone.
Sorry, but their TOS reads like a list aggregator and I could go no further.
Oh, and seriously, is this Brad K guy going everywhere to promote his own venture, or what?
Khalid
Of course I didn't
Tue, 2008/01/29 - 11:47I have a rule: any application/web site that requests credentials for other web sites does not get them.
This is the same way that Facebook and other applications would ask for Hotmail email passwords and such. This is a very dangerous thing to do, and hence I do not do it.
Others may fall for it though, or really do not care much about their privacy.
--
Khalid Baheyeldin
Bryan Starbuck (not verified)
Innovation in the Hiring Process
Sat, 2008/02/02 - 21:20TalentSpring (my company), JobFox, and ItzBig are three companies working on making hiring more efficient. Now NotchUp is also doing some interesting things in this space.
The first three are working on advanced ways to job seekers to their ideal job opening. And employers to their ideal job candidate.
TalentSpring goes beyond that to rank resumes within an industry. We do this to benefit Job Seekers by getting the attention of employees. Job seekers rank well in areas they are passionate about and where they have invested in their work experience and education.
Since job seekers will rank well in areas they are interested in, we can bring large numbers of employers back to that job seeker. Specifically, we email a wide range of employers of job types that the job seeker considers ideal. This way the job seeker wins because they have their ideal types of employers actively listening to them. (Ranking resumes gives us the power to accomplish this)
Bryan Starbuck
CEO
www.TalentSpring.com
Anonymous (not verified)
I just found what could
Thu, 2008/04/17 - 10:10I just found what could amount to NotchUp’s first major competition. Applicant Tree offers a very similar service, but for a lot less. Sure, they’re paying less, but they’re paying you to just have companies LOOK at your resume as opposed to you having to go through all the hassle of getting dressed up in suit for an interview. Heck, I don’t like to comb my hair too straight if I can get away with it. LOL.