I was happy with Bounty Jobs from the client side (see below for my feedback and critique of BJ). IMO the BJ concept is break through but still early in development as has a lot of room for improvement. I think to some degree you are splitting hairs by seeking to determine the total number of placements done by the BJ community. If you can do a few extra deals a year through BJ that is a no brainer for a free service. What reason can you give not to have BJ as one tool/platform you utilize. Of course you never out all your eggs in any one basket.

I've heard directly from my BJ rep that they have a 6 week waiting list of recruiters to get into the BJ community, they don't need more recruiters, they need more job openings and client development will always be the focus of their staff as I would want to be if I was a recruiter on the other side. That being said any smart business should have a Google Alert set up to notify them if they are being talked about and they should take the time to have someone respond since it effects their reputation in the market place.

DYK BJ pays out 97% on submittals made within the first 2 weeks of joining and that they pay 85% of the deal after you have made 2 placements with a client. The normal pay out is 75% which means 2 deals done on Bounty equals 3 deals done through a normal 50/50 split, which over the course of the year means you only have to 2/3 as many deals to earn the same money on BJ as elsewhere on split boards.

MY Bounty Jobs Experience from the Corporate Side:

We used Bounty Jobs at Pegasystems when we were hiring aggressively and it worked out great. We were able to work with and evaluate a lot of recruiting agencies all at once in a very efficient manner. You get a lot of submittals for hard to find position that you are willing to pay a 20% fee for from BJ. I would not recomend offering a low ball fee as you will only get the bottom feeder agencies to work on your job. Instead I recomend making your criteria very sepcific to make it worth paying a 20% fee. I found several small niche agencies on BJ that gave my positions a lot of quality attention and effort to filling them with success. On Bounty Jobs there is no way to tell which agencies are good and which are "resume spammers". I recomend you give everyone a chance and then you can easily disengage anyone that made submissions that clearly did not meet the requirements. Engaging everyone will result in you getting a lot of submittals that are not qualfied as often it is hard to identify the perfect candidate just from a written job description. To make the agency process work you really need to explain the opening to them and answer their questions; and this also shows the agency you are serious. Now to do this with 30-40 agencies on Bounty Jobs (that was just the agencies focused on my niche that I initially accepted to work with) would take way too much time. To address this and make it work, I put together a simple 15 minute webinar/power point presentation on our company and the open positions where I gave details on the openings and answered questions for all of the vendors. It took about 30 minutes to make the presentation and another 30 minutes to do it. Another tweak is to make your submittal criteria for Bounty Jobs Agencies very specific such as we only want senior software engineers from this list of 30 companies which completely eliminated the spam submittals. Then I set up job board agents for this same narrow criteria, this way I wasn't racing against the agencies to make sure they weren't just sending me somebody who just posted to Monster.com that day. The goal of using Bounty Jobs was to have the agencies find a "perfect" candidate from a direct competitor, someone that I could not have found on my own, and if they did that was a service we would gladly pay a 20% placement fee for. In our first round of using BJ I found a hadnfull of new agencies that I will work consistently for future openings through Bounty Jobs.

If you are going to work with agencies then Bounty Jobs is a very good tool which I highly recomend from the corporate recruiting point of view. I would be happy to speak with anyone one one one if you would like to know more. I'd even be willing to help you design the webinar (I use all free tools) and the power point presentaton as a free service in exchange for a nice recomendation from you on LinkedIn.

Thanks for listening!

Greig Wells