Archive for March, 2009

New Video and Site Update

Friday, March 20th, 2009

ChumBonus – Who do you know?

Our latest video launched last night! Check it out below and let us know what you think.

We have been very busy with site development. Or I should say the crowd has been busy. The final build or “Assembly” contest wrapped up on TopCoder on Wednesday and the app is now in review. We hope to roll into QA this weekend. Our “go live” date has slipped a few days but we think the delay was prudent.

The “launch” strategy has been a challenge and after much debate and consultation with our PR firm TierOne, we decided to roll the system out to approximately 10 users initially followed by a local Washington, DC launch and then a national push. We want to make sure we have both the application and the back office functions nailed down before we release it fully.

Don’t forget to fan us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Links to the right.

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Source of Hire Stats for 2008

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Even before the downturn in the economy, the bloom was off the rose for the major job boards. A 2008 Source of Hire (SOH) study recently published by CareerXroads (www.careerxroads.com) shows this as well as some other trends that we believe will help make our referral-based model a success.

According to the study, 27.3% of hires come from referrals representing the biggest source of external hires. 12.3% of hires are from job boards with Monster and CareerBuilder representing about half of this. However, CareerBuilder and Monster are losing ground to the “long tail” of niche site and social networking.

Also interesting to us here at ChumBonus was the insight into survey respondent’s plans for 2009 which included increasing the use of referrals and decreasing the use of agency and print media. One respondent said they wanted to “Develop new avenues that strengthen referrals from employees, alumni and more.” Man, have we got an offering for them.

Launch of the ChumBonus Beta is March 26th .

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Simple concept, powerful idea

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Jeff Howe coined the phrase crowdsourcing in 2006 and the video below explains the concept very well.  The power of people connecting on the internet has yet to reach its full potential, but we are seeing glimpses of it with sites like www.innocentive.com that helps companies reach people that can help solve their challanges and www.openstreetmap.org that allows the crowd to upload GPS traces of their car trips thus mapping the entire world (well, not the wet bits).  

The ChumBonus model seeks to crowdsource corporate recruiting and hopefully charity fundraising.   People from all over the world who are following us on Twitter have given us positive feedback.  The mere fact that a company can get opinions from all over the world for free is in itself powerful.  What will future businesses look like?  How will they be structured?  How will products be designed?  The Crowd will have a big part in figuring all this out.

Jeff Howe on Crowdsourcing

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