Companies that offer job referral bonuses do so under the assumption that their employees are most familiar with their work culture and the requirements of a position. But what if companies opened these referral bonuses to people outside the organization?
That’s the idea behind Draftboard, co-founded by Zach Roseman, former CEO of mobile app development group Mosaic. Draftboard allows employers to post referral bonuses and have referrers compete to win them by scouring their networks for talent.
“If you’re a big company, you get thousands of resumes for every job you post,” Roseman told TechCrunch. “Either you have a huge team of talent that spends an inordinate amount of time studying each one, or you’re spending six or seven figures a year on an AI filtering solution that undoubtedly has big downsides, like confidentiality, bias, errors, etc. .”
Draftboard is Roseman’s first project after Mosaic and IAC, the American holding company that owns several consumer brands including Allrecipes, Handy and Care.com. At IAC, Roseman was senior director of strategy and mergers and acquisitions, and frequently had to find the right candidates for talent.
“The idea behind Draftboard was: why not leverage existing referral bonus programs and the power of a networked world to identify the best candidates? Roseman said. “You get a much smaller, but much higher quality funnel of candidates, which allows you to hire faster.”
So how does Draftboard work?
Image credits: Draft board
Free for companies, Draftboard informs its approximately 1,000 referees – in Draftboard language, “scouts” – as references go through the different stages of the companies’ recruitment processes. Referrers are rated based on the quality of their referrals, and Draftboard takes a 20% cut of each referral bonus.
I asked how Draftboard found its initial group of referrers. Cold call, Roseman responded.
“We started by calling our network – through WhatsApp groups, mailing lists, LinkedIn, etc. – for people who ran and owned tech communities,” he said. “I would do discovery calls with them and ask them what their problems were… On top of that, every time I got on a call with a founder or talented person trying to get their company to list positions on Draftboard, it was almost always they ended up saying, “I know three people who would be great scouts – I’ll ping them right now.” »
Aren’t there conditions to be a referent? Not really, Roseman said — which can seem like a huge risk for businesses to take. But he said it actually democratizes the process in a meritocratic way.
“There’s no requirements to be a referent — and that’s intentional,” Roseman said. “I asked myself: why not make the system data-driven and self-reinforcing? Companies set minimum scores; if your score is below the minimum, you are no longer allowed to send them referrals. So rather than being a top-down police force that may or may not be a referent, we let referrers themselves moderate their own behavior in a bottom-up manner.
But, you might say, doesn’t Draftboard essentially outsource headhunting and recruiting without calling it that? Roseman says that’s not the case – and that in fact, many recruiters support the platform, which they use to conduct side businesses.
“Scouts run the gamut from Substackers to recruiters to everyday employees at tech startups like Amazon, Spotify, Deel and TikTok,” Roseman said. “We believe that referrals can and should be open to everyone, not just company employees, as long as you can control the quality, which we do through our reputation rating system.”
Image credits: Draft board
The business model certainly seems to appeal to brands. About seventy are on Draftboard today, including SeatGeek, Via and Formlabs.
This obviously also intrigues investors. Draftboard raised $4.1 million from investors including Founder Collective and Twelve Below at a valuation of $13 million.
“Job sites like LinkedIn, Indeed and ZipRecruiter exist to connect job seekers and companies, leading to genius incentives and selection bias,” Roseman said. “We don’t do that. Instead, we connect referrers with companies, and those referrers bring in the talent, whether they are active job seekers or just passively open to opportunities.
New York-based Draftboard, which has ten employees, plans to devote most of its initial capital to hiring and growing both sides of its market: referrers and businesses.
techcrunch
