No recommendations?

Since I spent the weekend reading What's Mine Is Yours, I am interested in the concept of generating an online reputation. From a collaborative consumption perspective this reputation would generate: how good a buyer/seller and loaner/borrower you are, all available in the online.

Using reputation, making an introduction or a referral is not new and recommendations were and are based on character as well as caste. Using an online community to make recommendations may allow us to circumvent the caste aspect of the recommendation--I can see and write a recommendation for my plumber, for example, a person who may not live in my neighborhood or have gone to college with me, but which my social network can access and decide whether or not to hire him, or let him couch surf in their house in London, a privilege not available to previous generations of plumbers.

There are systems in place to keep track of reputation: eBay's star system for buyers and sellers, is just one example. In the realm of business networking, LinkedIn has a reputation manager, the Recommendations field which allows users to write recommendations for people who are in their LinkedIn network. You can vet any recommendations written for you and hide them if you don't want them to be visible, revealing them again when you think they might help. But should an employer be able to stop employees from writing recommendations for their network connections on LinkedIn? Workforce Management has an article on when and why to craft a LinkedIn referral policy, but I think writing referrals, in the age of "collaborative consumption" is much bigger than the people we work and have worked with, and it may not be possible to forbid a person from writing a recommendation, considering the varied places where a recommendation can be input and our coming ability to search and sort individual reputation.

Rachel Botman's TED talk about collaborative consumption and what it might mean

JobPrize and other Job Referral Networks

Adding a financial incentive to job seeking and rewarding a connection is not new--there are plenty of companies that offer bonuses to employees that find a candidate that they can match to a currently open job, but JobPrize allows a job seeker to post a profile and offer a reward for finding the matching job.

The job seeker registers on JobPrize and offers a reward for the person who can find the job that they want. According to the About Us section of the JobPrize website, the job yenta should just be employed in the industry. Ideally, what I think they hope will happen is that an accountant at a hospital will make connections with nurses on the site because both work in the healthcare industry. They recommend the person to the position and if the match is made, the matchmaker can claim the prize.

I'm already detecting some problems with this: you don't know these people. This means they aren't in your network and you really shouldn't trust them.

• What if you end up recommending someone who lied about their education or ends up needing some serious anger management training? 
• Do you have to disclose your relationship to this person if HR calls you to find out why you recommended them? 
• What if the job seekers discloses how she found out about this position and it turns out you will be double-dipping: getting prize money from the job seeker and claiming the recommendation bonus from your employer? 
• How do you know that the job seeker, once they secure an interview, is going to be good for the bounty? The site states that the job seeker needs to put the prize into an escrow account, but how do you know if she really got the job--and owes you some money?
• What happens if the site is taken over by people who have better research skills (*cough* librarians) who spend their day finding job ads to match the people on the site, hoping to score prize money?

I don't mean to be a party-pooper but part of a network means you should trust and be trusted--which requires building a relationship, even if it is online. I won't undermine online networking, especially if you have done work for the person at a distance, but a referee should have some idea of your skills or personality and not put you forward because you offered them cash.

And guess what I found when I was searching on the topic? A patent filed for a job referral network system.

Other peer-to-peer job finding services:

• LinkedIn (via the referral system on their job board) 
• Ntroduction
  
• ReferYes
  
• TugLink

Spotted on Springwise.

How do referral programs work?

There is a post on ERE.net today about getting more bang for your buck out of referral programs on college campuses. If you aren't sure what a referral program is, here is how it works:

• Your friend or family member works for a company that regularly disseminates job postings throughout the company--or they make a habit of checking an internal job board with offerings.
• There is a notice that the employee will get a referral bonus if a candidate that they recommended for the position applies, interviews, receives an offer and accepts a job. The referral bonus is usually cash and can range from $50 to $2000, depending on the position and how hard it is to staff. (If you know anyone in nursing, they are bombarded with offers).

Just to be clear, the referrer gets the bonus, not the person that was hired--but once the new hire is on staff, they can start sending out postings to their friends and family.

If you are looking for work in special corporate library, or an information position with a corporation, you need to talk to your friends about where they are working and ask them to include you in the postings they send out to friends and family. If they don't know what you do, or what you want to do, explain what you are looking for. Take a look at their company's website and get an idea about the types of positions that they post by what you can definitely do and what you could kinda do.

There are a few reasons to be wary of these referrals: if you blow off the offer, will your friend be mad? Maybe. It could also take time for the bonus to pay out--up to six months in some cases, and usually not before your probationary period ends. But this is a good way to get job postings delivered to your in-box, and if it all works out, your friend might be very very happy. And you'll be employed.

Check out the H3 network to get an idea about how this service might work on the web. I received a recommendation to use this service from someone on LinkedIn, and though I haven't found anyone for a position, I am still hoping it might work for people in my network.

I also feel like I am referring people (I'm your really weak tie) to postings when I put up the Yahoo! Pipe for library jobs and the Career Jet widjet, though I don't expect any back scratching for it.

Refer a friend: Job Tonic and H3

You're looking for a job and you see some stuff for you but you also see stuff that might be good for your best friend, your squeeze's sister, that annoying person in your book club who never finishes the book before the meeting and you kindly decide to cut and paste, or forward the job to a friend, just out of the goodness of your heart. But there are services out there where you can get paid for your...goodness. (I was about to say "virtue" but, last I checked, you can only get paid for that on Ebay.)

There are new sites that are trying to tap into your ability to connect jobs with friends and give you some cash back, encouraging you to be a more active node in the network. H3 is a popular service with recruiters and Job Tonic is spreading the work-love in the UK. In these services, hard to find positions can be filled through the principle of "weak ties": you know someone slightly and you know they need work; you pass on your intel and they may pass something back to you. Usually called networking. To reward your goodness for tightening the tie, the site will give you some cash back if your connection applies and gets the job.

This might also be one way to see just how effective a network can be, so think about passing on a job posting to a deserving other.