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Listen up WorkJunction, BrightSpyre and Rozee, here is how you can get me (and companies like mine) to become a more engaged, “locked-in” premium-paying customer.

Start offering value-added professional services on top of your databases. Here are Three Features that I would happily pay you premium for in Pakistan, and they are not features that are based on restricting me on how I advertise on your portal but rather enabling me to solve my problem / pain in a better way (hint: that was a tip for product strategy).

1- Background Check Service (i.e. do some quality assurance! We’ll pay for it!)

As a smaller-fish in the IT industry’s pond, I cannot effectively verify the information that a resume presents to me.

Often, I cannot simply call up the current employer of an applicant and say “one of your employees has applied to us and we’re thinking of hiring him - what do you think?” because this botches up the whole process.

Even if that is a non-issue, I still cannot get the previous employers to take a small-fish seriously. This is honestly a weird, pakistani-culture-only issue where another employers first reaction is to doubt and misguide “CDF Who? What? Yea yea whatever that guy was a good person — but WHO wants to know!?”

The online portals, however, wont have this problem. Here is how it works:

1- The online portals start randomly doing quality-assurance on the resumes they have, by calling up references, schools and previous employers to confirm the basic facts from the resumes and perhaps even getting comments and feedback from those previous employers.

This works because these calls are made on neutral ground, at a neutral time — its not for an active employment, but just a general quality-assurance check.

This works because portals have a neutral brand and will find better reception to inquiries.

2- The candidates who have been verified (and whose information is corrected) are labelled, say, “Brightspyre Verified Candidate”

3- The portals charge companies a premium access charge per month to be able to browse that database.

I would be willing to pay a 15-25% premium over regular service charges for this (i.e. I’d pay 25% more for a “verifed” candidate than a non-verified one).

2- Optional Warning Notices

In this value-added service, the company can choose that along with any applications and resumes received for jobs, I can also receive “feedback” or “warnings” from previous employers or other companies who have hired to interviewed those candidates.

This would be optional for the company, who can subscribe to this service at a monthly premium price.

The company would also know that this works like an ecosystem, and so whenever a person from their company leaves, that company can add an “exit feedback” on the portal itself.

The online portals can manage this by sending an automatic email whenever a particular candidate adds a new employer in a resume — the email is sent to the previous employer or university.

Next, when and if the previous employer responds back, the portal’s quality assurance team makes a friendly call and verifies that info, and finally adds it as the feedback and warning. This quality assurance ensures that people do not abuse the system as was discussed in the first “blacklisting” post, and other cases such as “a manager was fired from a company, but the company did not realize he still had an active account — the person went back, pretended to be the company rep and wrote a bunch of obscene job posts to discredit the company”

Even if these warning notes are as simple as “The person gave us a 1-day notice for leaving”, I would gladly pay 35-40% as a premium for this insight when I can see that it was a one-day notice for all previous employers.

3- Behavioral Model Service
When Candidates apply, they can choose to be evaluated in “behavioral tests”.

These tests are used by the online portal to create an extensive behavioral model for candidates — the model would answer questions like “How likely is this person to cave and wither away when a tough business decision needs to be made?” ; “How important is meeting deadlines for this person’s self-perception of worth?”

This information can similarly be made available as a premium. I may pay if I’m looking for a very specific management position filled.