VCred – Offering a Solution to Hiring trouble ?
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Disclaimer : The CEO of riksof is a close old friend of mine, the review might be biased but then all you readers are there to correct me, he will take all suggestions and criticism. Also the service is in beta wanted to get a pre release critique of our readers of the business model
Hiring in our local market is a tricky thing with our desire to satisfy our friends and relatives we don’t usually give an honest opinion, which results in wrong positioning of a candidate. The references provided in our CVs are of closest allies who we know will not talk bad about it, if we don’t have such person we usually write “will be provided on requestâ€, the other deep problem is verification of a persons experience and getting an honest feed back from previous employers because no body wants to share information what ever claims are made by a candidate can not be fully verified and at the end the decision is always based on gut feeling.
This is where VCred comes in and offers a solution, They plan to help Employers verify the credentials of candidates by forming a trusted network with Universities at the first level, so if I am an employer I would be able to logon to their portal and verify if the candidate did graduate from the said university with an assurance that the fact checking is being done by university itself. Students and Candidates on the other hand will be encouraged to create their profiles on VCred and for providing references they will be able to use this, which will offer a peace of mind to both the employee and employer. Oh and universities will not do it for charity VCred will be sharing portion of revenue with them
Here is a chit chat I had with the CEO Khurram Ali of riksof, They are not yet out of beta yet so I will wait before we do the review of service it self, for now the business model seems at least to me a doable thing. here is the transcript of our communication
GnW> Which institutes have you signed up and which would be in line?
Khurram Ali>None are signed up yet. We have a few with whom we are regularly communicating. We have the details sorted out with them. We are expecting to sign them up immediately after launch.
GnW> How m any students have shown interest or registered ?
Khurram Ali>Since we have not launched yet, we do not have any registrations. We do have about 1000 mainly students on facebook fan page just through word of mouth.
GnW> Are you seeing any professionals signing up?
Khurram Ali>Again its not launched yet 
.
GnW> You have been doing a great job on FaceBook fan page what other marketing tools you have in mind to use?
Khurram Ali>We have twitter with it although it seems to not have been as popular as Facebook. We are already ranked on the first page for web based verification in pakistan at google. And we have not done any SEO yet. So this will surely come in.
Khurram Ali>Most of our marketing right now are physical visits.
GnW> what is the pricing structure like who pays and when?
Khurram Ali>For individuals its free. For Universities it is also free, in fact they get paid a percentage for each verification they do. Any university that signs up will get a portal, e.g., vcred.com/lums (of course not there yet).
Any organization that requests verification, will have to pay verification fees. An individual can also request verification and pay the fees himself. Usually we expect organizations to purchase the verification.
Here is a link to brochure http://riksof.com/attachments/VCred_WhitePaper.pdf
you can try out the beta here do let us know your comments http://demo.vcred.com/
Also they have an impressive fan following on their facebook page
2:10 am
Best of luck Khurram. I’d say that the interface needs to improve a bit (looks unneat).
All the best,
Ali
1:11 pm
Ali, thank you for the input. I do realize there are improvements to be made in the interface.
I would really appreciate if you are able to give some specific examples. If possible also please let me know your browser and version?
Thanks!
Khurram
12:15 pm
Khurram, very nice to know that someone’s trying to do something about the hiring issue.
However, two suggestions from me that I believe you should consider doing asap:
- University credentials are one part of this – and a smaller part… the employer-history part is essential because this is also the easiest area for people to lie about. Even if its as simple as verifying the start-end dates of employment and whether they left with a full notice or on bad terms (e.g. walking out without adequate notice) would be hugely beneficial and something companies like mine would happily pay for… at a later stage you could think about including linkedin-style recommendations.
- If you want to sign up universities and have people take a credible interest in your solution, may I suggest hiring a professional freelancer online to do a UI revamp – I think $500 will give you something which looks professional and a substantial effort – you dont want to risk being seen as just a side-project for your firm
1:17 pm
Osama,
Thank you for the feedback.
- In terms of technology we do have the employer-history part covered. I have also gotten similar interest from other companies on it. The issue has been about motivating past employers to provide this information. We are working to sort this part out.
- We have already tried two freelancers to-date, and spent around $800, unfortunately with what we have currently being the best result. I have found these two issues in general with Freelance designers:
* The samples they have may not always represent their actual work.
* Working on a fixed budget makes it difficult to go through multiple revisions to get to something which would be visually appealing.
We have actually realized (albeit quite late) that we need a full-time designer to get desired results and are now going through the process of hiring.
Thanks,
Khurram
9:34 pm
I just wanted to update everyone on a new release of VCred.com
We have improved the user interface and simplified sign up.
I hope you like it. Thank you for the past feedback. I certainly hope to get more feedback this time around!
Thanks,
Khurram