Zubka: Stupid name for an interesting idea

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 13:25:36 +0100

Via my friend Allan Englelhardt I got to hear about Zubka:

Zubka is not just another job posting site. It is not for those actively looking for jobs for themselves. Zubka works by allowing people to refer their past colleagues, friends and other contacts for jobs which they think they will be great at.

Interesting idea. LinkedIn allows recommendations to be left for people but doesn't give you a very easy way of recommending anyone for a specific opportunity. In fact the recommendation model is a little clumsy as I discovered recently.

I signed up to Zubka as a referrer. Partly because I am happy to refer people if I get an opportunity but mostly because I'm still looking for work (yep still looking for something) and I wanted to see if there were jobs someone else might be able to refer me for.

Not a good start that they had no IT jobs mentioning Ruby in the entire UK. Not that many jobs at all that I could see. And how on earth do I find people either to recommend them, or have them recommend me? I'm really not sure how one would build a network here since the purpose is so focused. I guess it depends on whether the financial rewards for referral make the system work but it doesn't feel quite right.

This is a clear case of a potentially useful social networking tool that will falter because of a lack of integration with existing social networks. Maybe a distributed FOAF style solution would have worked better: friends of my friends of my friends tagged with 'ruby' and 'rails'?

Curiouser and Curiouser! on recruitment

Zubka: Stupid name for an interesting idea