[alttab]

4) waiting on the right bids when you just need to hire someone.

5) Outsourcing the DNA of the company to the lowest bidder.

If your idea or your management team suck a recruiter can only do so much. Once you are worth your salt you can hire one full time recruiter and be done with it.

Recruiting is more important, not less important. Commoditizing it means you don't know how to build a company.

[brc]

Good points all.

On (4) this is a fatal flaw unless the market can provide enough liquidity that there is fast turnaround on bids. Overall I think it is a killer of the idea.

On your (5) I would say that many organisations have no DNA worth speaking of. This is the market I would be speaking to.

I have done contracting work for many different companies over my years. Rightly or wrongly, it's seen as a cost centre rather than a strategic issue in many cases (despite the rhetoric, of course).

[alttab]

Thats really sad. To me, the hiring process determines the day-in-day out culture and performance of the entire organization. Sure they have the right 'skills', but do they mesh well personality wise with the rest of the development team? This would be impossible for an out-sourced bidder to determine with any accuracy.

What you get then is a bunch of randomly selected people (essentially). They really could be random given the fact you could have many different "recruiters", without any true consistency on how they were chosen outside of process.

A hiring manager could use this service for a handful of hires. Individually all the employees look great on paper. But something weird will happen when you put them all on the same project, and you are going to wonder where you went wrong.

Personally, I wouldn't see a web application commoditizing the hiring process as disruptive (in any good sense, anyway). LinkedIn was already disruptive because it changed the recruiting industry and well-qualified highly-skilled people don't stay unemployed long because of it.

Recruiters jumped on LinkedIn because it was built correctly and it made their job easier. Trying to commoditize the process further is going to be difficult because any recruiter worth their salt isn't going to take a pay cut and fight for bids. Most recruiters I've worked with take a commission on the hiring salary anyway.

I understand that the concept is disruptive from a hiring managers point of view ("Great, I don't have to hire HR, recruiters, or pay out the ass!"), but my guess is its going to be difficult for them to take the jump into an untested service to literally have anonymous bidders ala ebay doing their hiring.

As a manager myself I wouldn't use such a service.