Thanks for all the NotchUp invites. I’ll pass for now. +

I guess the PR in NotchUp is strong. Resistance is futile. It’s been-know-to-work-before viral.

I received the first invite from Ivan Brezak Brkan on January 25th, and they’ve been pouring in from all sides ever since. Thanks all, but I think I’ll pass for now.

I still haven’t registered. And I don’t think I will at this point. Tried snooping around the website a bit? I did. Noticed it was slow as hell. For the whole weekend. And today too. I’m hoping it’s due to the overwhelming amounts of traffic and not the PHP code behind the whole thing.

The concept of the thing feels “fishy”. Get paid to do stupid things. go to job interviews. Come on. It sounds almost as silly as those damn “get paid to INSERT-EASY-TO-DO-VERB at home”. Why would anyone (in their right mind) pay to get people to show up for job interviews? Isn’t getting a good (good == proven track record) recruiting company a more lucrative endeavor for a company that needs new hires?

Finding good people to hire is like searching for gold, and for all of the folks out there who don’t remember what that consists of, here’s a picture:
Miner’s search for gold
The people in the HR departments are about to get an influx of extra dirt to sift through. With chances of it containing gold being exactly the same, if not smaller. Hooray.

The only business who’d approve of such an exercise is the one that is highly optimized for landing people after/during interviews. And that shit takes skill, time and money. It’s like a highly targeted & optimized SERP. Except it’s about employment.

I know their website states “it’s for you if: you’re happy at your job, you’re good at what you do and you’re not looking for a new job” — that’s clever design & copy. They need as many users as possible. And once you get “many”, you start loosing in other areas. Quality usually goes down first.

Kudos to the two managers though. It’s a hell of a way to open up and create a nice little niche for themselves.

6 Responses to “Thanks for all the NotchUp invites. I’ll pass for now.”

  1. Sorry for that, I’m part of the problem :)

    I’ve accepted the invite, but realized I agree with you. Anyways, they don’t offer any delete account which is a total no-no. The whole deal was kinda fishy, but the 10% Referral Bonus is even more.

    Don’t know, we’ll see how it ends up, but I really don’t think any Croatians will earn any money. And I dislike the lack of design, rather the – ‘Oh, it allows linkedin imports hence it looks like linkedin’.

  2. Wow, no opt-out mechanism? I thought companies like these would figure out that it’s a bad idea by now :)

    The Linkedin import feature is cool (and expected) of course. The next “big” feature could be a Notchup facebook app. That should reel in even more users :)

  3. I’m fed up w/everything right now, and primarily loving last.fm.
    It feels ‘clean’, don’t know how to describe it.

    //thanks for the linkup man

  4. Zyt, sorry for the “spam” invite. They could have given me the choice if I actually want to spam people or not. :/ They make it so easy for us to spam all our contacts, don’t they?

  5. Yo Ivan, no need for apologies :)

    The point of the post was to express my gratitude in one place [instead of replying to each invite, yeah, classic developer’s syndrome :)] to everyone who was kind enough to send me an invite. And to explain why I decided not to register at this point.

    People tend to get “insulted” (in one way or another) if you don’t accept something they’ve offered. That’s one of the basic reasons why the “friends invite other friends” type of promotion works and is so popular lately.

    This post was aimed at alleviating (or better yet, avoiding completely) the “insult-ish” feeling that the kind folks might get. *fingers crossed* :)

  6. @Ivan – They DO give you the choice to spam people or not.