Crowdsourcing your next job

My good friend has decided to look for a new job.  Today, she brought in some good Mexican food for the crew as a thank you.  It was, however, not a free lunch.  In return for the tacos, we were supposed to go to the white board in the conference room and suggest where she might work next.  For the price of 2 dozen lunches, my friend tried to crowdsource her next job.

Soon enough (if not already), everyone will be connected to everyone else in their immediate market segment.  We’ll all have a Kevin Bacon number of 3 or lower.  Linkedin, which originally provided value as the “inside connection” to a given company or executive, now has become the ubiquitous contact folder for everyone.  Where recruiters used to thrive on Linkedin because it complimented and extended their most valuable asset: their rolodex of contacts, it now threatens to replace that rolodex completely.  The Recruiter still has value, as someone who knows how to interview a candidate and get at the soft chewy center of a person to see if they are a good match for the company with an open position, but not as a simple nexus of resumes in one hand and job openings in another.

Given that Linkedin has given us all that magic rolodex, why not try to crowdsource positions?  How could one simultaneously incent the armchair recruiter in all of us, yet invoke enough friction to keep out the spammers and robots?

Here is my idea:

1. Vigorously pursue companies to list their open positions on the network
2. Invite people to recommend people in their network for the open positions, with a standing bounty of 10% of first-year salary (still leaving room for the recruiter doing the actual interviews to make 10-15%)
3. If Andy is going to recommend Betty to C Corporation, then Andy needs to pay $5 to Betty (she’s the one looking for a job, and probably needs the $5 anyway)
4. C Company would see that Betty is recommended by 7 of her friends (all willing to stake $5 on it), and therefore she is probably worth a look.  If Betty is hired, the 10% is split amongst the 7 people who recommended her.
5. Andy just profited $1423 for his work (assuming 10% of $100,000 job, spilt 7 ways, minus the $5)

Hmmm.  This might work.  I should ping Harry or Alex or my old friends at Daijob.

UPDATE: 27 May 2010: Looks like I called it.  http://www.notchup.com/ is almost a perfect match for this business model.