A Silicon Valley entrepreneur wants to disrupt the standard recruitment agency model and get a piece of the multi-billion dollar market.
G2Bay, launched today, is positioned as an online global recruitment agency though its initial focus is jobs in the greater Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area.
The twist?
G2Bay says it will evenly split the finder’s fee with job seekers, a potential windfall of thousands of dollars for upper-level employees hired through the online company.
“There is so much information out there on the Web for free, I was looking for a way to monetize some of that,” Sunil Tagare, CEO and founder of G2Bay, told internetnews.com. “Job seekers often pay steep fees to mass-mail their resumes and agonize over every typo they make. Yet everyone other than the job seekers makes tons of money on ther resumes. It’s not fair.”
While HotJobs, a division of Yahoo , and Monster.com
are the dominant players in online recruitment, Tagere says they are hardly a duopoly with over a thousand other online job sites. “There’s plenty of room for competition and we’re just looking to establish a niche, not try to beat HotJobs,” he said.
G2Bay (G2 is military terminology for intelligence or information) said it expects job seekers in fields where there is high demand, such as health care and high-tech, to be most attracted to the site. For employers, G2Bay charges 10 percent of the annual compensation compared to what it says is the industry norm of 20-33 percent.
The company also has a plan to franchise the site to other cities, growing its database of resumes in the process.
Further, Tagare said he has grander ambitions to introduce four to six new modules in other, non-recruitment areas this year. He wouldn’t reveal the content of the other modules, preferring to roll those out separately. The idea is that as each module is introduced, it will attract new visitors who will then be exposed to the recruitment service and vice versa.
Tagare said he has applied for patents on certain aspects of the technology and processes behind his site.
Tagare’s consulting company, Research4 in Los Altos, Calif., is the owner of G2Bay. He developed the concept of the Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) project in 1989 when he was 27 years old. FLAG was the first privately financed submarine fiber optic cable to link several continents around the world.
FLAG was featured in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest telephone cable in the world and considered instrumental in lowering the cost of international calls to countries like India, helping to facilitate the creation of new industries like offshore call centers.
In 1999, Tagare was selected by Wired magazine as one of the “Wired 25” (25 people trying to achieve the impossible and change the world).
Job seekers from the United States, India, Philippines, U.K., Canada, China, Germany, Spain, France, Japan and other countries have already posted their resumes on G2Bay.
