Kenya’s TalentBoard has launched to help job seekers easily find jobs from their friends through referrals taking on struggling job boards and headhunters.
“The easy way to find a new job is to hear about one from a friend,” says Juliet Gateri, a professional recruiter and co-founder of TalentBoard. “Talent Board leverages the power of referrals and crowd-sourcing to ensure a seamless recruitment process for the employer, job seekers and recruiters.”
As a professional recruiter, Gateri says she is always overwhelmed with employer requests looking for the perfect candidate, given that each job advertised easily gets a minimum of 100 CVs from applicants.
“Talent Board offers value to employers, where the platform shortlists for them automatically without having the hassle of doing it manually through the platforms matching algorithm as 70% of applications are usually not within the scope of the employer. Additionally the employer can access passive job seekers who can be directly referred by their networks or friends,” Gateri said.
Talent Board also allows everyday people to become part-time recruiters and earn a few on every successful referral.
“Our goal is to have a very vibrant community of professional recruiters and industry professionals,” Gateri asserts. “We are leveraging the social and professional connections of individuals along with the diverse candidate pool of our recruiting community to be able to fill open positions.”
According to her, many job boards work well for entry-level positions, but require additional resources when seeking more seasoned talent.
“Once you start looking for hard-to-find professional roles in executive positions or with specific skills set like in technology, finance, sales and marketing, you’re going to find it more difficult to find talent on job boards,” she said. “You’re not going to find passive candidates or senior candidates, who don’t hang out on job boards.”
It all comes back to the main goal: to minimize the time and resources it can cost a company to find a good job candidate.
“We completely take away the administrative burden from the employers with one simple platform, Talent Board” she concluded.