Talent Scout Profile: Aaron Miller

My name is Dr. Aaron J. Miller, and I am a Senior Search director residing in Mars, PA. Mars is a small rural community 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, PA. It is also the only Mars in the United States. As far as my employment goes, I work full-time as a Campus Dean for a major university. I am married with 4 children and a beautiful wife. In my spare time, I play competitive tennis in local USTA semi-pro and pro events. I discovered NotchUp while browsing my LinkedIn network. I highly recommend that people join NotchUp as a way to make extra money and help people gain interesting job opportunities.

NotchUp's Top 3...

NotchUp is quickly becoming the staffing manager's recruiting choice because of 3 critical success factors: Crowdsourcing, Social Media and the Peer Ranking software. We have already showcased how NotchUp is at the crossroads of Crowdsourcing and Social Media in this blog article. When these two internet phenomena are combined with the power of the Peer Ranking process and software, NotchUp surpasses any other recruiting service or tool on the market.

The Peer Ranking process can be compared to an election. That is, all candidates submitted are voted on by scouts and the result is a rank-ordered list of people that best fit our client's job descriptions. We want to thank all scouts for taking the time to accurately complete the peer reviews - it is definitely one of the keys to our success!!!

How to Earn More Money with NotchUp

When your LinkedIn network is broad you have more access to top talent for postings. Expanding your network will let you see more qualified candidates in the right geography, which will increase your potential earnings. Take a look at this article for the easy steps on how to grow your network exponentially. You can also visit the Talent Scout Cafe forum or the NotchUp Wiki for tips on connecting and leveraging LinkedIn.

Photo by QuiteLucid

Crowdsourcing

NotchUp's approach to identifying the best possible candidates for our clients' critical job openings is based on crowdsourcing.  The term "crowdsourcing" is getting a lot of exposure lately, but what exactly does it mean?

The term "crowdsourcing" was first introduced by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 article in Wired magazine. The generally agreed upon definition of crowdsourcing is the outsourcing of a task, traditionally performed by an employee of a company, to a large group of people.

One of the best known examples of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia - an online encyclopedia developed through the collaborative efforts of tens of thousands of individuals - almost all of whom are not professional encyclopedia authors.  Another good examples are Google's open source operating system, Android, which powers a large number of new smartphones, and the Linux operating system.

In James Surowiecki's book "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations" he starts out by giving a number of examples of successful crowdsourcing.  His first example was of a British scientist, Francis Galton, who in 1906 attended a regional country fair in western England.  Galton came across a weight-judging competition, where fair goers placed wagers on the weight of a fat ox on display.  Eight hundred people competed to guess the weight of the ox, with the best guesses receiving prizes.  When the contest was over Galton borrowed the tickets from the organizers and analyzed the data, including the mean of the group's guesses.

While Galton thought that the group would collectively be way off the mark, it turned out that the median guess was 1,197 pounds.  The ox weighed 1,198 pounds.  It turned out that, as a group, the crowd's judgment was perfect - and better than any individual guess, including farmers and butchers who were considered experts at such things.

Surowiecki goes on to give a number of other fascinating examples of tasks where the crowd does better than any individual "expert".  He then describes the circumstances under which crowdsourcing works best.  The common properties that most of his successful crowdsourcing examples had were situations that had:

• large crowds
• diverse crowds
• independent crowds
• a combination of experts and non-experts
• a way to efficiently aggregate the group's results

And all of that brings us to NotchUp.  Instead of assigning a single recruiter to a client's new search project our Web portal assigns 100 or more Talent Scouts.  Some Talent Scouts are freelance, professional recruiters, but most are not and we have an extremely diverse set of backgrounds within our network.  While each Talent Scout has access to information and feedback from the client, our process assures their work is fairly independent of other Talent Scout's work on the same project.  Finally, NotchUp's PeerRank process puts the submitted candidates into a forced ranking order, where we pass the top 50 profiles on to our client, from an initial group of thousands of profiles that the Talent Scout Network reviewed and rated.

But how well does it work?  We've received one common theme from our clients in terms of feedback on our service - we deliver extremely accurate and high quality candidate profiles.  We also do this very quickly, since the Network operates in parallel on every search.  One hundred recruiters working on the same search can get results much faster than a single recruiter!  We also deliver this service in a cost effective manner, by using a worldwide network of Talent Scouts that can earn extra income on a flexible schedule and work from home.  And finally, our Web-based portal provides an extremely convenient method for our clients to go through the process, give their feedback, and see the results without the need for time consuming face-to-face meetings.

Applying crowdsourcing to professional recruiting also has other benefits unique to our domain. NotchUp primarily targets passive job seekers and finds them by collectively leveraging the social and professional networks of our Talent Scout Network.  Instead of tapping into a single recruiter's network, our clients get to tap into the union of hundreds of Talent Scout's networks, resulting in our ability to effectively identify nearly everyone who is a possible fit for a position search.

And we're just getting started!  Our process and underlying technology platform is improving every week.  As we continue to grow the Talent Scout Network and NotchUp's Web-based technology platform our service will continue to improve even further, and deliver to our current and future clients a recruiting service that finds the very best candidates, in the shortest time, at the lowest cost, and with the highest degree of convenience compared to any other alternative.

New NotchUp Features

We have implemented a number of changes to the NotchUp system. Please review the information below and, as always, let us know if you have any questions.

Requirements Checklist
Accuracy in matching candidates to job requirements is the best way to get your candidate to the top of the list for our clients. To assist scouts in this matching process, we have restructured the requirements checklist for submitting and comparing candidates. Here are the specifics:


Submitting Candidates: Scouts rating candidates prior to submission must check either Yes or No on every requirement listed.

REQUIRED category:

• Will always be "Location" and "Qualified for Job Title"
• Both must always be checked Yes or the candidate cannot be submitted

PRIORITY categories:

• Remaining requirements are listed in order of importance to the clients
• These do not all have to be checked Yes, but the more Yes checks you have the more chances of a higher ranked candidate.

Comparing Candidates: Scouts doing "Compare Candidates" no longer have the option to check "Unacceptable". Instead, simply select the better of 2 candidates.

• As with submitting candidates, you must check either Yes or No on each “Required” listing.
• Unlike rating candidates for submission, the top 2 requirements can be checked either Yes or No. Candidates with a top 2 requirement checked No will be reviewed by an Account Manager. If it is determined that either "Location" or "Qualified for job title" requirement is not met, that candidate will be demoted to the lowest relative ranking among submitted candidates.

Remember...correct Yes/No choices will affect not only the candidate’s rating, but also the way we measure each scout's accuracy. Both of these affect your ability to get candidates to the top of the list – and to get paid!

Talent Scout Account Changes

To ensure prompt payment for all Talent Scouts, we will now be asking for your PayPal address when you create a Talent Scout Account. To make sure we haven't missed anyone, within the next week existing scouts will be prompted for their PayPal address when they log on to NotchUp.

Also, to allow us to match scouts with the most appropriate job listings, we are asking that you supply NotchUp with your LinkedIn profile. As with PayPal, new scouts will be prompted for their LinkedIn profile when creating an account and within the next week existing scouts will be asked to supply it when they log on to NotchUp.

Customer Profile: SkillSlate

SkillSlate empowers the 16 million+ individual service providers in the US to market their services directly to consumers. A SkillSlate profile provides detailed professional and personal information including pictures, fees, and reviews, all with the aim of not only showing what the person does, but who the person is. SkillSlate puts these profiles into a searchable directory where consumers can find service providers that fit their specific needs. SkillSlate is backed by prominent venture capital and angel investors including Canaan Partners, Jason Finger (founder/CEO of SeamlessWeb), Dan Ciporin (former CEO of Shopping.com), and other high-impact angels.