Every few years there seems to be chatter about how traditional resumes are falling by the wayside. It’s hard to glean the full value of an employee from a one-sheet and job titles or vague accomplishments don’t exactly provide much information in the first place to an employer who wants to know about intangibles like productivity or how well you work on a team. On the other hand, employees rarely have a chance to evaluate a prospective employer in the areas that matter most to them, that is, generally, what’s it like to actually work for someone new?
A new service called Poachable is aimed at a particular type of job seekers and employers alike. And while the service isn’t a catch-all, it’s a convincing solution for what is largely a new problem: how to look for a job without raising suspicion at your current place of work.
Poachable has the type of self-describing name and ballooning value that startups dream of. The company, which was founded in Seattle last year, had raised $1.8 million as of April and holds the Silicon Valley-friendly clout of being founded by a former employee of both Google and Microsoft, Tom Leung.
The service has been pegged effectively as a sort of cross between LinkedIn and Tinder, a feedback driven professional network aimed at those quietly and/or passively searching for new work. The Tinder resemblance comes in the form of a hidden identity for either side and means that your name won’t be revealed to anyone but employers you’ve “swiped right” on (to use the Tinder parlance). Even in the cases where you’ve found a match you don’t have to advertise to anyone else that you’re on the prowl. In this way in particular Poachable solves a problem for already-employed job seekers. With professional networks like LinkedIn advertising your every professional move or inclination, looking for a job replacement has turned into an exercise in tact. Unless you’re miserable, and even if you are, quitting your job without another lined up is an enormous risk. And given that most employers don’t want to let a good thing go, job seekers often have to tip-toe around their hunt.
The most direct competition that Poachable aims to dismantle is provided by job recruiters and headhunters. The service is open to anyone but given the nature of the approach, facilitating the poaching of established professionals by interested employers, Poachable caters especially to upwardly mobile workers. In that way the tool leaves behind the most desperate job seekers, which is probably a good thing for everyone involved. (Out of work job seekers generally don’t have the luxury of a matchmaker and are better served elsewhere while on-the-rise pros rarely have the motivation to join the hungry crowds that frequent job boards.)
While the approach itself is peculiar, Poachable’s criterion are even more so. “With the traditional job search website, you fill in job title, location, and function,” Leung told Inc.com last year. “But people are sharing with us things like, ‘I want to work with someone 10 years my senior,’ or ‘I want to manage a team that’s X people or more,’ ‘I want to work in a place that has an open environment and where I can work from home once a week.’” In this way Poachable prioritizes the type of day-to-day aspects of a job that often take months or years to unveil in place of job title, and the whole point is you only invest in an opportunity you’re legitimately interested in.
If nothing else, with a growing valuation and online footprint, Poachable is sure to become a more and more popular, which might be as good a reason as any to join now.
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