Can Cachinko make automated social job referrals work?

Review: Cachinko

There are number of entrants in the automated job referral business. Long gone are the days of weeding through the resumes of bosses children needing jobs. The ‘send us your friends’ resumes and win a Beamer programs disappeared in the early 00s.

Really, referral means something other than it used to. The current definition began to take shape with the launch of H3. Hans Geiskes, once president of Monster, and Lexis-Nexis before that, built a patented process to process referral payments and harness word of mouth advertising. (read about the referrals advertising market here, here and here). In the middle of the decade, there was an initial rush of products. Jobster, H3 and a half-dozen other somewhat forgettable players entered the market with Social Media 1.0 products.

Anymore, ‘referral’ really has something to do with the number of friends you have on Facebook or the number of followers you have on Twitter. Where referrals used to involve the friends you’d swear by, the now feature the vast array of people you sort-of-might-of-know. This idea, whose strongest proponent is Dr John Sullivan, assumes that you can build an enduring talent pipe ling stratified by discipline and rank and powered by acquaintance. It’s a long way from personally vouching for someone. But, it’s an interesting rethink of the fundaments of sourcing and selection.

As we watch, the core disciplines of HR and Recruiting are evolving while the nomenclature remains the same. Referrals are a perfect example. Contemporary referral systems are mostly complex, single thread, outreach campaigns designed to create candidate flow and (sometimes) identify key sourcing nodes.

There’s a strong undercurrent of pay-for- performance. In the best systems, referral bonus payments are used to optimize overall system performance.

That’s the where we got turned on about Cachinko.

Using a visual interface and a set of easy to understand business rules, Cachinko helps you manage (and distribute referral bonuses to) your ever expanding network of social media connections and other referral network members.

The company, built over the past four years by a team led by Career Builder’s former National Accounts Manager, is a self-funded startup. They are in the business of building “automated referral networks.” With a tight coupling to the company employment website and job aggregators, the service helps you manage a referral driven sourcing process as if it were a multi layered social network.

It’s worth running a small pilot program in your organization,. You move your contacts from outlook to the Cachinko workflow and then start building networks and track records. Cachinko helps you distribute the job and collect data on the paths through which referrals come to you. You pay bonuses using PayPal. Cachinko processes the payments and the tax paperwork.

In some ways, building this kind of referral network is an exercise in multi level marketing. Cachinko has enough experience in the market to be able to make interesting suggestions about the optimal distribution of referral bonuses. (Spending a percentage on leads tunas out to be a smart way to grow your overall network.)

This is another arena in which the performance data that the vendor is amassing is one of the compelling reasons to join the service. In most sourcing operations, measurement is a secondary consideration. This means that the deployment of budgets biased on hunches. With Cachinko, you can test and experiment until you find the optimal spend.

Cachinko looks pretty smart from here. The stong graphic interface, laced with pictures and illuminating the underlying business rules, is easier to navigate than the more standard screens of forms to fill out.

We like the product and think it has a meaningful chance of bringing new life to the referral business.