Interesting - kind of reminds me of a site a friend built a few years ago. It was a resume site with contact info hidden. In order to contact you the recruiter had to pay you - at whatever price you put on a contact (usually a buck or two). If you didn't respond in a reasonable time the money was refunded. But he was trying to solve the same problem - recruiter spam. Unfortunately he launched right in the deepest pit of the financial meltdown and he was unable to get any traction with the site.
If I'm looking for a high paying job, a few dollars isn't going to interest me. Your friend probably had to create a ton of code to allow for the applicant to store and eventually withdraw his few bucks. If I'm really looking for a job, how many recruiters could possibly contact me? 10-15? at $2, that's $30 at the end of the process. Seems more like a distraction from my job hunting.
It seems more like a distraction from core development (having to manage the cash accounts for applicants) and not enough money to be interesting.
I can see charging the recruiter to email people (sites like Elance do that) but that's where it should end. The money will never be interesting enough for an applicant to care and it confuses the process.
I expect the intent was really the other way around. To someone who is truly interested in what you have to offer, a buck or two is just a rounding error on the salary they will eventually pay you. To someone who is harvesting contact information to fire spam your way, $2 * n-number-of-contacts starts to add up very quickly.
But that's the point. It's supposed to be a no brainer for someone who actually wants a real contact with the applicant but prohibitive for a spammer.
A recruiter who is genuinely interested in you for a job opportunity wouldn't mind paying the $2 but a spammer who is emailing hundreds or thousands of people just trying to build an interest list would suffer.
Still, this hinges on the person actually responding so the spammer wouldn't suffer in this case. They'd be happy to pay for a $2 lead and not suffer any expense if the person doesn't respond.
I think you'd have to pay regardless of the lead responding for this to have a chance of working. Again, that's how a successful system work with Elance. You pay regardless of getting your bid accepted.
I see your point. He really didn't ever get enough usage on the site to know if the refundable upfront fee would have been a sufficient anti-spam tactic or not. Several sites with the same basic idea all launched around that time. His was bootstrapped, at least one of the others had millions of VC behind it. I don't think any of them made it.
> I can see charging the recruiter to email people (sites like Elance do that) but that's where it should end. The money will never be interesting enough for an applicant to care and it confuses the process.
Just make the applicant choose a charity. (Have a list to choose from, and allow them to add one for themselves, too.)
