H3.com is an online contingency referral system. By combining the best of contingency recruiting and referral systems, H3 is reinventing and disintermediating the industry in true internet fashion. The combination of a contingency payment model, referral beyond the internal employee network and performance tracking separates H3  from what is a growing pack. It's a new model built from small pieces of the existing process.

The business is best explained by comparing it to Jobster. We think the comparison is useful, in part, because we've never seen a functional description of Jobster.

Hans spoke eloquently about his desire to be hands-on in a cutting edge startup. H3 is a lean mean fighting machine, trying to build a culture of high productivity without reliance on the "supersizing" to which  many VC backed startups fall prey. In addition, Hans has put a fair amount of his own money into the business, so he manages for return.

The name is designed to be short and memorable, meaning was an afterthought. The team has been batting around the idea of "Hidden Head Hunters" as a tagline. That gets at the fact that H3 will motivate an interesting range of performers.

Using the service is easy. Unlike most of the players in this growing space, H3 offers a clear picture of "How It Works" on their website.  H3.com handles all of the logistics of disbursing the reward money. H3.com will disburse the Referral Reward 90 days after the candidate begins their new job. In addition, H3.com will handle all necessary tax processing (e.g. 1099 Forms) associated with the disbursement of the reward money.

Their privacy policy is explicit and simple. (Interestingly, the Jobster privacy policy contains a lengthy section distancing Jobster from Third Party advertisers. We wonder when ads will start showing up on Jobster.)

We're going to see a great deal of competition in the Automated Referrals market. H3 will come out at the head of the pack because the team is very clear about what they are and what they aren't. The are not interested in the Enterprise market, preferring to target markets where innovation and competitive advantage are matters of survival. They are not a new kind of Recruitment Advertising Agency. They are simply a contingency referral business and really good at it.

Here are some other players in this emerging space:

ForumJobs
G2Bay
HireBound
JobThread
KarmaOne
Yorz
The VirtualHandshake Vendor Wiki has a great list of some of the players in business social networking. Some form of referral recruiting will emerge in most of them.

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