Announcing our first Recruiting Partner Nemensis

15. September 2020 · 6 Minuten Lesezeit

tl;dr - Nemensis is the first of our partners who will be able use our system to publish jobs in our community, and interview and introduce freelancers to their own clients.

Update September 16, 2020 - We changed our pricing model slightly and will charge the 3% fee, which we initially planned to charge to the recruiter, to the candidate instead. Also, after feedback from the community, we changed the term "middleman" everywhere (including the new Slack channel names) to "recruiter". Let's call a spade a spade. 😉

When I founded Uplink back in 2016, my main idea was offering "a fair and transparent alternative to recruiters." In the 8 years before that, I worked as a freelancer and experienced first-hand in many interactions with recruiters, that these parts were often missing - fairness and transparency.

Uplink has now become a vibrant community of more than 1400 freelancers from all over Germany. We have organized craft beer and remote community meetups, webinars, had thousands of interesting discussions in our Slack and posted hundreds of jobs - all this with a very small team (currently 2). I am immensely proud of what Uplink has become and grateful to everyone who has made it into what it is today!

We are still convinced that for many companies, it's in their best interest to find and engage a freelancer without the help of a recruiter! But the reality is that - especially for larger companies who work with many freelancers at the same time - a recruiter offers certain advantages like consolidated billing, a single framework contract instead of many individual contracts, or compliance with regulatory and legal requirements.

At some point we realized that recruiters will be with us for the foreseeable future and that many freelancers are actually ok with working through a recruiter of their choice. This is why we trialed a cooperation with a recruiter for a while, and started posting jobs from selected "consultancies" that are not straight-up recruiters but are still looking for freelancers to work for one of their end customer.

What we noticed, though, was that when the "middlemen" we worked with knew what they were doing, i.e. gathered all necessary information from the client before posting the job, interviewed the candidates we introduced promptly and professionally, etc., then our contribution to the whole process was minimal. The main reason, we realized, is that over the last 4 years, we have built out a software system that encompasses our approach to the recruiting game to such a great degree, that the middlemen could more or less use it on their own and the experience for the candidates as well as the clients would be almost the same.

This realization coincided with us meeting (or getting back in touch) with Ben and René from Nemensis. Nemensis is an established, Switzerland-based consultancy, and Ben and René took over the German branch this year to focus on IT freelance recruitment. Both of them worked together with my colleague Nick at a large recruiter for a few years, but moved on after realizing that the typical recruiter world - hierarchical, KPI driven, and focused on margin maximization - was not for them. We told Ben and René about the system we've built to manage our freelancer pool, post jobs to our Slack workspace, collect the applications of interested candidates, and introduce them to our clients with the click of a button, and they basically said that this is exactly what they need at Nemensis as well!

So to cut this already long story short - Nemensis will become our first Recruiting Partner, meaning they will from today use our system and the processes we've build and optimized over the years to post their own jobs to our Slack community, interview with candidates, and introduce them to their own clients.

We are treating this as an experiment, just like our last recruiter cooperation, and we're ready to pull the plug if we realize it does not work out in the way we intended. The main goal is to simply get more jobs on our platform, because that was what we heard from our members over and over in the last months: "Sure, it's lovely you're taking the opportunity during this COVID-19 induced market slump to do webinars, online community meetups, and other gimmicks, but please bring back the jobs!"

More job postings make our community more attractive for everyone, since even if you're not really interested in recruiter jobs, you can check them out to stay up-to-date on what is out there, what skills are in demand, and what the hourly rates are in different sectors.

I can honestly stay that haven't been as excited about a new development in our community in a long time, and that I think it's a huge opportunity for us to make the Uplink community stronger and more powerful!

FAQ

Which Slack channels will the recruiter jobs be posted in?

We set up a new set of channels for recruiter jobs which are completely separate from the existing job channels:

#jobs-recruiter will receive all jobs from Nemensis (and future Recruiting Partners), and the other channels are dedicated to jobs from the areas of SAP, frontend development, backend development, mobile development, ops (operations), PM/Agile and consulting. We might add more channels in the future when the job selection demands it.

If I apply to one of Nemensis' jobs, what will be different to applying to an Uplink job?

The process of applying to a job in Slack will stay exactly the same. Afterwards though, Ben or René will simply call or email you if your profile is suitable for the job. We're working on making this even smoother in the future!

Will I have to pay the Uplink fee for these new recruiter jobs?

Yes, but for recruiter jobs it will only be 3% instead of 10% for direct jobs. Read here why it is actually in your best interest to pay us instead of the recruiter!

Will Nemensis have access to the Uplink Slack workspace, i.e. read everything and contact freelancers individually?

No, they won't. Our Slack will continue to be accessible to our freelancer community only.

I don't like recruiter jobs, I just want to see client jobs! What's changing for me?

Nothing at all. If you're not interested in recruiter jobs, simply don't join the new recruiter job channels and you won't ever see them. The other public channels for community discussions and the existing job channels for client jobs will stay exactly where they are.

If you have any other questions, please reach out via email or Slack!

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