TopProspect is all about referring great jobs to your friends. We do allow people to apply for jobs themselves (we didn’t see a reason to prevent this), but always believed in the “power of the referral” as what really differentiates the cream from the… crop. So, we recently dug into our data to see who was more likely to qualify for the job: those who were recommended or those who self-applied. The results were conclusive: you have a much better chance of getting an interview if you were referred.

People who are recommended by someone else are 2.5x more likely to qualify for a job than those who apply directly. This makes sense because they’ve got at least one other person who thinks they’re good (external validation can be a good thing).

Sweet! We weren’t totally off our rockers: recommendations matter. We’ll keep working hard to make it easier for you to make them (and reward you handsomely for doing so). Meanwhile, when you stumble on a job that looks good for you, remember that additional endorsement by one (or more) friends will help your chances… big time. You can use our nifty “looking” feature to let your closest friends and colleagues know you’re searching and get them involved in your job search.

People You Know
Changing jobs is a huge decision, and starting the interview process with a company is a big investment of time; the more a prospect knows about what they are getting into, the better it is for everyone. This was our motivation in rolling out People You Know:

On every TopProspect job and company page, you’ll be able to see if anyone within your LinkedIn or Facebook social graphs are connected to that company. We have defined ‘connected’ as whether they currently or have ever worked at that employer. If you’re recommending someone, you can see the type of people the company likes to hire and if you’re looking for a job, you can reach out to your friends for more info.

This means the prospect has a better understanding of the company, the company gets someone who is excited about what they do, and the recommender has a better chance to get their referral hired. Everyone wins!

Legal Vertical
A lot of our Users have been requesting job postings from other industries, and we’re happy to announce that we’ve added new jobs from 5 of the top national law firms (including Fenwick)! These are all large, private-practice firms that are looking to add quality employees, and we’ve got an amazing former-lawyer helping to build out this space for us. There are a few listed now and we’re adding more through the course of the next week.

You can find these jobs on our job page by filtering for the ‘Legal’ industry. All jobs have hefty rewards ($10,000 +) so tell your legal friends and get recommending! Stay tuned as we have more industries coming soon.

Matching Game
Thinking through a great referral can sometimes be tough, so we wanted to make our site more engaging and the recommendation process more like a game. Remember Hot-or-Not? Good, because this game is nothing like that. It’s more like Facebook crossed with Google crossed with magic. We’ve tried to design a fun module where you can quickly flip through and decide how well one of your friends matches with a job.

We think you will see this useful in a couple ways: the feedback you’re giving us will make our algorithms *a lot* better at matching you or your friends with jobs; also, for the matches you think are good, we make it really easy to recommend them for a job by listing them under the game.

As always, please let us know what you think and thanks for checking out the site.

Top Prospect Team

Some say employee referrals are the only way to go, while others only trust referrals from former classmates. Mark Granovetter’s famous study on The Strength of Weak Ties suggests that a great referral may be more likely to come from an acquaintance than a close friend.
In true TopProspect fashion, we let the data decide! We looked at the quality of all the referrals made on TopProspect so far and how well the Connector and Prospect knew each other (using the proxy of mutual connections for closeness of relationship). Check out what we found:

It turns out that referrals made by close connections (24 or more friends in common) are 55% more likely to make it to the interview stage than referrals made by fairly weak connections (less than 3 friends in common).

This makes sense since close friends are likely to be a) former colleagues who worked closely together and/or b) former classmates who went to school together. Since you know the skills and preferences of your closest friends quite well, you have a good sense of what type of opportunity would get them excited and the type of role and organization where they would excel. They are more likely to be enthusiastic about the opportunity and the employer is more likely to be enthusiastic about your friend. And if you make a successful referral on TopProspect, you could make at least $10k

Think back to successful referrals and connections you’ve made. Are you more comfortable referring a close friend, or a new acquaintance? Which referrals have worked out best?

Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein are the co-founders of Asana, a San Francisco based start-up focused on building collaborative task and project management software.




Dustin: You and your co-founder, Justin, met while working at Facebook. How did you meet some of the other early employees you brought on at Asana?

Moskov: Some are people for whom we already had a ton of respect who had worked with one of us in the past or someone whose judgment we implicitly trusted. Others heard about our product vision or our internal technology stack and reached out because they wanted to get involved as co-creators — we hope we’ll be able to look back on the work we’re doing now as having pioneered a whole new way to build software for the web and that’s something people have been drawn to.

In general we’re just working on a ton of interesting problems (technical and product) that are more general or powerful versions of ideas in which people on the team were already keenly interested. Malcolm Handley, for example, built Android’s end-to-end mail synchronization system and out of that experience had developed a vision for how sync technologies could enable a new style of productivity apps. When a friend introduced us, he was pretty set on starting his own company after leaving Google. After we all talked, he went home and decided that his vision for sync made the most sense in the context of this much broader vision that we all shared — that Asana was the best opportunity to do sync the Right Way.

So some people come from our network, and some hear about us through the grapevine. There was a lot of excitement in the Ajaxian and Hacker News communities when we published a short video about our in-house programming framework, Luna. Avital Oliver was a brilliant hacker in Tel Aviv working on a similar problem and cold-called us after watching the video. It became clear quickly we were all deeply kindred spirits, and three weeks later, he and his family packed their bags and moved to San Francisco.

What types of people have you found to be the best at recognizing a good fit for the team at Asana? What qualities do you think they possess that make them good at referring talent?

JR: The best recommendations are coming from people who really understand the problems we are tackling and what’s special about our approach. Some know us well personally, but some are members of the tech community who really *get* what we are doing, even if only from afar.

Sounds like you’ve begun building a really awesome team already. How many employees does Asana have today? In the near term, how big do you think you’ll get?

JR: There are currently 11 of us (plus a full-time gourmet chef, and part-time yoga instructor). We believe in the ability to do more with smaller teams, and we’re taking an unusual approach to building the company: assemble a relatively small, tightly knit collective of extraordinarily talented peers, rather than building out a giant hierarchical org. We treat each hire with the same seriousness that companies traditionally give executive hires — each contributor to the project is crucial to our success, and each new team member will have the opportunity for tremendous impact on the organization and the product.

Right now we’re looking for engineers, a head of product and a Matt Cohler-style business person.

One of the things we’re really excited about in building this company is making working at Asana the world’s best apprenticeship for software entrepreneurs. We work to incorporate that throughout the experience, from being unusually transparent in the way the company operates to bringing a rotating non-founder member of the team to every board meeting and giving people broad access to responsibilities and people outside of their primary roles (we don’t have titles at Asana). We hope that some of the best software companies starting up in a few years are coming from Asana alumni, and we’re even likely to help them with funding.

We’ve heard a little bit about what you guys are working on already — reimagining the way people manage information in order to speed up work and communication. These are really big goals with awesome impact. How do you imagine Asana will influence future organizations and enterprises?

JR: At first it will be about making organizations incrementally more efficient, but we’re strong believers that differences in degree can yield differences in kind. At first, email seemed like it was just speeding up people’s ability to do the kind of sharing that was already happening in other ways, but over time there were emergent effects that have actually changed the nature of communication for people around the world. At Asana, we aspire to build software that produces a similar fundamental shift on the way groups work together — not just making existing projects go faster but enabling people to take on more sophisticated collaborative endeavors than were previously feasible.

We’ve written more about the Asana product vision on our blog and welcome comments and feedback.

On Top Prospect today, you’re offering a $20,000 referral bonus. How did you come up with that amount? What does it mean for Asana?

Moskov: Finding the right next person to join our team means so much to us; it’s really hard to put a number to. After all, Asana *is* the people who work here; the people with whom we spend our days working, playing and building. We’re looking for a very special kind of person with the skillz, experience, vision, empathy and passion that we believe this project warrants, and $20K feels like a small gesture of gratitude for someone who can help us find those rare people.

My story — of how I became a designer at Top Prospect — began when one of my closest friends, Mark Moore, met with the founder of the company, Rotem Perelmuter. At the time, Top Prospect was still in the very early stages with Rotem describing a concept for social recruiting. He mentioned to Mark that he was looking for a designer to bring his ideas to life. I had done a bunch of pro-bono design work for the non-profit Mark used to work at, so he connected us.

When Rotem and I met over coffee, I was still working at a fairly large company. I had never worked at a start-up before, but I admired start-up culture and the pace of innovation. I had even been reading about various small companies in an attempt to mimic some of their accelerated work flow in my then job.

My first reaction when I heard the idea behind Top Prospect was that Rotem needed to hurry up and build this thing, so I could start using it. I got calls all the time from people looking for great designers but had never been recognized — much less rewarded — for helping them out. Although I wasn’t looking for a new job, I saw the opportunity for Top Prospect to be useful through my own experiences. By bringing the recommendation process online, it would be more accessible to people like me, and I wanted to be part of that.

Much later, I learned that the initial introduction was a bit of a mixed blessing for Rotem, but now something we joke about today. Rotem was worried that if it didn’t work out between us, Mark would never talk to him again. Thankfully, we hit it off, and Mark doesn’t hold grudges.

After our first meeting, I did some preliminary work for Top Prospect on the weekends; Rotem and I met for a few more coffees; and eventually, he asked if I would join the Top Prospect team full-time. He then proceeded to explain how at start-ups, the benefits are plentiful with inclusion in future company blog posts being chief among them. So, here I am, thanks to a great connection from Mark.

If you enjoyed my story, keep reading because we’ll be profiling even more experiences and perspectives on our blog — some from Top Prospect employees like myself, others from employers who’ve listed jobs on the site and even industry connectors with their experiences hiring and introducing people to companies.