A site where getting poached is the whole point

Watch this: Poach me, I'm for hire

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Time and time again, the old adage that it's easier to find a job when you already have one rings true. One young Austin, Texas-based entrepreneur decided to capitalize on that notion and created a Web site with a perfectly descriptive name: JobPoacher.com.

When building the site in his spare time, John Everett Creighton said he drew on his own experience. As an MIT graduate with a degree in physics and nuclear engineering, he was in hot demand when entering the job market and had to juggle multiple offers and rounds of negotiations. Creighton sought to simplify that process by putting the skilled worker in the driver's seat: "I thought, what if it's the other way around. These companies need good engineers more than the engineers need them."

Part of the beauty of JobPoacher.com is its simplicity. Someone looking for a job only needs to enter the most basic information about his or her current situation: job title, salary, location, and what they're looking for. There's no need to share your name, upload a resume, or write a cover letter. Creighton says that's all by design. "I'm starting to see it as the Twitter of job searching. I think the old way where people obsessed over every comma on their resume is outdated because no one really reads those."

JobPoacher.com has been active for less than two months, but more than 3,000 people have posted their profiles, hoping to be poached by a prospective employer. One such employer reached out to Creighton to sing the site's praises and share how he found a quality employee from the site in very little time.

"It gives you exactly what you need. They're really focusing on someone who's not being paid enough and not having a good enough place to work," says Paul Biggar, founder of San Francisco-based startup CircleCI.com. Biggar and his co-founder Allen Rohner were open-minded about where their new front-end developer was located and ended up hiring a man from Tijuana, Mexico, in just 10 days. "I would definitely use it again. It very much fits in with how hiring already happens in Silicon Valley."

In Tijuana, Carlos Rosquillas was gainfully employed as a graphic designer and Web developer for a local firm. While he liked his job, he wanted to challenge his skills and work with more cutting-edge technologies. The trick was to find this opportunity and then gracefully exit his current job without burning any bridges. For him, JobPoacher was the perfect match.

"It was simple and quick enough to put up a profile. I saw so many profiles being updated so quickly that I didn't think I had a chance at all. But within the first day, I had three offers. I was very honest and I think I was very pragmatic in my application."

Both Biggar and Rosquillas are happy with their current arrangement, but if that changes, they both know a good Web site to start the process over again.