A new Blockchain platform wants to empower professionals by giving them full control of their data by cutting out the middlemen who make money out of their personal details.
Profede says its protocol is designed to make it easier and more cost effective for companies to contact individuals with job offers and business opportunities. Under this decentralized approach, professionals are paid every time their contact information and full profile is released to a business. Professionals set their own price in tokens depending on how accessible they want their profile to be.
The start-up is optimistic about becoming a mainstream player after signing an agreement with beBee, a collaborative platform for professionals which has already amassed 12 mln users in more than 100 countries. As part of the deal, beBee will be the first network to embrace Profede’s protocol – and the company says it is in talks with other apps to gain further market adoption.
“Making data valuable”
According to Profede, the current options for business networking are not working – with its whitepaper describing the professional recruitment market as “broken.”
The Estonia-based company claims professionals are currently being bombarded with low-quality offers, meaning businesses find it harder to entice them with genuinely exciting opportunities and struggle to get a return on their investment.
Profede also alleges that current recruitment platforms such as LinkedIn are charging businesses “outrageous fees” to get in touch with prospective candidates, and none of those fees are making their way to the professionals themselves.
How does it work?
Profede regards professionals as the type of workers who use LinkedIn profiles, as well as those who have registered with job portals and industry-specific social networks.
Through the Profede Professional Protocol, these users choose how much of their personal data is made public – and they decide how much other businesses and professionals must pay in order to access their full profile.
When their data is purchased, they will be compensated in Professional Activity Tokens – known as PATO for short. Profede takes a commission of 2 percent from these transactions, which is then reinvested into the platform.
The company believes this system will make professionals feel more valued, while also helping businesses to save time and money. Profede says businesses will only need to purchase data they are actually interested in – and, as every professional’s feedback rating will be on public display, there is less chance of a business wasting money in acquiring the data of professionals with poor track records.
Similar to its arrangement with beBee, Profede hopes its protocol will be embraced by other recruitment firms, job portals, headhunters and professional networks.
Profede says examples of where its Blockchain-based platform could make communication easier include when a business is looking to hire an experienced programmer, or when a professional is in the market for new job offers. It hopes its protocol will also help businesses boost their sales and start mutually beneficial partnerships with other entrepreneurs.
Looking to the future
By the middle of Oct. 2018, Profede hopes that an alpha version of its protocol will have been fully developed – paving the way for a beta version to be integrated into beBee by the end of the year.
Its final product is due to be launched on Ethereum’s mainnet in 2019. Once everything is up and running, one of Profede’s main priorities will be marketing its protocol to small and medium-sized apps, including job portals, professional networks, recruitment businesses, software vendors and professional service providers. The company hopes that attracting professional apps will incentivize professionals to create a profile and benefit from Profede’s protocol.
Profede is currently in the presale period of its initial coin offering, which ends on May 31, 2018, and the public crowdsale will begin on June 1.