Over the past few years there have been a number of projects that have aimed at boosting the serendipitous connections that lead to fantastic opportunities.

One of the earliest was Lunch Roulette, a service modeled on the Chat Roulette platform that paired up people within organizations for a lunch date.

Alas, the system was rather low-tech, and it never really achieved the results it could have as a result.  It’s into this breech that Spark Collaboration jumps.  The service began life as Randomised Coffee Trials, which was an attempt to encourage serendipitous encounters in a similar kind of way to Lunch Roulette.

Both Spark and Lunch Roulette apply their tools internally as we seek to collaborate better with colleagues.  A new service is aiming to provide similarly beneficial encounters to help us find a new job.

Bumping into a new job

The service, called Lunchcruit, taps into the prevailing wisdom that highlights how important networking is to landing your next dream job, with research revealing that you are more likely to utilize your network in finding a new job, the better paid that job is.

The platform offers something for both employers and applicants.  The employer service comes for $399 per month, and the organization creates a custom profile describing both their line of work and also any vacancies they’re currently looking to fill.

Potential candidates then browse through this list of vacancies and can contact any organizations they take an interest in.  Once they find a suitable opening, they request a lunch slot with that organization via a simple contact form, and should the organization also be interested in the candidate, a lunch date is set up.

The aim is to create a no-commitment scenario whereby both parties can feel one another out in an informal setting.

Vacancies are searchable by location or job type, albeit with the majority of listings on the site currently from technology companies in California.  The hope is very much however that the site will rapidly expand to include openings from a wide range of organizations and industries.

Overall, it’s quite a nice way to help support the more informal way that an increasing number of recruitment decisions are made.  Of course, it still suggests that the recruiter doesn’t have a candidate in mind from within their existing network and thus has to branch out further, but the platform offers a nice and simple way of doing that.