After testing its career agent Web site for months, NotchUp (DEMO 08) Monday opens its service to all businesses and introduces new privacy and messaging features for users including an optional updating of NotchUp work and education profiles from Facebook.

Unlike traditional Web job sites, NotchUp helps companies find and recruit passive job seekers - candidates they wish would interview for openings but already have jobs. Companies pay qualified candidates to interview for job openings. People using NotchUp set an asking price -the price at which they'll talk to prospective employers. NotchUp brokers the transaction between the company and the individual, providing several layers of protection for both parties.

After launching at DEMO 08 in January, NotchUp was approached by more than 1,000 companies to test run its service. Rob Ellis, co-founder and vice president of product, said the Palo Alto, CA start-up chose a dozen companies of different sizes, industries, and geographies to fine-tune its service.

"The common criticism of our service when we launched was that people would say yes to any interview because they were offered money and we found that not to be true. About 40 percent of interview offers are accepted," Ellis said. "The opportunity has to be significant for people to accept money for doing an interview.

NotchUp is free to job seekers. NotchUp charges companies a one-time US$100 activation fee and 35% of each user-negotiated interview fee. (If a company pays someone $100 to do an interview, NotchUp also gets $35).During its corporate trial, Ellis said, companies offered between $100 to $1,000 to interview job candidates by telephone and in person. (NotchUp offers a calculator to help users determine their interview time worth. During the corporate trial the average was $350.)

New features for users include integration across Facebook™ andOpenSocial™ networking platforms, and unique personal identification numbers (PINs) that give companies a way to access candidates through the NotchUp system, at the candidate's discretion. Ellis expects NotchUp work and education profiles on OpenSocial social networking sites such as MySpace, hi5, Orchid, and others will be active by the end of July.

"This option lets users keep their social and professional aspects of their lives separate, but gives then the convenience of updating work and education information from Facebook or other OpenSocial social networking sites automatically," Ellis said.

With the NotchUp PIN system, users give themselves a unique number that, in combination with their member number, allows them to exert control over their online data, releasing it only for selected opportunities. NotchUp users have the ability to funnel incoming job inquiries through the site. When a user directs a cold call offer to access their profile through NotchUp, both parties are protected. The offering company will have a chance to review the user's profile to determine if he or she is a fit, and the user is able to review the opportunity and negotiate an interview price.

New features:

When a user updates their professional profile or resume in Facebook, NotchUp automatically incorporates the changes.

Resume importing

Users can leverage the Facebook or OpenSocial messaging systems for NotchUp alerts.

Users can invite friends to join NotchUp through Facebook or OpenSocial.

Users can seamlessly import contacts from multiple address books.

The centralized messaging feature provides NotchUp more ways to contact users. During its trial it only used email and gave users 10 days to respond. Ellis expects users' acceptance of interview offers to increase somewhat now that NotchUp can contact users in more than one way.

NotchUp received an undisclosed seed round this spring from investor Michael Maple, who also invested in digg and Twitter, Ellis said. The company expects to seek Series A funding in late 2008 or early 2009.The company employs four people and several part-time contractors. So far, Web sites that appeal to active job seekers - Monster.com, CareerBuilder, Yahoo, HotJobs, Dice, or LinkedIn - haven't copied NotchUp's approach to interest professionals who are employed but are always scouting for the next big opportunity.