Montreal Tech Watch

Currently in beta version, TempHunt aims to create a marketplace of temporary jobs. Anyone can fill a profile with their skills and availability, and then companies can find them through TempHunt’s search engine.

The experience is informal compared to other job boards. It’s a fresh approach in an industry where profiles are verified, long and complicated conditions have to be followed and where you have to be recommended or friended by all of your friends before being able to do anything. TempHunt fills the gap between craigslist’s anarchy and linkedin’s complexity.

Started by Amir Lehrer, TempHunt is a Montreal-based venture, and is currently focused on the New York city market, a much more dynamic and bigger market than Montreal’s. Amir states they are still developing new features for the search engine and they will also launch soon a version at temphunt.ca. As the popularity grows, power hunters will be charged for extra features, perhaps for customized alerts, or perhaps a job search feature for temps.

Amir also supposes that only locals can post and apply to jobs, but TempHunt’s pitch makes it also perfect in times of globalization and commodification of high-speed internet. I can see skilled worked in countries such as Pakistan, East Africa, etc. registering on TempHunt, creating a global and liberal job marketplace, where overworked executives could offload repetitive tasks or enterprising individuals could outsource contracts to “cheap” countries. Amazon’s mechanical turk already proved there are millions of Internet users willing to do simple taks for cents, so why can’t a worldwide jobs/tasks board site work? Check out TempHunt and their blog, I’d love to hear your opinion about this site.