Let’s say instead of giving away a Wii over the holiday season, we chose to scalp it on Craigslist. Three interested parties e-mail us with offers to meet up for the exchange. We don’t want to get scammed, and we also want to avoid wasting our time going to meet someone who doesn’t show. How would we find out if the people who e-mailed us are trustworthy? We could try Googling their e-mail address and see what comes up, or we could use RapLeaf to check their reputations.

RapLeaf believes that “it is more profitable to be ethical,” and their e-mail based reputation system is designed with this goal in mind. Using publicly available information in conjunction with information provided by their users, RapLeaf generates a trustworthiness score for any e-mail address. The score is based mainly on ratings and recommendations from your friends and people whom you have transacted with. RapLeaf also scours the Internet for information related to your e-mail address such as membership on social networks, the legitimacy of your e-mail address’ domain, and Amazon Wish Lists. By aggregating this information, RapLeaf is able to give a clear picture of who owns an e-mail address and whether they are someone you would want to consider doing business with.

Many people have been worried about privacy issues with RapLeaf, and being an early-stage startup they’ve made some mistakes that bothered a lot of people. Still, we think RapLeaf gives you some pretty strong tools to manage your own privacy that make it worth signing up for. The information that they list is all publicly available, so you might as well be in control of it. Some say that RapLeaf is like an open version of eBay’s feedback system. We’d tend to agree. Too bad eBay banned it’s users from showing RepLeaf scores – looks like someone is scared.

We’ve done our best to describe RapLeaf’s service to you, but to fully get it, you need to try it – especially if you want a job at RapLeaf.

With that in mind, RapLeaf is currently hiring an “amazing software engineer.” We like that the job title includes the word amazing, but we’re really impressed with their job description. It brings the job to life and lets you know what you might be getting yourself into if you choose to work for RapLeaf. We also like that we can add RapLeaf to the list of companies that blog about what it’s like to work for them. Beyond that, their Founder, Auren Hoffman, has a personal blog and their development team has a blog about engineering type stuff. What impressed us most, though, was that RapLeaf offers a $10,007 bonus to people who refer their new hires. We haven’t come across any other company that is so clear about the value that they put on talent, especially when that talent may be coming in at the entry-level.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, we decided to post about RapLeaf before we noticed that they were offering a referral bonus; however, we won’t turn down a $10k check if we earn it. We want to create a reputation for sending companies great applicants (so that they purchase advertising on our site or hire us to consult for them), because we feel that it’s the best way to convince companies to give you a better online recruiting experience. So, if you apply for a job at RapLeaf (or any company that we write a post about), please be sure to tell them that you found out about them on One Day, One Job. It won’t only give us a chance at earning a cool 10 G’s, but it will also ensure that we’re still around a year from now to continue to provide you with great daily content. Remember, we never take payment for inclusion in our daily posts. We are an editorial website, and any advertising that we have will be identified as such.

Lastly, on the note of One Day, One Job’s integrity, check out our Founder, Willy Franzen’s RapLeaf score to the right. If you like what we’re doing, feel free to rate him based on the quality of our site and how much you trust us for valuable career related information.

Note: On April 23rd we revisited entry-level jobs at RapLeaf.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• RapLeaf’s Home Page
• Jobs at RapLeaf
• About RapLeaf
• RapLeaf’s FAQ
• RapLeaf’s Blog
• RapLeaf’s Development Blog
• RapLeaf Founder Auren Hoffman’s Blog
• TechCrunch Posts on RapLeaf
• A Video Interview with Auren Hoffman

What’s your RapLeaf score? Tell us in the comments.

We've identified RapLeaf as having career opportunities in the following categories:

• all employers
• California
• engineering
• software development

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One response to “RapLeaf”

1. Vivek Sodera says:

   May 1, 2008 at 12:11 am

   Willy,

   Great post! Awesome job describing the company, our quest for the best software engineers, and the referral award. Let me know if you have any further questions.

   Best,

   Vivek Sodera
   Co-Founder
   Rapleaf

   Reply