Site arranged pay for job interviews

If you have a gold-plated resume and are beating recruiters off with a stick, here's a new twist: Companies will pay you to talk to them. You set the price.

That's the proposition behind the self-funded startup NotchUp.com. Its founders, Jim Ambras and Rob Ellis, say the site will fill a void between recruiters who charge 30 percent of a new hire's salary and resume agglomerators such as Monster.com.

Their audience, they say, is "happily employed professionals" whom they call "passive job seekers."

How it works: You plug in your industry, job, pay and experience into a calculator on the site to help you set your pay for an interview. (NotchUp recommends a range between $200 and $500.) Then you submit your profile to the site.

If a hiring company is interested in you, it deposits the money with NotchUp and talks to you. If you seem like a real, engaged candidate, NotchUp will transfer the money to your PayPal account once the interview is over. The site makes money by charging a transaction fee, which it estimates will be somewhere around 15 and 20 percent.

Companies including Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Facebook are recruiting on the site, which bears a striking resemblance to Facebook. NotchUp was being unveiled at the DEMO startup conference, which began Monday in Palm Desert, Calif.

So far, the response from would-be job seekers has been warm. The site officially launches Jan. 28, but it went from 445 members to 10,500 in the five business days ending Friday, despite being in password-protected, invitation-only mode, Ambras and Ellis said. The traffic shut down two servers, they said.

"In every job I've had, I've had to, under time pressure, build a team of engineers. I learned years ago that the best people you want to hire are the people who aren't in the job market," said Ambras, who was vice president of engineering at the search engine AltaVista.