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Judge my idea

Is a startup that matches candidates with small, scaling startups a good idea (like underdog.io but more personalized)?

Or is this just another one to put in the bin. Would any of you (who run companies) out there pay for such a thing? If you would what would be the make or break feature?

  • It’s a good idea if you already know how to get the attention of startups and great candidates. Recruitment is a huge pain point for businesses of any size, so you’ll have no trouble making a lot of money.

    If you don’t have the right connections and no special marketing strategy then you’ll fail for sure.

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  • The problem right now is candidates. The good ones are not necessarily looking and that’s the tough nut you need to crack. How will you a) find them and b) convince them that you’re the one to trust when they have tons of recruiters calling them everyday with “a hot startup that will soon be a unicorn lead”?

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  • Add game theory to your idea and you’ll find your differentiation on both sides of the introductions. Recruitment is still so stuffy and HR sanatorium like. If you’re going to do something new in a well entrenched industry, shake things up, disrupt. Make it fun, rewarding, and exclusively your brand to be recruited by your solution as well as to recruit with your system.

    Second, don’t look for consensus; if you have passion and clear assumptions, beat down your assumptions with MPV’s until you achieve a success (failure is a success, too). Consensus results in faster horses.

    The role of recruitment is “broker”; are you looking to be profitable by volume or quality? If by volume, it is a huge slog; if by value, it is fuelled by passion because it is harder but more rewarding. Revolutionize by looking at other industries that act like a broker in a new digital way.

    Take UBER for example, I “think” it would be neat to be able to see in a geo visual what skillsets are in a boundary, tenure, and availability. I think it would also be interesting to have all the data on recruits and startups already precollected from social media and placed in a talent dashboard with links to recommendations and such… if you think about how Amazon now personally asks purchasers if they could answer a question about a product that was posed by a potential purchaser, you could the same in both directions. Startups can’t afford poor hires, and good talent cannot afford bad startups. Maybe a niche would be to aggregate the details of people, then teams, then reach out to recruits with “I think you’d be a good fit for this team, and here is why (in a autogenerated visual”, as well you could do the same for the startup in giving them a tool to share (input or API) their team dashboard and let them see how they would look to a recruit, and what recruits will fill gaps (auto-identified or specifically startup-defined). In the end, you’ll have a very good lens in which startups and recruits can honestly see what their getting into.

    TLDR; That actually could really hit a nail on the head; give startups a way to orchestrate growth through the migration from tools to people, and to organize the traits of their teams to find the most suitable recruits. Lots of talent and client acquisition paths. Be an expert on teams (small teams for explosive growth like AWS, maybe?). The match them with your proprietary 147 point algorithm.

    Good luck!

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  • Not sure I’d pay much for this if at all. At the very early stage, it’s all about the founding teams network and who you can bring in. Shortly after that, it might be the right time, but you’re likely building and trying to ship, not scaling the team. If you raise some money, and then start a concerted hiring effort, there are lots of tools out there (and as a founder who raised a bit of money, it can feel like vendors come out of the woodwork to start charging for all sorts of things) that may make life somewhat easier, but to me this particular idea feels a bit like a vitamin, not a pain killer.

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  • agree with the game mechanics stuff mentioned above. i had an idea recently about building a mobile game that would be played by the hiring manager and all potential candidates to figure out who is the best fit. the game would include different decision-making scenarios, ethical dilemmas, specific task completion (coding, design, accounting, etc. – depending on the role) and communication.

    as a founder/ceo myself, i think there is really something missing in the hiring process in that you don’t really get to see someone’s real self as you are going through it, and that perhaps some sort of gameplay would better expose people’s true identities without them even realizing it…

    could also be used as a “blind” technique to get rid of sex, age, “ivy-league” biases and just find the right person for the job.

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