Thousands of people spend hours on sites like Indeed and Monster and still have never found a job a months later. Day in and day out copy and pasting your resume to different email addresses gets repetitive and worst of all, gets you nowhere. What we need is a more efficient method of finding jobs. What we need is UpScored. Instead of relying on key words and filters, UpScored cuts right to the meat and potatoes and finds your future job quickly through their powerful algorithms. What’s more is that their service is completely free for job seekers!
Elise Runde Voss, CEO, tells us about how they started up and hope to expand their market rapidly.
Tell us about the product or service.
UpScored cuts through the clutter of recruiting by intelligently connecting candidates to their best job prospects, and companies to top talent. Our data science platform exceeds the capabilities of current talent marketplaces with the UpScore. The UpScore is a proprietary algorithm – it formulates a graded score that reflects the relevance of a job seeker’s resume to a company’s job description. In turn, job seekers can focus on the right opportunities and hiring teams can target talent with the highest scores.
How is it different?
Current job boards and talent marketplaces rely on simple keywords and basic filtering, which can lead to poor matching and inefficiencies in the talent market – particularly for ambiguous titles such as project manager, sales executive, or data scientist. Our main differentiators include:
- Automated Scoring. Resumes are scored against thousands of job descriptions in seconds, which saves job seekers time and headache.
- Adaptive Intelligence. The technology learns from candidate preferences in real-time via a Pandora-like feature by which users can like/dislike prospects. The next batch of roles reflects their career interests.
- Pleasant Experience. The onboarding process for candidates is simple. We don’t require the user to fill out a lengthy profile. It takes less than a minute.
Did we mention it’s free for job seekers?
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
U.S. human resources total expenditure eclipsed $400 billion last year with human resources technology spend climbing to over $30 billion.[1] McKinsey predicts that online talent platforms will add $2.7 trillion to global GDP by 2025. It’s a massive market, but it’s congested and noisy. Candidates and companies cannot find each other. Our mission is to eliminate the noise.
What is the business model?
UpScored is free for the job seeker. We will monetize by charging companies to post jobs and view pre-qualified candidates.
What inspired the business?
UpScored was born from a problem our founding team experienced firsthand. Prior to UpScored, Dan, Robert, and I worked together while building Point72 Asset Management’s (formerly SAC Capital’s) Big Data Strategy Group. While launching and growing the division, we faced the challenging process of hiring a team – and how candidate choices can significantly impact growth and culture. We’re extremely passionate about using data science to solve the fragmented process of matching job seekers with their best-suited roles.
Your technology incorporates data science, natural language processing, AI, and machine learning. How does it work?
UpScored applies natural language processing and machine learning to the most convoluted part of the recruiting funnel to create a seamless experience for our users. Our technology analyzes thousands of data points on the candidate’s resume while incorporating proprietary taxonomies and external data sources. Our scoring algorithms were trained on almost half a million resumes.
The most important aspect of our technology: UpScored gets to know you. It’s our goal to create a truly customized experience by using data science techniques behind the scenes.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
Over the next 6 months, UpScored will be focused on expanding to additional geographies, as well as adding functionality based on what our users want. Currently, the majority of job openings on UpScored are based in New York. That said, anyone can sign-up, and we’ll be adding jobs in other cities in the future.
We’re also developing a resume analytics tool that we will be releasing to our job seekers in a few months. The idea for the tool came from user feedback. It’s all about making the experience better for candidates!
Stay tuned…
What is the one piece of startup advice that you never got?
The best piece of advice we DID get was to be constantly speaking with our users. However, the best piece of advice we DID NOT get was that it’s important to speak to all constituencies in the ecosystem, especially in the early days.
Feedback from our users is the most important input we have. It is paramount in every decision we make. However, in the beginning, we found it extremely beneficial to speak with anyone and everyone in the talent space – e.g. recruiting leaders at Fortune 500 companies, hiring managers at startups, third-party recruiters, people actively looking for new jobs, and people happy in their current jobs, to name a few.
This type of research is time-consuming, but it provided us with a number of perspectives and helped us approach the problem with a better, holistic point of view.
If you could be put in touch with anyone in the New York community who would it be and why?
It would be great to meet Joshua Kushner and his team at Thrive Capital. We admire their investment style and appreciate their expertise in both human capital and big data (e.g. Justworks, Oscar, etc.). We’ve also talked to founders that are either backed by the fund or know the team – they have nothing but tremendously positive things to say about Thrive.
From an advisory standpoint, we’d love to get in touch with Gary Vaynerchuk. He invented an entirely new approach to branding, and we greatly respect what he’s built at VaynerMedia and his other successful ventures. On top of that, he values hard work and seems like a genuinely cool guy.
Did we just cheat by naming two?
Why did you launch in New York?
New York is the ideal first market for us – there are plenty of exciting career opportunities and a remarkable caliber of professionals here. Our team has roots in New York, too. We’re proud to be a company made in NYC!
Where is your favorite fall destination in the city?
The Botanical Gardens is a great escape from the hustle and bustle of the city, especially during the fall. It serves as a great place to clear your mind and think through tough problems.
