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Some startup ideas around recruiting / talent management - what are your thoughts?

by yang0419

Hey all, am bouncing around a couple startup ideas / am going through user research on a handful of them. Take a look and let me know what you think! More criticism the better :-)

  • Employee referrals - allow recruiters to tap into their employees' professional networks and ask for intros
  • Resume screening - auto screen and score resumes in an ATS system
  • Org chart as a service - service that shows comprehensive, current org charts of companies
  • Backchanneling / reference checks as a service - make it easier to run reference checks on potential hires
  • Job data for universities - provide schools insight into the job hunting processes of their students / to support student recruiting as well

Thanks!

yang0419's avataryang0419
on February 4, 2020
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  1. 1

    Interesting set.

    If I were picking one to start with, I’d bias toward “resume screening / ATS scoring”, but only if you can avoid the two classic pitfalls:

    1. People don’t trust a single opaque score — they trust specific, actionable issues (formatting/parser problems, missing keywords, unclear impact bullets).
    2. Most resume tools ignore the role context. The same resume can be “good” or “bad” depending on the target role.

    A wedge that might work: focus on a narrow set of roles (e.g. SWE, PM) + give a structured report (ATS parse, readability, role fit, concrete rewrite suggestions).

    I’m building “Easy AI Resume” (linked on my IH profile) along those lines — happy to share what kinds of issues come up most often in real resumes if that helps your research.

    easy_ai's avatar easy_ai
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    7 months ago
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  2. 2

    Build something that kills ATS and I, for one, would rejoice.

    Just my two cents.

    c0nsilience's avatar c0nsilience
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    7 years ago
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    1. 1

      Hey @c0nsilience, can you elaborate a bit more on your frustrations with ATS? I've used Lever but only had minor problems with it (still plenty of manual work / tedious, context switching, etc.) but nothing too serious.

      yang0419's avatar yang0419
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      7 years ago
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      1. 1

        @yangczhao oh, I just loathe the systems overall. It’s cool that they can whittle down 5,000 applicants to 50, but I just don’t like the keyword-based segmentation in general. It’s a little easy for unscrupulous people to game the system (i. e., load it down with the ‘right’ keywords).

        c0nsilience's avatar c0nsilience
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        7 years ago
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  3. 1

    Hi Yang Zhao,

    I am not an expert in this field, but I valued a fair bit of startups and worked at private equity that mainly funded early stage. Let me shoot back in staccato:

    1. Employee referrals - allow recruiters to tap into their employees' professional networks and ask for intros --> I am not sure why you want to automate this process. I think it will be fairly difficult to convince someone to open-up their whole network (I wouldn’t, recruiters are most of the time !@#@!$). Where I used to work they just ask a potential employee if it is okay to contact their former manager/director/peers etc and just asked for the contact details.
    2. Resume screening - auto screen and score resumes in an ATS system --> I am fairly sure this isn’t a new idea. There are a ton of articles on this topic on how to beat the resume screening bots.
    3. Org chart as a service - service that shows comprehensive, current org charts of companies --> How would you want to do this/what is your service? Majority of the time it is up to the business to keep it up to date.
    4. Backchanneling / reference checks as a service - make it easier to run reference checks on potential hires --> check out services like https://validatagroup.com/
    5. Job data for universities - provide schools insight into the job hunting processes of their students / to support student recruiting as well --> what is the service you provide? My university contacts me annually to see how I am doing and to check if I have an opportunity for a graduate.

    Hopefully, this helps you to get more specific in the product/service you want to offer.

    Pieter

    Oboema's avatar Oboema
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    7 years ago
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    1. 1

      Thanks @Oboema, this is super helpful! I thought your feedback was spot-on, just wanted to clarify on a couple of these in case other people choose to bite...

      Employee referrals > this would be used by recruiters to source additional candidates, not for reference checking. A recruiter hiring for a position could look into the professional networks of his / her employees, find suitable candidates and ask employees for warm intros. In my last role, I felt that coworkers 1) weren't knowledgeable about roles the company was recruiting for and 2) found referring people to be a tedious, unimportant process.

      Org chart as a service > would sell this to sales reps who want to understand company orgs and the decision makers behind buying decisions. There are a couple tools out there now (https://discoverorg.com/ being the biggest) but the cost is quite high.

      Job data for universities > this is an half-baked idea for sure... schools want to get insight into how their students are progressing with job placement but it's unclear how valuable they find this data. Potentially could offer a free job progress tool to students and charge universities for the consolidated data.

      yang0419's avatar yang0419
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      7 years ago
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