Featured Startup Pitch: RemarkableHire utilizes ‘Social Evidence’ to give employers a holistic view of both active and passive job candidates

Avatar
By Editor November 16, 2012
Jamey Jeff, RemarkableHire

RemarkableHire logoCompany: RemarkableHire

Website: www.remarkablehire.com

Founders: Jamey Jeff and Scott Rothrock

Headquarters: McLean, Virginia

Investors: Bootstrapped

Year Founded: 2012

Twitter: @remarkablehire

Facebook: www.facebook.com/remarkablehire

Brief Company Description: RemarkableHire is a talent sourcing platform that uses social evidence to help recruiters find and evaluate the best technology candidates.

Jamey Jeff, RemarkableHireBy Jamey Jeff, co-founder

Product Overview

Simply put, RemarkableHire helps recruiters and hiring managers find—and evaluate—the right people for the right jobs in the tech industry. Don’t hire just anyone. Hire someone remarkable.

Here’s how it works: Our program crawls dozens of social tech and design communities, including GitHub, Stackoverflow, and Dribble. Then, we aggregate user profiles from these sites and find what we call ‘Social Evidence’ of a candidate’s skills, evident through the implicit endorsements of peers on the sites—such as ‘likes,’ votes of approval, or number of followers. Our algorithm uses this Social Evidence, the ‘collective voice of a crowd,’ to determine how well a candidate knows any particular skill, offering a 360-degree view to a recruiter. Not only does RemarkableHire provide a detailed list of skills each candidate has demonstrated, but we offer a biography, contact information, and links to a candidate’s online profiles—so recruiters can verify for themselves.

Five key features of RemarkableHire that make it a must-use for employers and recruiters in the tech industry:

1. It measures a person’s expertise and knowledge by evaluating peer-reviewed communities’ responses to that person’s contributions.

2. We collect not just the 15 percent of the workforce actively seeking new work, but also the much larger, harder to find, passive candidate pool. This gives our customers visibility into the entire tech workforce.

3. Candidates are scored and ranked based on how well they know particular skills you desire based on the dialog found on relevant sites. Most other candidate databases order their search results based on how many times a candidate’s resume includes the right keywords.

4. Provide our customers with a 360-degree view of candidates’ online presence, offering a more meaningful way to reach out to them with interesting job opportunities.

5. Eliminates bias from application materials (e.g. candidates embellish on their resumes).

Founders’ Story

RemarkableHire was born from our own frustration with the hiring process. How many times have recruiters or employers met someone who is great on paper but completely wrong in an interview? We’d both read a lot of great resumes, then sat down for interviews with people who clearly didn’t have the skills their resumes claimed. What a waste of time, effort, and money—all for nothing.

So we created RemarkableHire to streamline the process and make sure recruiters can find quality candidates for their open positions. It can be a daunting task to try to find the best candidate for an open position in the tech industry—most positions require a very particular set of skills and qualities that, quite simply, aren’t easy to find despite the high unemployment rate. That’s what led us to ask ourselves the questions that would spawn RemarkableHire: Where can you find the best candidates, and what evidence do you have that they really are the best?

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

Online marketing, social marketing, conferences and word of mouth.

How We Differentiate from the Competition

Our competitors fall into three categories: traditional online job boards, professional networking sites and social profile aggregation products. The first category is largely targeted toward candidates actively seeking a new job, which is less than 15 percent of the total workforce; the second category lacks the ability to accurately capture a candidate’s expertise; and as for the third category, none of the social profile aggregation products we’ve seen use Social Evidence—and we do. Instead, other aggregation products gauge individuals based on interests. The way we see it, anyone can be interested in something but not necessarily have the skills to perform—RemarkableHire’s Social Evidence is the only way to provide a third-party proof point behind a candidate’s knowledge and skill.

Business Model

Software as a service (SaaS), licensed on a monthly or annual basis.

Current Needs

While we are not currently seeking investment, we are always looking for feedback on our product. Right now, we’re responding to the amazing customer demand. We’ve had an exceptional amount of interest following our October 2012 launch, and are thrilled by the sheer number of customers interested in RemarkableHire. We’re super busy adding new features and sources of talent to the product, and feedback at this stage is immensely helpful.

RemarkableHire – www.remarkablehire.com