Company: Unrabble
Website: www.unrabble.com
Founders: Kevin Watson, Chris Rickborn, Marc Slack
Year Founded: 2009
Twitter: @unrabble
Brief Company Description: Unrabble is a cloud-computing hiring software solution that helps hiring managers make their next great hire. It’s an entirely new, and better, approach to the hiring process. It saves time and money by better qualifying candidates, automating core hiring tasks, automatically ranking top candidates based on skills and verifying claims made through social networks, thus saving hiring managers from candidates who stretch the truth.
By Kevin Watson, CEO and co-founder
Product Overview
Unrabble is a pure cloud-computing solution that simplifies and redefines the process of hiring new employees. Unrabble was created for a new class of end user who must make hiring decisions, but doesn’t have the time or resources to do it quickly, effectively and inexpensively. Unrabble is not regimented HR enterprise software, a job board, or a legacy-style applicant tracking system for processing resumes. Unrabble is an innovative new approach to hiring.
Unrabble makes it easy to create a new job posting, instantly broadcast the job to your social networks, publish it to job boards of your choice, and then quickly identify the most highly qualified candidates as they apply from multiple sources. Unrabble removes the need to invest in expensive HR software and significantly reduces reliance on HR staff and professional recruiters. Unrabble is the first solution of its kind to put hiring in the hands of the decision maker and unchain hiring from back office, administrative and expensive third-party services.
One of the most notable differences in Unrabble’s approach to hiring is the complete shift away from the traditional resume to the new generation of online profiles. Using Unrabble, job candidates create an interactive profile that details their entire career history rather than emailing or uploading a resume. This gives the candidate the opportunity to do things a traditional resume cannot do, such as connecting to their social media profiles, integrating video, explaining job transitions, ranking their skills and bragging about their accomplishments (bragging is supported by a unique feature called Micro-references that allows candidates to have very specific accomplishments verified by their professional network). There’s so much more to people these days than can be summarized in a resume and Unrabble’s profile allows candidates to tell their story in the way a resume never could. To make the process easy, candidates can import their LinkedIn or Facebook profile and then simply fill-in the additional information required by Unrabble.
As this rich profile information flows into Unrabble, hiring managers can easily identify candidates that match their needs. Profiles can be analyzed and researched in ways that would have typically required significant time and even phone interviews to accomplish. Unrabble automatically ranks job applicants based on an array of criteria including skills, career preferences, and other specializations to quickly identify the most qualified and best fitting candidates.
Another time-consuming part of the hiring process is communicating with candidates and including co-workers in the process. With Unrabble, you can communicate with candidates using built-in messaging functionality that eliminates the need to make redundant phone calls or disclose your email and phone number. Colleagues can easily view, comment on and rate candidates so that hiring managers can see a quick consensus.
Recently, Unrabble announced new enhancements including job distribution capabilities, which allow hiring managers to publish job openings directly to sites such as StartUpHire, Indeed, SimplyHired and social media sites.
Other new features include options for businesses to create a branded landing page for job candidates and a branded careers page for multiple job openings.
Founder’s Story
Prior to Unrabble, I was the Chairman and CEO of Verid, one of the largest providers of identity verification software to the financial services industry. I led Verid’s raising of over $20 million in equity prior to the company’s sale to EMC in 2007. Before Verid, I was the co-founder of C/max Capital where I led investments in Verid, Adjoined Consulting and About.com, all of which had highly successful exits.
After Verid was acquired, we spent a lot of time reflecting on what made that business not only highly successful, but also a great place to work. We realized what a great group of people we had there, but the conversation quickly turned to how difficult it was to put the group of people together. Since Verid was less than 50 people at our biggest, we were never big enough to justify a full-time HR person, so each executive was responsible for their own hiring—which meant we could either spend our days flipping resumes, or hire recruiters to do the leg work for us. Having done a little of both, we all agreed that the hiring process was broken. So looking at what caused so much pain in the hiring process, we put together a plan for a product that would break away from the traditional resume and actively engage candidates in the process. Thus the idea and vision behind Unrabble was born.
Marketing/Promotion Strategy
Our initial target market is SMBs, which represents over half the workforce according to U.S. government statistics. Even in today’s poor economy, SMBs create over 1.3 million open positions every month. Startups, especially, can benefit from Unrabble’s software that offers a unique and better alternative to legacy resume tracking and screening systems.
We continue to promote Unrabble through web advertising and social media.
Unrabble is available as a free 30-day trial at www.unrabble.com.
How Unrabble Differentiates Itself from the Competition
There are many differences between Unrabble and the competition, the key being that all of the legacy applicant tracking systems (ATS) simply parse text-based resumes and score candidates based on keywords embedded in the resume. These keyword base systems are highly susceptible to being gamed by applicants, and do thus not accurately give users a feel for a candidate. Further, existing ATS were designed for HR professionals, not for managers and operators of businesses. Thus they focus more on managing the process rather than helping users make better decisions about candidates. Plus, unlike competitive products that still require hiring managers to work with a printed stack of resumes, Unrabble is profile-based and eliminates the need to print hard copies.
Business Model
Startups and other businesses can sign up for the Basic Version of Unrabble at $29 per month. The Pro Version is priced at $49 per month. Businesses are conveniently charged on a month-to-month basis and no contract is required.
Current Needs
At Unrabble, we’re continuing to grow. We’re always open to hearing from interested and motivated investors.
Unrabble – www.unrabble.com
