The resume, a dated and inefficient component of the hiring process, is dying. Now Poachable, a two-week-old startup co-founded by ex-Google and Microsoft employee Tom Leung, is trying to put the final nails in its coffin, while also putting pricey headhunters out of business.
The company’s Tinder-style platform targets what Leung calls “passive candidates”–people who have desirable credentials but who are already employed. Candidates type in what their dream job would be and their salary, location, and other requirements, as well as their employment history. The system then finds matches by aggregating all the job listings on the Internet and filtering out the ones that don’t fit with the candidate’s specifications.?
Leung, who co-founded Seattle-based Poachable with engineers Ian Shafer and Sam Skjonsberg, tells Inc. he’s surprised the archaic hiring machine hasn’t been fully disrupted yet. “It’s amazing that people have been finding jobs pretty much the same way for as long as I can remember with pretty much no innovation,” he says.?
The founders starting building the platform after realizing recruiters were using their previous company’s product, Yabbly, to poach tech employees who were answering the site’s ask-me-anything questions. Leung says that the recruiters are looking for potential candidates who aren’t actively searching for jobs, which makes them more desirable than people who have been on the job market for some time. “This put a lightbulb on in my head and I was wondering if we could build something to help desirable candidates find jobs well upstream, before they start looking,” he says.
At the same time, Tinder, a dating app that allows users to swipe through pictures of men or women and choose the ones they want to meet, was generating a lot of excitement around its easy platform. Poachable’s app, which is about a month away from launch, “is not an exact transfer of Tinder, but we put it together with a little bit of Netflix, and a little bit of LinkedIn,” Leung says. In the meantime, candidates can use the website in a similar way.
Read more at INC.
