Listen to this articleJobFit is an anonymous job referral marketplace with non-recruiter employees who have job referrals to give and job seekers who are looking for job referrals. Non-recruiter employees who want to see more women, more minorities, and more people of socially and professionally diverse backgrounds can use their job referral as their vote for more diversity in their workplace and not have to wait for leadership to make diversity a priority to make diversity a reality in their workplace.
Below is our recent interview with Maximilian Kwok, CEO at JobFit:
Q: Can you tell us something more about the company and what you do?
A: Finding talent is hard. Finding a job is hard. Why is this the accepted norm?
Modern day hiring practices are inefficiently opaque, outdated, and are biased against women, minorities, and people of socially and professionally diverse backgrounds. All too often, preliminary and disconnected candidate screenings are conducted by backlogged HR employees or recruiters whose understanding of the complexities of modern day, specialized career fields are limited to memorized key words and unrelated processes. Hence, inaccurate assumptions are made and excellent candidates are often completely overlooked.
Biased and algorithm-driven applicant tracking systems become patch work solutions for the disconnect with no intention of finding the right person for the job. While millions of dollars are wasted on HR procedures and technologies that attempt to extract gems of information about job candidates, when what should really be happening is so much simpler: Job candidates need to be asked direct and relevant questions by people who can truly understand the value of their unique work history and skills early in the application process. This is our goal, AND we’re doing it in a fair and unbiased manner.
We’re creating a modern solution for the high cost of HR inefficiency with a mission to build better, bias-free work cultures by helping people get hired with powerful referrals from company insiders.
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Q: What is wrong with the resume?
A: The current system of looking for a job with a resume and cover letter is outdated and is chock filled with bias-able information against women, minorities, and people of socially and professionally diverse backgrounds.
Resumes were created well before the start of the internet and has not been able to withstand the test of time and scale from the internet. The number of resumes per job opening was manageable before, but in the age of mass information, the numbers of resumes are no longer manageable.
Companies are inundated with resumes with a national average of 250 resumes per job opening. Popular companies like Facebook and Google receive around 20,000 resumes per job opening. Companies don’t have the resources to parse for great candidates from within reams of resumes.
There are currently 4 ways companies use to solve for this problem:
1.Go through every single resume manually, but the attention given per resume is around the national average of 6 seconds to read a resume. As a results, bias for keywords like “Harvard” or “Worked at Facebook” stand out on a resume. This will eventually cause a culture problem that Facebook and Google currently have.
2.Lean on AI powered solutions to find the best candidates, but AI systems lack context at the expense of the job seeker which then creates the notorious “resume black box”
3.Hire only through job referrals, but job referrals have notoriously been the enemy of diversity in the workplace as white men disproportionately win job referrals
4.Hire by poaching talent, but this gets expensive for the company.
Hiring then becomes a roll of the dice, and companies will have to pick their poison. Making the wrong hire can be devastating for the team and company as companies often have to consider a variety of potential lawsuits. All 4 hiring strategies are built on the problem that the resume does not give enough information about the candidate needed to make a good hiring decision.
As a result, the application process is extremely opaque and job seeking professionals are frustrated. I’ve never heard of anyone saying they enjoy looking for a job.
Rather than build another hiring process on top of a resume, we at JobFit are building a hiring system built on a Fit Story.
Q: What is a Fit Story?
A: We live in a globalized world and in 2019, the world is incredibly interconnected in certain ways. Because of global competition, we strive to develop dynamic work experiences to hedge our bets for the next better opportunity to be financially sustainable. This does not translate well into a resume, and the resume is the only means to communicate on paper how dynamic work experiences can meet increasing dynamic job requirements for the jobs in our century.
A Fit Story is the opportunity for a job seeking professionals to take whatever they have developed in their career at the point and apply it to the company they want to apply for. It is essentially an elevator pitch built on analyzing the needs of the company and positioning a job seeker’s skill sets in the context of the company’s business practice. At the end of the day, a hiring manager could care less if you graduated from Harvard or worked at Facebook. A hiring manager wants to know how quickly you can contribute to the team and when can they expect a return on the hiring investment.
A Fit Story is an elaborate elevator pitch that covers 4 topics:
- How much does the job seeker know about the company
- What solutions can the job seeker provide to unattended problems in the company
- How does the job seeker plan to execute those solutions
- How are the job seeker’s goals aligning with the company’s goals
The answers to these 4 topics are the basic understandings any company would need to make a hire for you or not.
A resume does not enable the job seeker to communicate any of these directly. A Fit Story does.
Q: How does the process work for someone who wants to get hired?
A: When a job seeking professional who wants to get hired through JobFit, they would search through our database of 80,000 companies with over 200,000 sponsors in our networks. We have robust profiles on each company for job seekers to discern if the company is a right fit for them.
After choosing a company based on their criteria, the professional would create a Fit Story for the company. The Fit Story process is guided task that helps a professional tell their story with our process. Once the Fit Story is completed, the job seeker can publish that Fit Story for verified employees in that company to read. The professional’s identity is anonymized and the verified employees will only be able to see the contents of the Fit Story, interested positions, and an anonymized AI generated summary of the resume. Only after the employees make the commitment of job referral, will the verified employees be able to get full access to the name and resume of the professional. We follow up with the verified employees with the status of their sponsorship and job referral on behalf of the professional.
Q: Who are sponsors and what are the benefits of becoming one?
A: Sponsors are the verified employees of the companies who are eligible of making a job referral. There are 3 benefits we especially highlight of becoming one on JobFit.
1.A streamlined way to capitalize on job referral bonusses provided by their company
2.For sponsors who want to see more women, minorities, and people with socially and professional diverse backgrounds in the workplace, they can use their job referral as their vote on JobFit to vote in more diverse talent.
3.For heads of teams and departments, we provide them with a suite of benefits to discover the best talent which fits the culture goals of their teams and departments.
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Q: What makes you stand out from other similar companies?
A: There are many things we do that makes us exceptionally different from “similar” companies. The most unique is the anonymity of our job referral marketplace. Every single action on our platform leverages the benefits of anonymity to make the job searching and hiring process a fair one to every single job seeking applicant. By anonymously connecting verified employees as sponsors to job seeking professional armed with their Fit Stories, we aim to empower fair assessment and hiring parity for people of all backgrounds that have the best skillsets for the job.
Businesses are beholden to their paying customers, and we want to be beholden to the job seeking professional because they have the bigger pain point in the hiring conversation. Because of that, job seeking professionals pay the price of a cup of coffee to be introduced for a job referral to all verified employees at the company of their choosing. Most companies charge the employer and job poster, and it results in solutions that frustrate many job seeking professionals in the forms of bias against women, minorities, and people with socially and professionally diverse backgrounds. We want to be tied to solving problems for the people who have problems with these biases, which is why we will always be beholden to the job seeker.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Our plans are to partner with universities, employee resource groups, and education technology companies to help support their respective communities to make the conversation for hiring and job seeking easier and more fair for people of diverse backgrounds.
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