With a down economy, and an overwhelming number of job applicants to any open position (well, maybe not in tech startups, but everywhere else), there’s a real need for tools that help businesses better sort through their over-crowded inboxes to find the best candidates from among thousands of emails with attached files, photos, resumes and cover letters. A new company called SortBox wants to help address that problem by getting rid of the email inbox altogether. Instead, it’s offering a simple, customized inbox designed just for the purpose of moving through job applications quickly.

The SortBox inbox was created to be very easy to use, however it joins a crowded market of companies innovating the talent acquisition/hiring space : there’s The Resumator, HireRabbit, Firefish Software, Jobvite, Ovation, and Sendouts, to name just a few, and Oracle acquired top competitor Taleo at the beginning of the year.

But a lot of the companies that are designing tools related to hiring are offering something robust, with a lot of features and configuration options. Obviously, that serves a need in this market, but SortBox wants to provide an alternative for businesses that don’t need that level of complexity. Its target market is not the enterprise, but rather the mom-and-pops, the small businesses, recruiters, and yes, even startups who are just looking to keep their actual inbox clutter-free.

Explains SortBox founder Justin Sherratt, “we purposefully removed many features, both on the scope and even commented out code because we wanted to come to market with an MVP product that was super easy to use,” he says. “In time we are going to add products and functionality.”

To get started with the system, you just click “create a Sortbox” from the SortBox homepage to create a web presence for that particular job. You then fill out the title, description, and other any other details about the position. Once posted online, when anyone visits the page, they apply by clicking the big blue “Apply” button at the bottom and upload their images, bios and their resume into the SortBox job listing. The system then organizes the content so that it’s all neatly laid out on one page for the business owner or hiring manager to view.

And you can really fly through the job applications, thanks to SortBox’s color-coded “Yes,” “No,” and “Maybe” buttons at the top of each application. The system also supports multiple SortBoxes so you can advertise for more than one position at a time, and keep everything related to hiring in one central resource. Currently there’s no auto-posting feature included, but companies can post the custom link SortBox generates to places like Craigslist, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter on their own. In the future, support for auto-posting will be added.

SortBox was founded in April 2011 during Sherratt’s participation in the Founder Institute program in NYC. His background includes time spent at startups (RxCentric.com, 300 Monks, NinjaFinder), at recruiting agencies, and in film (producing, directing, and cinematography). Having been involved with the hiring process directly in many of these efforts – and even building tools like NinjaFinder to fix the problem of finding creative talent – he knew first-hand how difficult the current hiring process is today. This experience inspired him to build a tool that could simplify the process for any industry.

Prior to today’s public debut, the company has been running a private beta test with under 50 customers, which included startups like Wello.co and Kindara.com, and restaurants like Mixt Greens and Split Bread. Pricing for SortBox has not been worked out, but it will be a freemium-based service. You can try it for free from here now.

Y Combinator-backed Pomello wants recruiting to be more about getting new employees who will get along with the rest of the team rather than pushing fancy perks and competing on pay.

At least, that line of thinking is what got co-founders Catherine Spence and Oliver Staehelin talking while they were at Stanford Business School. With backgrounds in product management and recruiting, respectively, they each had thoughts on how the process of recruiting could be approached from a different angle.

They started meeting weekly, and had already signed up First Republic Bank as a customer before they finished their minimum viable product in December 2013. With feedback from the bank and other early testers, the team (which by then included Google/Microsoft alum Xian Ke) launched Pomello in its current form last September.

At a high level, Pomello’s pitch is similar to a dating site that promises better matching than simply asking about your interests. It instead has team members fill out surveys that get to their value frameworks. They determine what motivates current employees, whether it’s renown, the freedom to be creative, or public service (the complete list of motivators is rather long). The data from these surveys is then compiled to create a cultural profile for the team. When someone applies for a job on a team that’s set up a culture profile, they can take the same survey to see if they’ll be a good fit.

Of course, a common criticism of Silicon Valley is that it promotes its own monoculture of nerdy dudes hiring and spending time with others just like them. The team is aware of the stereotype and says that its method actually pushes against that problem. Ke says the questions they ask “are less biased than looking at a person’s particular interests and background.”

As an example, she pokes fun at cute interview questions like asking, “Who’s your favorite super hero?” While seemingly innocent enough, those kinds of questions are exclusionary of those who weren’t exposed to the same culture growing up.

With that said, the team has found that the job market for software engineering talent in Silicon Valley is so hot that cultural fit doesn’t seem to be much of a motivating factor for teams or job candidates. Companies really seem interested in finding the right fit for customer-facing jobs: sales, customer support and other jobs where maintaining relationships is key.

Pomello currently has 20 companies on its platform, with 70 cultural profiles generated from more than 2,000 individual surveys. Based on their early feedback from customers, employees who are hired based on fit do measurably better at their jobs. “When you feel you fit in with your team, you’re happier and more engaged with your job. That leads to better performance when it comes time to actually interact with people on the job,” Staehelin says.

Pomello’s customer acquisition strategy is similar to closer to something like Slack than a traditional enterprise solution. They try to get in at the team manager level, letting small teams within companies make their own profiles and screen two applicants per month for free. From there, they try to get more teams on, convincing higher-ups to pay a subscription to screen more applicants.

Spence says things get more interesting once companies start mapping out culture across the board. If a team gets an incredibly qualified applicant who just wouldn’t fit in at all, they can send the data to other teams that might be a better match, resulting in the employee getting a better work environment without the company missing out on talent.

Once they have even more companies on board, Pomello hopes people will come to them when they’re looking for a job. Instead of checking for cultural fit on a case-by-case basis, they want individuals to take their survey and use that to find which companies are worth their time to apply to in the first place.

In today’s heated market, recruiting for top talent is more competitive than ever. Employees have more career options – which means that established technology companies and startups are often aggressively pursuing the same top candidates.

For early stage companies to be successful, founders need to develop a thoughtful recruiting process, and need to do it early on.

Doing so will ultimately shape the DNA of the company. Greylock talent partner Dan Portillo, who has led recruiting efforts for the US Digital Service, Rypple, and Mozilla, has seen over and over again how an effective hiring process can impact the evolution of an organization.

Portillo believes that one of the most leveraged hires a founder can make is a strong recruiter. When companies are young, founders tend to hire “zero degree” people, meaning people who they have already worked with, went to school with, or are in your network. But as the company expands, they need to look for people who “punch above their weight” and can attract high quality talent for companies that have little or no established product or brand. Further, instead of relying on reputation or compensation, startups need to sell the long term vision and quality of the team.

Portillo also thinks founders should throw away their job descriptions. When Portillo talks to hiring managers about the roles they want to fill, it’s rare they say a candidate “should have done 7 years of XYZ.” Startups need to move beyond a job description template and source potential hires with a more dynamic approach. By researching potential candidates, executives can gain a deeper sense of who an individual really is, what they care about, and see if that is aligned with the mission of their company. Portillo recalls his experience with Mark Finkle, who he successfully hired for Mozilla. Portillo found Finkle’s blog on writing extensions and passion for the Open Web, and knew that Mozilla would be more than just a job for him.

For companies at scale, job positions – and teams – aren’t static. Rather, they change over time to fit the evolving needs of the company. Founders need to focus on potential candidates who fit the company culture and have a passion in the company’s purpose and mission.

Have you hired someone straight out of college in the last decade? If you have, it comes as no shock that today’s education system simply isn’t creating job-ready employees. Far from the differentiator it once was, the college diploma has become an expensive check box in the HR process.

Let’s cut to the chase: You need experience to be relevant in today’s demanding job market. Period.

Most graduates, regardless of their progression within higher education, are simply not presented with the opportunity to learn and exercise skills employers really need. According to a study by McKinsey and Company, 72 percent of educational institutions believe recent graduates are ready for work. Here’s the kicker: only 42 percent of employers agree. The overwhelming majority of these employees will need to learn on their own to close the skills gap.

So what can we, as business leaders, do to make sure the workforce of the future is getting what they need? It’s a matter of acknowledging the problem, realizing what this means for businesses and actually doing something about it.

The Problem: Workers Aren’t Coming To Interviews Equipped With The Skills They Need

I’ve been in the tech industry for well over a decade, and in the business world for twice that. When hiring, we often find ourselves looking for candidates with a particular set of both hard and soft skills. Many of these skills revolve around problem solving, time management and creativity — on top of a ton of real-world experience. We’re looking for a business-side Liam Neeson in the Taken movies: a very particular set of skills.

The problem is that these types of skills simply aren’t the ones you’d get in school. As Harvard Professor David Edwards wrote for Wired Magazine, in today’s system “we ‘learn,’ and after this we ‘do.’ We go to school and then we go to work. This approach does not map very well to personal and professional success in business today. Learning and doing have become inseparable in the face of conditions that invite us to discover.”

When candidates don’t have the skills we want, we don’t hire them — so they don’t pick up any new skills. It’s a vicious cycle we need to break.

Why Should Today’s Business Leaders Care?

You want skilled candidates filling your open positions, right? Then this should matter to you. We can’t rely on the systems currently in place to solve this problem on their own. Universities move at a glacial pace. The most common tools in the workplace (like Google, database systems or analytics software) are seldom seen in the classroom.

When a new employee encounters them in the workplace, they have no manual, context or past experience for learning how to thrive with these tools they’ve never seen. Teaching to test, rather than to skills, extinguishes desirable traits like creativity and innovative thinking in that student. Over the years, these traits disappear. The result is an education system that stifles the minds of today’s youth, destroying the creativity students need for success.

As successful leaders, we need to make ourselves the solution. We are the teachers our students truly need, the successful practitioners who excel at the positions those students want to obtain. Rather than generalization, we must push for specialization by inclination. If a student is naturally inclined to create awareness and understanding, why aren’t we pairing him or her with a successful individual who will foster those skill sets, rather than muting such a coveted trait?

Employers need to hop the fence and help educators build programs that encourage creative thinking. We’ve made failure a positive thing in business settings. Now, let’s figure out how to nurture that skill in the classroom.

I recently participated in a standards validation committee for the Arizona Department of Education to make sure learning requirements for students in sales and marketing were up to date and correct. I was blown away and, to be honest, a little embarrassed by what was currently being taught. Even if a student earned an A+ on all the current skills, I wouldn’t hire them. They just aren’t the right skills.

That’s why I’ve devoted much time and experience to creating a curriculum that actually teaches what I need my best people to know. Sure, it took billable hours away from my day. But I’m invested in making sure experience and innovation become skills required of each student at graduation. I want graduates to be people I’d hire.

So I’m making sure creativity, a mostly suppressed trait in today’s system, is squarely at the root of most of what these students will learn. Whether it’s solving a problem or completely changing the perspective that understood the problem, creativity is key.

It’s Up To Us As Business Leaders To Make A Change

It’s clear at this point that we, as leaders, can’t simply wait around for the tide of education to change on its own. We have the experiences, expertise and resources to make a shift — and as such, we have to do something besides whine about how no skilled candidates are coming our way.

A lot of this can start before a student ever graduates. We’ve all heard it before: We need to get involved. Hire high school students for projects in your office. Let them use real tools. If you want an intern to learn more than how to get coffee, you have to let them do more than make coffee runs.

These days, nearly every office has some sort of database that needs to be reviewed. Have them start there. Yes, it’s boring work. But it’s also essential to gain familiarity with technology and working with data — and it’s something they’d never do in school. These are your future employees, after all.

You’re also going to need to make this skill shift a priority within your existing workforce. Many companies say they have mentorship programs, but don’t invest time or money into it. Encourage your highest achievers to become teachers. It’s not beneath them to work with the newest hires or interns, and you as a leader shouldn’t force them to cram this in around client work. Be willing to invest in training for your existing employees, too. Learning is something that should never cease.

Educators and employers alike also need to stop looking at single mistakes as catastrophic failures. This is a big one. Mistakes happen. Every day, multiple times per day. Today’s top companies view them as critical learning experiences. Facebook’s now famous “move fast and break things” motto still isn’t welcome in academia. Trying to insulate students from failure makes them afraid to take risks. As anyone in modern-day learning and business will agree, failure is the best recipe for success.

We must fail if we are going to learn and grow — a branch gets stronger at the broken parts, as the motivational speakers say. Make sure your workplace welcomes failure, on resumes and in day-to-day innovation.

Whether you’re a company leader, hiring manager, expert or a job candidate, you have a stake in addressing this issue. The education revolution is upon us. The only problem is that it should have kicked off two decades ago. We’re overdue for change, and change is hard. We need the creativity we’ve been stifling for more than a century to destroy the system, before it finally destroys us.

A new book declaring the end of the golden age of economic growth has set the wonky world of economics aflame. Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth juxtaposes the world-altering impact of 19th century inventions with a disbelief that today’s digital transformation might foster growth on the same scale as refrigeration, aviation or the birth of telecommunication.

A digital skeptic, Gordon argues that byte-based developments aren’t likely to dramatically improve our standard of living. But as Gordon also points out, innovations often manifest themselves in unanticipated ways. The impact of refrigeration on the meat-packing industry and nutrition was clear; its role in boosting iron productivity by reducing moisture in blast furnaces, less obvious.

We’re currently seeing a similar phenomenon in higher education. When we look back on the innovations of the early 21st century, online learning may not warrant more than a footnote. However, the convergence of new forms of learning with unprecedented labor market data may prove to be an engine of economic growth on par with Gordon’s favorites.

Economists like Gordon are fond of criticizing China for its top-down misallocations of physical capital, but few think deeply about the misallocation of human capital — and potential for realignment — within our own economy.

In recent history, unemployment/under-employment has been an economic anchor. The challenge has several facets: matching workers with jobs, aligning workforce capacity with employer demand and creating pathways for training that enable the workforce to adapt and recalibrate over time.

Hiring has been an art more than a science, with signals like degrees and social networks distorting a market already starved of objective data. As a result, employers still hire candidates who are a poor fit and fail to improve, and job-seekers over-invest time and money in education programs that are unlikely to lead to a desirable employment outcome.

But that is beginning to change. Skills bootcamps in high-growth areas like web development and digital marketing are already helping thousands of learners develop skills — and land high-paying jobs. Universities are abandoning vestigial constraints on time, like the credit hour, and are developing programs more tightly coupled with employer demands.

These signs are a precursor to a more fundamental shift. At its core, the skill gap between what our education systems produce and what employers demand is a data problem. Real-time data on the actual skills of job seekers doesn’t exist. Employers haven’t been able to express the competencies they actually require, and educational institutions haven’t demonstrated the competencies they impart.

Today, nearly 70 percent of all job openings are posted online — close to 4 million new job openings are posted online every quarter. Natural language processing and the semantic web means that resumes, transcripts, test results and job descriptions are increasingly online and machine-readable.

Employers can evaluate whether a job candidate has mastered the competencies required for a job. Job-seekers can assess the skills employers value and identify the most direct path toward their acquisition. And by tracking the performance of new hires by competency profile, job descriptions and qualifications are getting more specific and exact.

The human capital revolution becomes a powerful new force for economic growth when we begin to see marketplaces for competencies that pair a candidate’s skills and abilities with increasingly sophisticated analytics capabilities of employers.

Employers will sift through terabytes of data to identify candidates who may be a match and begin engaging them early on, perhaps with internships or projectships. Or candidates will identify and enroll in competency-based educational options to achieve target competencies for dream careers.

This is not the stuff of science fiction. Just recently, CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson announced that the largest online job site in the U.S. would begin to share real-time, labor-market intelligence with Capella Education Company. Together, they plan to develop sub-$1,000.00 accelerated courses that offer students the chance to upskill and compete for high-paying tech jobs.

According to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, the Internet giant is already creating such a marketplace for the 40 million college students and recent graduates on its platform. In the not too distant future, he explains, LinkedIn will have a “profile for every member of the global workforce, a profile for every company in the world,” and a “digital representation of every job and every skill required to obtained those jobs offered through those companies.”

Their acquisition of Lynda.com was just a start. Weiner’s plan calls for the creation of a massive course catalog, of sorts, to include an ecosystem of higher educational organizations or universities that might enable one to obtain relevant skills. In doing so, he argues, LinkedIn “will lift and transform the global economy.”

It is a fair bet that employers will be enthusiastic at the prospect of data-driven-based hiring, rather than relying on opaque degrees in order to qualify candidates.

Employees will celebrate, as well. For the first time, they will have a GPS for their own human capital development. Students will be able to ascertain which educational programs are likely to pay off. Those that don’t, will fail.

Equally important, as they progress in their educational program, they’ll understand their evolving zone of proximal development, which might cause them to veer in a direction that will make them more productive, happier and wealthier.

Better-off employers and employees signals higher productivity and stronger economic growth. Let’s hope that Gordon needs to make some amendments and corrections in a few years when the next edition of his book comes out.

Humans are nothing if not contrary. Technology destroying jobs is something most Americans accept will happen within their lifetimes, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, just not to their own jobs — which most believe won’t change significantly in the next 50 years.

Polling just over 2,000 Americans in June and July last summer to ask about their perception of the risk of jobs being automated, the researchers found a majority (65 per cent) of Americans believe that robots and/or software will “definitely” or “probably” be capable of doing much of the work that humans do now within 50 years’ time.

But when the robots and the algorithms move a little closer to home – and the question becomes specifically about the future security of their own jobs — respondents’ views are very different, with an even larger majority (80 per cent) convinced their own jobs and professions will remain largely unchanged and will exist in their current form 50 years from now.

More than a third (36 per cent) of respondents expressed definitive confidence that their current job or occupation will “definitely” exist in its current form five decades from now vs just six per cent saying their current role will “definitely not” exist.

Even younger respondents believe the jobs they are doing now will remain much the same come 2065. Indeed, they are a little more confident than older workers that their employment prospects aren’t going to change radically, with 84 per cent of workers aged 18 to 29 expecting no big changes to the role they are currently doing in the next 50 years vs only 76 per cent of workers aged 50 or older.

Younger workers were also a bit more likely to be skeptical of the notion that robots will replace much of human work, with more than a third (35 per cent) of 18- to 49-year-olds thinking it’s unlikely to happen vs less than a third (27 per cent) of those aged 50 or older.

Those with college degrees; households with higher annual incomes; and those who work in the government, education or nonprofit sector were also more skeptical that machines will render most human elbow grease redundant in the near future.

In the same study, Pew did find that just over a tenth (11 per cent) of the polled workers are at least somewhat concerned they might lose their job as a result of workforce automation. However other more immediate worries – including mismanagement by their employers; displacement by lower paid human workers; broader industrial trends; and concerns over learning new technical skills for their current role – are more of a concern for the employed, rather than the rise of robots and smarter algorithms replacing their labor entirely.

Pew also looked at how attitudes vary depending on the type of work being done. Here it’s a sliding scale, with blue-collar workers generally the most confident their jobs will remain resilient to the rise of robots and white-collar executive/managerial workers the least secure in their perception of the robustness of their future employment prospects.

The study found that close to a majority (41 per cent) of those whose jobs involve manual or physical labor expect the same job to exist unchanged by 2065, while around a third (34 per cent) of those in professional occupations expressed the same belief vs just over a fifth (23 per cent) of managerial or executive role workers.

But again workers whose jobs involve primarily manual or physical labor did also express heightened concern about all potential employment threats, especially replacement by robots/machines — with fully 17 per cent of these respondents at least somewhat concerned about the threat from workforce automation, and 11 per cent saying they are “very concerned”.

Are the majority of Americans being hopelessly optimistic when it comes to their own future employment prospects? Time will tell. If you flip the exercise and look back at the kind of jobs people were doing in 1965 vs the kind of roles that exist now it’s evident there are plenty of blue-collar and professional jobs, at least, that existed then and do still exist now – be it teacher, doctor, nurse, driver and so on.

There are of course also a swathe of new jobs that have been created by the rise of technologies such as the Internet and ecommerce. And these newer job roles – whether it’s social media marketer or native app programmer — are perhaps more likely to have a shorter lifespan than traditional job roles, given the technologies they are founded on are likely to keep changing, thereby potentially shifting the demands of the work associated with them.

The larger question is of course whether shifts towards increasing automation of jobs will transform the technological underpinning of vast numbers of more traditional jobs — by, for example, automating driving via AI-powered driverless vehicles, thereby making human drivers redundant.

On those bigger questions about the looming impact of automation on employment, Americans at least appear to be sitting on the fence about what it means for future job prospects. And despite expressing significance confidence in the power of technology to transform human employment, they do not appear quite so ready to imagine a future where most humans are out of work.

The rise of on-demand startups and other fast-growing businesses like online marketplaces has created a need for reliable ways to verify new hires and customers to make sure they are cut out for the task. Onfido, one of the group of startups building software-based solutions to do just that, has raised $25 million to meet that need.

The Series B round was led by Idinvest Partners, with participation also from existing backers Wellington Partners and CrunchFund (founded by TC founder Michael Arrington), and brings the total raised by the startup to just over $30 million. It’s not disclosing its valuation in this round, but as a marker, its competitor Checkr, which has raised just under $50 million, is valued between $250 million and $300 million.

Onfido plans to use the capital in a couple of different ways. First, to continue expanding its business internationally: originally founded in the UK by three friends from Oxford, Onfido is now focused on the U.S., which co-founder and CEO Husayn Kassai told TechCrunch is currently its biggest market among its 1,000+ customers, who have collectively run 10 million checks through its platform in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia.

It also plans to continue building out its machine learning platform. The company, which offers its service by way of an API to its customers to integrate into their bigger HR systems, now claims to perform basic ID checks in seconds, and is constructed to learn more about fraud patterns to identify quickly when people are trying to hide their backgrounds in more sophisticated ways.

Kassai describes Onfido’s bigger mission as the building of a “trust engine” that can be used not just to verify identity for on-demand startups and others in the business of rapidly hiring contractors, but any business scenario that requires a company to make sure that the people using its platform are legit.

Background checks — and their automation by software — is a budding area right now: just last month, Onfido’s bigger startup rival Checkr announced that it had raised $40 million. Both companies — taking on more established players like SterlingBackCheck, HireRight, and First Advantage and other small startups like Goodhire — say that they are growing fast right now. Onfido’s business is up 40% month-on-month, while Checkr told me last month it is already profitable.

A lot of the early business opportunity for companies like Onfido (and Checkr) has been in the on-demand marketplace — Onfido’s customers today include startups like Handy, TaskRabbit, Deliveroo and BlaBlaCar, while Checkr works with biggies like Uber. But what’s interesting is looking at how these businesses are evolving beyond this first wave of customers.

While Checkr is looking to tackle more traditional and offline businesses, Onfido is applying its expertise to more than just employee checks. One of its current customers is JustGiving, which uses the Onfido platform to check backgrounds of people who are looking to use the platform to raise money, to make sure that they are not defrauding their customers. With online commerce only continuing to grow, tracking fraud at marketplaces could potentially become an even bigger opportunity for Onfido than employee checks.

The other area that makes Onfido unique is its focus on machine-learning technology. While there are people on its team that do legwork to carry out certain checks — criminal background checks in the U.S., for example, often require physical visits to courthouses to verify — it’s pushing as much of the work onto its software platform. The machine learning aspect essentially means that with each check it does, Onfido’s platform is getting faster and better at carrying out future checks across some 20 different categories like credit ratings and verifying documents.

The software element is a tricky one, too, however. Jumio, another startup that made a big point of using software to verify credit and identity, filed for bankruptcy last month after failing to secure funding in the midst of regulatory investigations. Investors believe, however, that Onfido’s platform is significantly more robust. 

“In what is set to be a testing year for many startups, Onfido has the product and business model that will allow them to continue their strong upwards trajectory,” said Mathieu Baret from Idinvest. “This is why we invested and we look forward to working together as they expand to new markets and territories.”

The technology industry has a problem with retaining qualified female employees. According to a study by the Center for Work-Life Policy, 56 percent of women in computing jobs will leave their positions at the “mid-level” point, right when it is most costly to the companies that employ them. This is due to a number of factors that can be alleviated by corporations adopting mindful practices that will create better and balanced work environments.

The lowdown

The tech industry is growing so quickly that it is outpacing the number of qualified technical employees available to fill open positions. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States will have nearly 1.4 million job openings in this industry by 2020. However, more than two-thirds of these positions could go unfilled. While efforts need to be made to encourage more women to enter tech, it is also effective to take steps to ensure that talented women remain at their positions and eventually take on leadership roles.

This is not only important for staffing, but also for the health and innovation of technology companies. According to a study by NCWIT, teams that comprise both men and women produce technology patents that are cited 26-42 percent more often. Another study of more than 100 teams at 21 companies showed that those with equal numbers of men and women were more likely to experiment, be creative and fulfill tasks. Companies will simply perform better if they are able to develop and sustain a diverse team.

Equalize compensation

The best way for companies to hold on to female tech talent is to create a work environment that is fair, even and open for advancement and reward. Professional women currently earn .73 cents to the dollar versus men. That adds up to a difference of $333 a week, and $17,316 a year. It’s hard for a person to remain passionate about a position when they aren’t being fairly compensated for their work.

An effective way to handle this is for companies to implement regular salary audits in order to determine if there is a discrepancy in pay between male and female employees. This will expose any unintentional gender bias that exists in compensation, allowing these organizations to take steps to resolve the issue.

Eliminate promotion bias

While salary is important, it is also necessary to eliminate any bias that may exist in the promotion process. Studies have shown that women are less likely to ask for more responsibilities at work than men are. This can lead to a situation where the majority of leadership roles are held by males. That, in turn, perpetuates the problem, making it increasingly difficult for qualified women to rise to through the ranks.

The best way to combat promotion bias is to make the process as transparent as possible. Companies should lay out the specific steps that need to be taken in order for a person to transition to a higher-level job. By making the system impartial, with easily recognizable goals, it is possible to not only remove the human error that can lead to skewed decisions, but also provide a clear path for shy and reserved employees to take on more responsibility.

Give credit where it is due

Another important step that needs to be taken if tech companies want to retain female employees is for management to recognize the accomplishments of women, even if they are not in a position where they can readily be promoted. The simple act of giving praise to those who deserve it can be a powerful tool that can help counter a culture that often feels harsh, isolating and cold to women.

The tech industry is growing, but the only way it will be able to maintain that growth is by creating an environment that is open and inviting to women. This can be done by eliminating unintentional bias in compensation and promotions, while also recognizing the contributions of women at work, and praising them for their accomplishments. This will in turn lead to companies that are more dynamic, diverse and able to take on creative challenges.

The people of Switzerland have rejected a proposal to give a universal basic income (UBI) to every citizen, with almost 77 per cent saying ‘no’ vs 23 per cent in favor.

They were voting on the idea in a referendum after an independent group, Bien-CH, gained enough signatures on a petition to trigger a vote, per Swiss law.

The idea of a future need for a UBI to grease the wheels of the capitalist economies has been gaining ground with some economists and technologists, driven by the notion that tech-fueled automation will result in fewer jobs — leading to the obvious question: how will people earn money to pay for the goods and services that will fire future economies if there aren’t enough jobs to go around?

At the end of last month, Y Combinator announced an experiment with basic income in Oakland — saying it would pay basic income to a group of people over a five-year period and study the effects. There are also experiments planned in Europe, in the Netherlands and Finland.

The group behind the Swiss proposal had suggested providing adults a UBI of 2,500 Swiss francs a month — well below the mean income of the wealthy nation — plus 625 for children.

The Swiss government did not support the idea of a UBI and had urged voters to reject it. In the event one in five voters backed the proposal.

The obvious question for any universal basic income is how to fund it, with critics suggesting large tax hikes would be required. In the Swiss example authorities had estimated the costs of funding the proposal at an additional 25 billion francs, according to AFP.

However the Swiss non-profit behind the referendum believes funding could easily be achieved by placing a micro-tax on all electronic transactions.

Given there are some 100,000 billion Swiss francs worth of electronic transactions annually in Switzerland, a tax that takes 0.2 per cent would generate 200 billion; more than enough to fund the basic income proposal — and more than enough to replace all other taxes, according to Marc Chesney, a professor at the University of Zurich, who was interviewed by Bien-CH (in the below video) ahead of the referendum vote.

Because managing a large pool of job applicants can be cumbersome, SmartRecruiters thinks its software has the right tools to keep you organized in your candidate search. The team counts clients like Square, Atlassian and Equinox gyms, who use SmartRecruiters to manage job postings and communicate about prospective employees.

Now SmartRecruiters is arming itself with a $30 million funding round, led by Insight Venture Partners. This is in addition to the $25 million already raised.

The startup is “driving a paradigm shift in recruiting technology,” CEO Jerome Ternynck tells TechCrunch. He calls themselves a “Salesforce for recruiting.” (Salesforce Ventures is one of their investors). 

While there is a slew of competition from other hiring software platforms, including Jobvite and Brassring, Jeff Lieberman, managing director at Insight Venture Partners, believes that “the space is large enough” for multiple players. Since countless companies need help with hiring, he forecasts “billions of dollars of potential annual recurring revenue.”

Lieberman is partial to SmartRecruiters because of their “mobile-first” strategy and feels that their “highly collaborative” platform “increases their ability to attract and retain amazing candidates.”

SmartRecruiters has garnered 700 enterprise customers in the past 24 months. They intend to use the funding to accelerate their growth.

The team deflected when asked about IPO possibilities, but to be raising a significant funding round six years after the startup was founded, investors are likely hoping that SmartRecruiters is on this path.

San Francisco-based SmartRecruiters also counts Mayfield Fund and BDS Capital as existing investors.

Did you know nowadays there are more people who dislike their jobs than like them?

While there was once a time where the vast majority of Americans were happy with their current job, now anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of employees are dissatisfied with their current position.

Combine that statistic with the fact that more than 90 percent of millennials expect to switch jobs every three years and it sounds like a good time to be in the employment industry.

And while there is definitely no shortage of job listing sites, Mentat, a company launching out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2016 batch, does things a little differently.

The company specializes in helping people who know they want a new job, but either haven’t been able to organize themselves enough to take the leap, or are literally too busy to find and apply to one.

To help these people, Mentat will take over and optimize their LinkedIn and resume, then literally write cover letters and have one of their advisors apply to jobs for you, by hand.

The company also pairs you with a dedicated, real-life advisor to talk via phone, chat and email as much as you want during the process. The company has about 50 advisors on staff who have expertise in tons of different industries, so they can give you the best advice for the specific industry you want to work in.

So where does the tech come in? Mentat says they are using machine learning to match job seekers with potential jobs, as well as matching them with one of their advisors with a similar skill set.

The whole package costs $249, and Mentat will literally give you a money-back guarantee that you’ll get at least one interview. They also have a free tier which is similar to a traditional job site, and lets you find and apply to different jobs.

But does it count if you get a job that you don’t even apply for? Mentat’s view is that most actual job applications just require you to regurgitate your resume, and end up being a pretty big waste of time. They handle this grunt work so you can focus on the interview, which is where a person’s actual personality and skill starts to come into play.

Interestingly, Mentat is working to partner with educational institutions to buy their product for students. And in today’s market, where getting a job is really the only thing students care about, it may be a plus for prospective schools to be able to guarantee their graduates will get interviews post-graduation.

Walking around the neighborhood handing out CVs in the hopes of scoring shifts in a local cafe or restaurant has never been an efficient job-search process. But workers in the service industry still do it. London-based startup inploi is hoping to change that — it’s gunning to replace the paper CV with a mobile profile and location-based jobs platform.

The founders say they came up with the idea after trying to find hospitality work themselves during their university holidays — a process they found to be time-consuming and frustrating. “We realised that employers were also spending too much time and money, hiring the people they need.”

inploi, which launched in beta late last month, is actually one of several European startups chasing high-turnover service industry jobs with a new recruitment modus operandi via a smartphone chat app — with the likes of Accel-backed JobToday, Barcelona-based CornerJob and Atomico-backed Jobandtalent all spying similar opportunities here: looking to leverage the speed, familiarity and convenience of mobile messaging to kill off the paper CV.

But inploi, which is backed by £200,000 in pre-seed financing at this point (raised in January from a group of friends, family, angels, a Chicago-based family office and a Johannesburg-based investment fund), reckons its positioning is a little different versus the better-resourced regional competition. It argues rivals are taking existing structures — such as the job board model or the staffing agency model — and optimizing them for mobile, whereas inploi claims it’s aiming for a more radical rethinking of how recruitment is done in this sector.

“‘Agency’ model startups still act as intermediaries, charging significant markups on the labour that they broker. Optimised jobs boards (like JobToday, for instance) still uses the volume of candidates that they can send an employer as a selling point — we think that this misses the point. inploi is working to drive the candidate-to-hire ratio down by reimagining the process entirely, saving everybody time, and money,” co-founder Matthew de la Hey tells TechCrunch.

“On one level we are building a recruitment-driven ‘LinkedIn’ for the service economy, rather than a mobile optimised jobs board. On a more macro level we want to change the way that staffing works at this end of the economy entirely, providing workers with credible ‘working passports’ with which they can get more and better work.”

Job seekers using the inploi app create a profile with their experience and skills (users can also create a short intro video for their profile if they wish), as well as specifying their hourly rate and location, in order to be matched with relevant job opportunities — applying in-app if they wish to do so.

De la Hey concedes the matching element is “fairly binary” at this nascent stage, but the intention is to hone it over time based on data generated by usage of the platform — such as response rates and reviews.

The platform covers both gig economy one-offs and full-time positions. So as well as matching job seekers with permanent roles, the aim is also to be a marketplace for one-off staffing needs, such as for festivals or corporate events, starting at one shift to up to five days’ work. In that instance, inploi handles the entire transaction in the app, with payment powered by Stripe.

A key facet of the inploi platform is ratings, with de la Hey noting that both staff and employers are expected to be rated. (For gig work, ratings are provided at the point of payment after the work has been completed; for full-time roles employers are prompted to rate hired workers “after a period of time” and vice versa.)

“The review system is mutual,” he notes, talking up inploi’s wider “mission” to try to equalize the relationship between employers and workers, which he argues is “too often skewed towards the former.” And, he adds, “The reviews employers receive from workers are private. Workers are rated across five areas — punctuality, presentation, co-operation, communication, and quality of work, in addition to short written feedback. These are public. However, in order to avoid possible ‘downward spiral’ situations we will only make an employee’s reviews public once the employer reviewing them has received five or more 4/5 Star reviews from workers, rendering them a ‘trusted employer’.”

“Employers who consistently receive bad reviews from workers will be removed from the inploi community,” he adds.

inploi also offers a dashboard view for its enterprise users, providing them with what it dubs “key HR data” on things like staff hire costs, applicant volumes, labor turnover rates and market wage positions. “To our knowledge this is unique. In time as the data we have becomes more comprehensive our matching algorithm will become smarter and develop into a key piece of our technology,” adds de la Hey.

inploi launched its mobile recruitment platform on iOS a couple of weeks ago (an Android app is slated as coming soon), focusing initially on London and the U.K., and on the hospitality industry specifically — although de la Hey says he also sees future potential to expand into other sectors with similar characteristics down the line, such as retail, domestic work, security staff, construction and railway workers.

At this point, inploi has 65 employers signed up to offer jobs through the app, ranging from single-site establishments to multi-site chains — including Bill’s, the Corbin & King Group, YouMeSushi, Daylesford and Deliveroo.

While the potential reach of participating employers is around 700 sites across the U.K., less than 50 jobs are listed at present, and inploi has less than 500 job seekers. So it’s certainly very early days for the startup, albeit no one dominant mobile app network has emerged yet for this segment, so there’s plenty to play for.

And while inploi is U.K.-specific right now, with an immediate focus on EMEA, the team’s wider goal is to build a global marketplace — with de la Hey noting possible future expansion opportunities in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In terms of business model, while the platform is free for job seekers to use, inploi charges employers seeking to fill permanent positions on a freemium tiered basis — so it’s free for small employers with limited hiring needs but larger employers with more activity are charged if they wish to interact with candidates applying for jobs they have posted, including using the in-app chat feature. To do this, employers have to connect with applicants, and it charges for the number of connections on a volume-driven sliding scale, says de la Hey.

For gig work, via its QuickShift marketplace, inploi adds a service fee onto the total amount paid by the employer at the point of paying the finished job.

One of the hallmarks of any social network is how it pushes people to share their experiences with others, but increasingly we’ve seen a lot of moves by social platforms to give people the option to remain very private, if they choose.

One of the latest moves on this front comes from LinkedIn, the social network for the working world with some 450 million members and currently getting acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion: today the company is turning on a new feature for its users who may be interested in quietly looking for a new job, while still employed somewhere else.

Open Candidates, as the new feature is called, will let those users essentially create a signal that will be viewable only to recruiters who use LinkedIn’s premium (paid) tier of service (prices begin at $8,000 and vary depending on the number of licenses). In turn, those recruiters who are looking for candidates like that person will get a signal that a particular candidate is looking to change jobs and is open to getting contacted about new career opportunities. It will be initially available in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia and will get rolled out to more markets throughout this year, LinkedIn tells me.

Open Candidates is being turned on as part of a larger revamp of LinkedIn’s recruitment products, which also include new and more dynamic Career Pages — customised pages that companies that are recruiting employees use to advertise themselves —  and a new way for recruiters to connect at the backend with their clients who are hiring to provide more seamless integration. Both of these are getting rolled out globally from today.

All three are being unveiled formally today at the company’s annual Talent Connect event.

Open Candidates and the other two updates are much-needed (and perhaps overdue) features for LinkedIn. Talent Solutions — the company’s recruiting operations — accounts for the lion’s share of the company’s revenues (last quarter bringing in $558 million of its $861 million in sales), but at the same time it’s facing a lot of heat from old behemoths like Indeed and Monster, as well as newer and more nimble approaches from the likes of Glassdoor, all of whom are also vying for the same online job advertising market. LinkedIn’s recruiting business, which today lists some 6 million jobs, needs updating and innovating all the time to stay competitive.

Of the three, Open Candidates is perhaps the most interesting update getting announced today.

In terms of social networks, LinkedIn holds a unique place in the market for how it has approached the idea of watching and being watched.

The company regularly tracks and updates users on who is viewing their profiles and other stats about their presence on the platform, essentially applying some of the mechanics of things like ad tech to its platform to highlight relationships and build connections. You can opt out of being tracked this way, and also from seeing these stats, but even if you don’t want to look or be seen, that information is still being tracked.

Features like this have been a blessing (some people love these things) and a curse (some find it creepy). But to me, Open Candidates is possibly one of the most practical and helpful applications of some of LinkedIn’s technology. The company is embracing one of the main ways that its platform is used today — to look for jobs, or to find people to fill jobs — and it is making it easier for people to do this now in a more discreet way.

And for some it might make LinkedIn a more friendly platform to use for other things. I’ve seen countless people note on their LinkedIn profiles that they do not, under any circumstances, want to get contacted by recruiters on there. The fact that people have had to put this on their profile pages is a sign of how annoying LinkedIn can be for some. If the Open Candidates feature gets used as it should, some of that spammy element could start to subside.

There are some interesting and very useful details for how it works. Dan Shapero, LinkedIn’s Careers product lead, told me that if you turn on Open Candidates, the “looking for new work” signal will only be beamed out to recruiters who are not in any way connected to the place where you currently work. That means that even if you are looking, you won’t jeapordize your current job in the process. You can then share your profile with that recruiter privately, too.

And LinkedIn, like other social networks, is always looking for ways of getting people to share more of their details and keep them up to date. This applies here, too. Once you turn on the feature that will privately let recruiters know you are looking for work, the company will give you an opportunity to revisit and update your own profile.

While less impactful for the wider population on LinkedIn, the Career Pages update helps to lay the groundwork for how LinkedIn wants to continue growing its recruitment business.

The new pages will now add significantly more conversational testimonials and other social features to company’s recruitment sites, making them more about trying to convey a company’s culture rather than simply the jobs that are on offer at the moment.

This is an interesting turn and to me really shows the influence of sites like Glassdoor on the recruiting market today. It may not feel like this to everyone in the world (some will take any work they can get), but a lucky proportion of the population has a choice about where she or he can take a job.

LinkedIn’s updates cater to that idea by helping companies create pages that give candidates a better idea of what the company is actually like, to see if it’s the kind of place where you might like to be. In the words of product manager Eric Owski, it’s “not about selling the company, but how we think.”

Still, it is a decidedly positive spin. No candid reviews from disgruntled employees, the updated Career Pages will bring in posts from existing employees that are getting published on LinkedIn, as well as a selection of profiles of other people from the company, alongside job listings.

As with the new Open Candidates feature, the new Career Pages will be made available to paying companies — with a more pared-down version still available to use for free.

“We’ve come a long long way together, through the hard times and the good. I have to celebrate you baby, I have to praise you like I should using a 360-degree feedback tool sold as as SaaS by founders who went through Y-Combinator in S14 and have offices in New York and Amsterdam,” Fatboy Slim once wrote and nowhere are these words truer than when used to describe Impraise. The company is, as the lyrics suggest, a way to “praise” your co-workers instantly and perform performance reviews without much fuss.

Founded by Bas Kohnke, Steffen Maier, Arnaud Camus, and Filipe Dobreira, the company was built as a solution to maintain engagement in the team’s disparate offices. They’ve raised $4.7 million and have seen about 100,000 feedback interactions from 3,000 clients this month.

“Many companies however still rely on Word documents or Excel sheets for their performance reviews so in that case even a word document would play as a competitor for us,” said Kohnke. “We differentiate by not only providing a feedback-tool but actually building a solution that creates a work environment where transparent recognition and candid peer feedback can happen naturally.”

The team believes the yearly performance review wasn’t sufficient and that real-time feedback is far simpler and more effective – “especially for millennials,” wrote Kohnke. Feedback can be named or anonymous and the app works on most mobile browsers.

Because it is SaaS the pricing is variable depending on the size of your team. To quote Fatboy Slim again, “Check it out now, the funk soul brother, for your advanced employee reporting software-as-a-service needs.”

Donald Trump was elected on a pledge to bring more jobs to more Americans. He pitched his deal-making skills as the key to job growth.

But anyone who has been paying close attention to the economy for the last 20 years knows that those jobs are not going to come from traditional manufacturing. Since 2000, America has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs, and there’s little to nothing Trump can do to bring those jobs back. No amount of tariffs or tough talk on trade is going to make American manufacturing cheaper than foreign manufacturing; like it or not, we are living in a global economy.

Although the majority of the tech industry (aside from Peter Thiel) completely rejected Trump’s candidacy, Trump’s presidency could present it with a golden opportunity. As the future of employment skews largely digital, the tech industry must now step up and show how technology can generate a more expansive economy, creating more, better jobs in the coming years.

Technology innovations have always spurred our economy in the past. From a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

“In the 1950s, average annual GDP growth topped 7 percent, thanks to a booming population and robust automobile sales. From 1996 to 2000, GDP grew at about a 4 percent clip, fueled by personal computers and the Internet; in the 2000s, the best performance came in 2004, when broadband connections started taking hold.”

Recent tech innovations have focused on the consumer experience or making small improvements to existing technologies. The personal enterprise economy is booming thanks to companies like Uber, Airbnb and Thumbtack supporting a vital new period of entrepreneurship. This is critical growth, but we can do even more.

Technology is far more than just cool apps and gadgets. President-elect Trump has proposed spending $550 billion to improve our nation’s infrastructure. Here is a chance for the author of The Art of The Deal to put his skills to work for an FDR-inspired new deal. The tech industry should be front and center in all of these discussions.

We don’t need to just rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges; we need to make them smarter. Sensors and video analytics could help move traffic more efficiently and tell when roads need to be repaired, and solar panels could be embedded in the “pavement” itself. The sensors could also pave the way for driverless cars, which would cut down on traffic accidents and take more emissions-spewing vehicles off the road.

Building new apps to analyze water-use data could go a long way toward helping deal with droughts in the southern part of the U.S. and help engineers build smarter water transportation systems.

Our electrical grid needs a major overhaul, and technology could help make electricity move more efficiently. Although the President-elect hasn’t promoted renewable energy, it’s a growing market, and technology can come up with better ways to move energy to big cities (that need more energy) from places where it may be very sunny (for solar) or windy (for wind power).

We also must improve our telecommunications networks, an often-forgotten but critical part of our national infrastructure. It’s the foundation upon which innovation occurs. Whether we’re talking about building gigabit fiber networks across broad swaths of the country or unleashing vast amounts of spectrum to fuel ongoing mobile growth, we must modernize our communications infrastructure to keep pace with constantly accelerating demand.

By incorporating tech into these plans, the new president could create thousands of new jobs for groups that expand beyond coders and software engineers in cities and towns outside of Silicon Valley and Austin. We can employ construction workers, civil engineers, architects and countless others to help rebuild America.

But in order to do this we need to realign our values with those of all Americans, no matter where they live. That means that politicians have to listen to leaders from the technology world and include them at as many tables as possible. And the tech industry needs to work with elected officials and regulators to assuage their fears about job-killing technologies. Government needs to avoid the urge to over-regulate the tech industry and destroy job-creating companies. But the tech industry also needs to make sure it’s working with government to create common-sense regulations that can help protect consumers and workers.

This challenge creates the opportunity for tech and government to work hand in hand to deliver on the bold promises and potential of technology. This is a new deal we must get done together.

Not a week goes by and it seems like we hear more bad news about Silicon Valley’s darling turned cautionary tale Theranos . The latest bit is a whopping 155 layoffs at the company today.

The one drop blood test company once worth $9 billion took a quite the tumble from grace after an intense series of investigations from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Several Wall Street Journal articles also began to raise questions about the accuracy of the startup’s technology and CMS declared the company was putting patients in “immediate danger.”

Then mid-last year founder Elizabeth Holmes was banned from operating in her own labs.

To save the company Theranos revealed a new type of box in August of 2016 meant to detect diseases like Zika out in the field, pending FDA approval. But the tabletop “miniLab” also met with scrutiny within the medical industry.

Now it seems things have gone from worse to barely breathing. The layoffs announced today cut into 41 percent of Theranos’ workforce and follows a 340 person cut in October of last year.

Theranos calls these layoffs a “re-engineering,” leaving a mere 220 employees to carry on with the miniLab development.

“The restructuring follows a period of significant change at the company that has included the building out of its executive team with substantial additional regulatory, compliance and operational expertise,” Theranos said.

The rise in on-demand services from the likes of Uber, Lyft and Postmates is fuelling a new workforce of freelancers in the service industry who are not tied to single places of employment and can work hours that are more suitable to them. Now a similar kind of flexibility is finding its way into the world of hourly work, too.

Shiftgig — a startup that has built a mobile platform for hourly workers to pick up shifts at local businesses looking for staff to fill gaps in their schedules (Shiftgig= target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_work">shift work+gig economy) — is today announcing that it has raised $20 million to scale up its marketplace. This round, a Series C, includes a mix of new and existing backers — DRW Venture Capital, FJ Labs, GGV Capital, KDWC Ventures, and an affiliate of William Blair — and brings the total raised by Shiftgig to $56 million. The company is not disclosing its valuation but sources tell us it’s around $150 million post-money.

For now, this puts Shiftgig well ahead of two notable competitors in terms of funds raised for growth. Others in the same space include Workpop and Wonolo, both of which have raised under $10 million to date (see here and here).

Shiftgig’s raise comes about a year after Renren, the “Facebook of China”, led Shiftgig’s last round of $22 million. Since then, the company has been seeing “solid growth”, in the words of Eddie Lou, the CEO and co-founder. Today, there are some 1,500 businesses and 15,000 workers using the platform, which has customers across all 50 states but with a concentration in about 12 cities. (The plan will “certainly” be to use some of the funding to scale that out even more, Lou said.)

Today, Shiftgig works with a wide range of business clients mainly in the food service, hotel, retail, logistics, warehouse, and experiential marketing spaces, Lou said. Interestingly, it’s also been approached by Uber to use the platform but currently does not provide drivers among its staff, Lou said.

The idea is that businesses connect on to the Shiftgig platform to fill any number of shifts. The marketplace accommodates both small businesses needing to fill one or a few shifts, as well as large events looking for 200 people. In all cases, businesses pay for every shift worked, and Shiftgig takes a percentage fee, which varies depending on the size of the order and size of the client.

There has been some scrutiny around how thorough background and credit checks are sometimes for workers in the on-demand economy. In the case of Shiftgig, the company goes through its own set of qualification and vetting checks, which also change over time as businesses rate employees (termed “Specialists” in Shiftgig’s marketplace) after each shift worked that ultimately result in reliability scores for workers.

On top of those checks, Shiftgig also handles weekly payments to Specialists as well as their benefits: Lou said that the company is compliant with the Affordable Care Act and insured with the appropriate worker’s compensation policies.

There is a lot of infrastructure in place today, but it wasn’t always this way. Lou tells me that Shiftgig got its start in 2012 as a web-only social network co-founded by Lou along with Jeff Pieta (who is now Chief Growth Officer) and Sean Casey (who is now Chief Data Officer), connecting small businesses in the service industry with people seeking full-time and part-time jobs. “We were free to use,” he said, which helped the platform scale “exponentially.” (Free has a habit of doing that.) At its peak, it connected 1.4 million job seekers with over 30,000 small businesses.

But in late 2013, the company had stopped growing virally, so it decided to turn on revenue. “We spoke to 25 businesses and many wanted qualified and vetted candidates and/or workers for short-term periods,” he said. “By listening to our customer’s needs, we pivoted the business to an on-demand marketplace connecting businesses with people seeking short term gigs. This time, we built our new product leveraging a smartphone instead of a website.”

The new formula has clearly found a lot of traction with both customers as well as investors.

“Shiftgig is the largest and best temporary staffing startup in the world,” said Fabrice Grinda, co-founder of FJ Labs, in an email to us. “It’s clearly going in the direction of history as more work is being ‘gigified’ as employers and employees both seek greater flexibility.”

“The Shiftgig team continues to execute against its plan by winning enterprise clients that utilize its technology to connect with hourly labor,” said Jeff Richards, Managing Partner, GGV Capital, in a statement. “The company is scaling across multiple verticals and proving that one platform can be winner take all.”