Tech Startup Helps Non-Techies Find Jobs at Tech Startups

Why would tech startups want non-techies? Because as many as two thirds of the jobs at such enterprises are non-technical. JL

Klint Finley reports in Wired:

A study of tech companies in New York found nearly two-thirds of the jobs are non-technical roles like customer service. Even with stubbornly high unemployment rates for recent college graduates, startups complain that these roles remain difficult to fill because of filtering résumés.
Job hunting is miserable. Just ask Connie Wong. Even with a degree from the prestigious Wharton School of Management, finding her first job proved to be a discouraging endeavor.
“It’s like applying to a black hole,” she says. “You send countless résumés, spending hours crafting the perfect cover letter thinking each sentence is critical for getting an interview. And then you don’t even hear back that your letter was read.”
Her persistence paid off, but years later, as a product director at the online dating site MeetMoi, the tables turned. She had to hire a community manager and was flooded with thousands of résumés. She just didn’t have time to sift through them all to find qualified candidates. Hiring, it turns out, was just as painful as hunting.
Wong’s friend Susan Zheng had similar experiences, both as a job seeker and a hiring manager at fitness company Tough Mudder. So they decided to do something about it. They founded Planted, formerly known as Lynxsy, a company that matches recent graduates with non-technical jobs at startups.

More Than Coding

Everyone’s heard about the amazing opportunities that await programmers at tech startups. But a study of tech companies in New York City found nearly two-thirds of the jobs are non-technical roles like customer service. Still, even with stubbornly high unemployment rates for recent college graduates, startups complain that these roles remain difficult to fill because of the pain of filtering résumés.
Zheng says more than 400 companies across the US, including Constant Contact, Hearst Media and SeatGeek are using Planted to find talent, and over 12,000 job seekers have signed up to use the service.
Planted attempts to solve the hiring problem through automatic filtering and manual screening of job seekers. When you sign up for Planted, you upload your résumé and answer a few questions about your experience and the
type of job you want. From there, the company will scan your résumé to suss out your experience, education, and skills. “Our algorithms are looking at thousands of signals to pair candidates with companies,” Zheng says. “We look at where they went to school, what their background is, what they’re looking for. On the company side we look at what stage they’re at, what industry they’re in.”
And of course the company tweaks those algorithms as it places candidates and learns which factors are the most important.

The Personal Touch

You’ll also be assigned a representative at Planted who will manually review your resume and help guide you through the job seeking process.
“They’re really communicative and supportive,” says Markie Mullins, who landed a customer operations role at a New York City startup through Planted. “They talk to you about what to expect, make sure it’s a good fit.”
While the personal involvement resonates with job seekers, what really sets it apart from traditional staffing agencies is the automation that the company has built. “We used a staffing agency at Tough Mudder,” says Zheng. “It’s a very outdated process, everything is manual, and there are very high fees associated. So we want to bring that recruiting model to the 21st century.”
Karthik Sridharan, CEO and co-founder of a startup called Kinnek, says his company hired several customer success managers through Planted over the past year and has been impressed with the quality of job candidates the company has sent his way. “When you compare them to Craigslist or TaskRabbit, the filtering and screening they do, it just doesn’t compare,” he says. “We would sometimes let them know we were looking for someone at the beginning of the day, and by the evening we’d have two or three really good quality interviews.”