Platform to cut pain of recruiting
THREE entrepreneurs have launched a platform they say will take the pain out of the hiring process for small businesses on the Gold Coast.
Ex-Bond University student Navin Kirubairajah, Anthony Goodwin and David Uhlmann are the co-founders of Whozwho, a start-up that seeks to make behavioural testing for new employees accessible to small business owners.
They founded the business, with the backing of high-net worth individuals, after working for a similar start-up called Irecruit, which folded without releasing a product to the market.
“We believed the idea was too good to give up, so we went to our investors, got their backing, and went into rapid development,” Mr Kirubairajah said.
It took three months to develop a minimum viable product for Whozwho, after which they entered beta testing with paying customers.
They now have a commercial product, essentially a webbased platform, which combines behavioural science with a configurable short- listinging tool and then ranks candidates based on employers’ preferences.
“We allow the employer to create their own hiring process and all our tool does is order, rank and shortlist people, based on those factors. It saves 80 per cent of your time in that short-listing phase,” Mr Goodwin said.
Every job on the platform is fully integrated with American employment-related search engine Indeed.
“The applicant never leaves Indeed; we’re fully integrated to them. They do our personality test on our platform,” Mr Kirubairajah said.
The beta testing phase was used to iron out kinks or bugs in the system.
“One of the big things we did was testing our pricing models,” he said.
“During this time we found employers wanted a scalable solution with a low-maintenance fee and be able to scale with their recruitment needs.”
Employers pay $50 to register on the system with one open job listing, then $49.95 for every additional listing.
The customer pays the same regardless of whether there are 10 or 1000 applications for a position.
Mr Kirubairajah said small businesses neither have the time nor the money to engage in complex psychometric or behavioural testing of job candidates.
He said they had built the business into a position where it was scalable, and ready to grow quickly.
“The beauty of software as a service (SaaS) is our ongoing operating costs are no higher. And our investment group comes from a very well-known background in SaaS,” he said.
“We have investors who have been part of US cloudcomputing company Salesforce. We have the experience within our investor group to take this product from a startup to being a growing business.”
Mr Kirubairajah said the goal was to have 130 businesses as regular users of Whozwho.
“What we want to do in the next six to 12 months is rapidly scale the business. We want to become cash neutral and then prepare for Series A (venture capital financing) round and prove our model.”
He said they had launched the product into the Australian, UK, US and NZ markets, and planned on branching out into other countries later.