PAIRIN

Making education relevant and hiring equitable for people with barriers to employment by accelerating development of soft-skills, lowering employer risks.

The 19% gap of available workers to jobs that require some training, but not a degree, costs our economy billions of dollars annually. Enabling employers to broaden their view of talent, which provides opportunities to the 42.3 million underemployed U.S. citizens, we must:

1-Introduce meaningful skilled careers to underrepresented demographic populations (e.g. veterans, military spouses, felons, ethnic minorities, people in poverty or with disabilities, dropouts, and teen moms)
2-Provide the organizations that serve these populations with relevant data and tools to better prepare their clients or students for work, and connect them to employers
3-De-risk these 'at-risk' hires by proving to employers that they will behave like their top employees, and helping hiring managers interview for the competencies that matter most

PAIRIN provides the data and resources to revolutionize the future of work readiness and applicant selection. PAIRIN PathwaysTM matches people to careers based on their preferences, soft skills proficiency (e.g. grit, teamwork, leadership, etc.), and past experience, including military experience or even work as a stay at home parent. PAIRIN PersonalTM identifies and bridges skills gaps with personalized curriculum for individuals. PAIRIN ProTM delivers deep insights and coaching tools to teachers, case workers and coaches. PAIRIN LiteTM removes unconscious bias from the hiring process and provides individualized behavioral-based interview guides to help employers recruit and vet candidates with a range of backgrounds.

Educational institutions, workforce development programs and companies can buy each product individually, but collectively, they create the first competency-based talent ecosystem for opportunities.

Our disruptive advantages begin with our business model. We don't charge per assessment and robust APIs and partner licensing allows for leveraging large networks of other software companies. We provide the only career exploration tool that calculates past experience and soft skills proficiency into non-linear career paths that reflect the real world, and is accurate enough for predictive hiring. We allow organizations to consolidate up to eight budgets (resume creation, assessments, data, career exploration, curriculum, etc.,) with an integrated tool that costs less. Our 300 online soft skills lessons, personalized for each individual's gaps is the most comprehensive available.

PAIRIN's solution was built upon 60 years of research, 18 years of job performance measurement and was co-designed with partners from public education, industry, and government. PAIRIN's innovation lies in our unique ability to combine soft-skills proficiency from a high-fidelity measurement with data from sources to create predictive algorithms, but present that information in a friendly, usable way. It's trademarked as Friendly ScienceTM. We have a patent in process for machine learning algorithms that allow our system to grow in intelligence and accuracy as more data is gathered. We use this science to deliver personalized curriculum and targeted coaching.

Top three goals over the next year:
-Triple revenue (on track)
-Reach $4.25MM ARR before our next round of funding
-Sign three strategic licensing partnerships (two completed already)

Our vision is to be the world's premier competency-based employment and education marketplace for underserved populations. By serving both opportunity seekers and opportunity providers, we create a virtuous cycle of performance data that continually improves our matching algorithms and the development tools we provide to the organizations preparing people for success.
If we are successful:
-Individuals will connect to educational programs and employers based solely on their ability to perform,
-Businesses will hire based solely on best fit
-Educational institutions will select students based solely on best fit
-Leads and opportunities will be pushed to all participants

Half of our customers include high school internship, apprenticeship, and work training programs (e.g. CareerWise CO, NYC DOE College for All Program) focused on disadvantaged youth, adult workforce programs (e.g. Upstream Impact, WorkLife Partnership, AWS, Hope House), and large networks reskilling adults (e.g. Skillful.com, CO Dept. of Corrections). The other half are employers, with many hiring from these pools of talent. As we grow, connecting these customers together creates an Opportunity Ecosystem.

PAIRIN provides the coaching tools, curriculum and insights to prepare our underemployed workforce for success.

40% of our customers hired top performers in the last year that were technically 'not qualified' by standard HR criteria. This is proof that we are transforming hiring and opening up opportunity to those populations that are often overlooked.
- Worklife Partnership: Initial cohort of 24 participants received multiple wage increases within the first 120 days. .
- Swisslog: Eliminated education and experience requirements, lowered turnover 67%, increased diversity 2X, saved $3.5MM over three years due to firing zero people for behavioral issues (previous average was 5% per year). Many of these jobs provide >$100K in salary.

Our CEO, Michael Simpson, and Ron Young, Ph.D., founded PAIRIN. Allison Phillips, CFO/COO, is an expert in organizational development and business operations.

Michael founded PAIRIN because little has changed in mentorship, career exploration and job matching since he dropped out of college to work, and to help others with non-traditional backgrounds succeed in meaningful careers through skills development and career awareness.

Our advisory board includes numerous social impact VCs, Ed Bailey, who created competency based hiring at Google, and founders of five Inc.'s 500 fastest growing companies.

Our products are all shipping. This year they will be unified into a single, modular codebase that enables 100% customization and simpler white labeling for license partners. This is when we will implement machine learning to leverage the data collected from top performing employees in real companies to automatically modify our default career and job matching algorithms. The more data we gather, the better our matching becomes. Since PAIRIN co-founder Dr. Ron Young began modeling top performers in 2000, we've collected 1000s of job profiles. In addition, we partnered with the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the Univ. of Chicago to map soft skills proficiency to all O*NET/DOL job codes to enable dynamic performance profiles created automatically with just a job description.

This enabled strategic partnerships that rapidly increase our reach through a leveraged model of resellers and license partners. For example, Hobsons/Starfish will integrate PAIRIN into >100 colleges and universities by 2020, and Skillful.com signed a partnership to offer our coaching and hiring solutions to companies in their 20 state partnership.

If we get support from MIT we would look into hiring:
-A full time data scientist with expertise in machine learning to increase the effectiveness of our algorithms
-Our current contract trainer who is a certified teacher and counselor already familiar with our methodology and products.

In addition, we would increase our PR firm contract to an $8K per month retainer to develop and publish case studies, write articles, garner public speaking opportunities for key leadership, and generate business press coverage to establish PAIRIN as a thought leader in workforce development and hiring.

Market risk:
-Bad actors in science-based hiring that hurt the reputation of quality providers
-A backlash to privacy issues making it more difficult to encourage free use of our career exploration tool that limits our machine learning capability
-Rapid acquisition in the pre-employment selection space from job boards, recruiting firms, and HRMS systems before we establish a large enough footprint for our Opportunity Network
The only way to mitigate these challenges is to establish PAIRIN as a thought leader through publishing, PR and partnerships.