Claira

Hiring is slow, expensive, biased and imprecise for employers and workers. Resumes and job descriptions are outdated and cut out half of the labor market. These processes are riddled with subjective measures that inhibit diversity and hamper business efficiency - including degree screens and referrals.  

The Claira competency library was built by experts and allows workers and employers to select statements of what they can do, enter text to create a custom statement and get matches instantly by percentage. 

We envision a human value library where everyone matters and hiring is easy. All people have competencies that can generate economic value. If scaled, we unlock the invisible half of the labor market with no degree and employers hire quickly, precisely and dynamically. 

Even before the pandemic, 44% of Americans said they were underemployed and almost 50% of Americans don't have a college degree. This statistic holds globally as well. The old process of hiring renders these segments of the workforce 'digitally invisible' as they are not on other job sites and often don't have a resume. Veterans, immigrants, long term unemployed and diverse communities make up the majority of the group that the current system doesn't work for. On the other side of the table, it still takes on average, 3 months and $4425 to hire one person and turnover remains high at 25% after one year. Companies want to source quickly and precisely, while getting more diverse candidates in the door. And workers want to contribute what they know and can do, no matter where it was attained. This is not a problem that can be solved by one firm, it requires a market solution, to change behavior by creating efficiencies for the consumers of talent - companies. 

Claira is a machine learning platform solution that is running on AWS and uses translation and matching engines to connect users on both sides. The competency library includes statements in six micro-sectors of the economy where demand has grown as a result of the pandemic (healthcare, test/trace, data/technology, logistics, education, services). Employers and workers create and account, select statements and type in text for the algorithm to translate into a custom statement just for them. This allows the market to build the competency library with us. The process takes about 4 minutes and workers and employers are matched by percentage and put in touch with each other instantly.  

The target populations for our platform are those workers who are unemployed, do not have a degree and historically have not engaged in the digital job process. We launched our MVP Wednesday 11/11/20 and already have 300+ workers from diverse communities all over the US, including veterans, ESL, no degree. We have an advisory committee called Claira Corps made up of our target talent segments and they are giving us product feedback, testing it and recruiting other users 'like them.' A quote from a user on Facebook last week: 'Thank you for building this. It was so simple and fast to use, I got a match right away and I have never been on a job site before.' The founder spent 9 years in workforce development working with these populations and with companies. The idea for Claira grew directly from this work and market demand in the field. Workforce organizations are partnering with us to reach these populations and build the user base.  

Claira does not just relate to the challenge of reimagining pathways to employment, it is the reason we exist. We believe that the future of work will be based on speed, efficiency and inclusion and it is not designed for any of those things right now. The three legs of the stool we address are 1) unlocking and quantifying talent in all parts of the labor market 2) creating efficiencies for employers and 3) designing a faster, granular system that enables us to share work with machines. . 

Full time (1): Katie Hall, Founder and CEO 

Part time (3): Rutwick Bhawsar, CTO, Shivang Arya, Data Scientist, Ian Brynjolfson, Product and Sales (been together 2 years, all going full time in December 2020 w/raise)

Contract (3): Elan Kawesch, Marketing and Digital, Melody Alefteras, Full Stack Developer, MelonTech Software Company (Bulgaria) 

Board Members (3) 

Student teams (3): Brandeis U MBA traction project team (summer), E-LAB MIT/Harvard/Wellesley Growth Team (current), University of Michigan Ross UX Design Team (spring semester)

Many of our employer customers are using Claira as their 'diversity funnel' and the entire approach of using competencies instead of JDs, resumes and cover letters removes bias. First, by leading with what people can actually do, instead of who we are, we are able to reach more diverse populations left out of the traditional screening processes. Second, our competency library ensures customers and workers are all using the same standardized language, which removes bias in the way different genders and races 'describe themselves' in the job search.  i.e. women underselling skills on a resume. Third, by having individuals and employers inventory what they can do, we introduce a blind that prevents 'writing a resume to fit a specific JD.' 

We still hire as if we were in the industrial economy, where there was no internet and a person worked at one job for their entire career. Business moves faster now and people need to do many different things. It's difficult to think outside the mental models of resumes and job descriptions. But there is a better way. There is a lot of activity in this space, but hiring still hasn't changed, so there is room for innovation - especially during this pandemic. Our main competitors are large job sites and AI/skills matching vertical sites. Both groups of software offerings use skill and keyword matching and are essentially just 'digitizing' the old collateral - JDs and resumes. None of them 1) use competencies or have our library 2) use graph matching or translation algorithms 3) match you instantly. We are taking cutting edge natural language processing and applying it to a well established problem and entrenched process.  

Claira is an AI solution with a SaaS business model. It is currently free, but will be paid monthly subscription for employers and always free on the worker side. Our team has custom built the matching and translation algorithms for Claira and we have filed a provisional patent on the IP. Because competencies are so much more detailed than skills, we use a mix of words in the statement, context, verb structure and graph matching to yield a percentage score. The translation algorithm takes free text entry and creates custom statements in our format that can be added to individual and employer profiles and then saved in our library for the next user to select. This ensures that the platform is co-created by users and stays up to date on what the labor market demands. 

AI/ML/NLP is widely used in many industries and software we interact with every day, but hasn't yet been applied to HR. The most common applications of the type of technology Claira uses are sentiment analysis, chat bots, virtual assistants, text classification/summarization/extraction, voice recognition and translation. Using the full suite of AWS ML tools allows us to grow fast and capture data that we can feed back into the labor market in ultimately becoming a data company. 

Activity, output, short term, long term. We know from our research, interviews and work in the field that employers are ready for change and willing to pay and experiment. Worker feedback and usage reinforces their choices being experiential and emotional. Once users see how different this is from the 'old way' we win them over quickly. The activity is the core interaction of the platform, which is a match. Once this happens, the output is people getting jobs, employers saving money, getting more diversity. Short term outcomes will be fewer companies using JDs and resumes and recruiting faster and more precisely. Short term outcomes for workers will be a better understanding of all the things they can do and better matching to work, plus lower un- and under-employment. Longer term outcomes will be educational institutions adjusting curriculum based on competencies, workers understanding their gaps and filling them, companies understanding their gaps and and dynamic workforce data set that guides connected stakeholders in what has until now been an opaque and clunky process. 

Goals next year: 10,000 workers on the platform, 2000 employers. Focused on putting currently unemployed Americans back to work. 70% of the current users are unemployed and do not have a degree. They have already been matched to work and are being interviewed. Release versions 1,2,3 and mobile app as well as enterprise in 2021. 1M in revenue by January 2022.  

Goals five years: Competency library of 20,000 statements, coverage in all 50 states and most US industries. Analytics dashboard supporting workforce boards, colleges, high schools and policy organizations. 

Educating the market on the competency based approach and incentivizing them to move away from the old models. Fundraising in a crowded space, ensuring network effects and managed platform growth. Adding a Spanish language and other language libraries and integrating into algorithms. Fending off large established incumbents. 

Add efficiency anywhere in the current hiring journey, solve small problems and encourage experimentation, offer competitive pricing, tell the powerful digital economy and inclusion story. 

Longitudinal hiring data which begins soon - number of interviews, hires, turnover, cost, diversity on employer side. Worker employment, satisfaction, turnover on job seeker side.

Founder market fit workforce nonprofit for 9 years domain expert. Did this work as a services model before going to MIT to find technical talent and turn it into software. I build competency libraries for companies, governments and know the science and methodology required to create and scale a user friendly solution. 

We are exploring partnerships with personality inventories, skill and training providers, recruiting companies for specific industries and state workforce offices. 

We provide companies a solution that cuts 2/3 of the sourcing time off of hiring employers, which lowers cost and increases fit as well. Our solution can 'plug and play' at any place along the hiring lifecycle to increase efficiency and diversity. 

We are onboarding customers now and have a diversified revenue model that allows us to create maximum impact, but also build an ecosystem and generate revenue. SMBs are the first customers, large enterprises, higher education and governments next. We anticipate three capital raises to grow as fast as possible - pre seed now, seed in 2021 and a series A in 2023. 

40k angel funding, currently raising pre seed round, 350 of 750k committed 

Please see above. In addition to the raise and revenue, we are written into two state grants deploying CARES dollars to put unemployed Americans back to work. We would love more grant opportunities to partner with large groups to drive usership up, capture data and obtain non-dilutive capital. 

When the team goes full time, our burn will be approximately 50k-65k/month in most of 2021. 

We believe this is a great fit and that solve is an incredible platform to showcase our impact. 

We would love to align with Solve in order to access experts, get the word out and be seen as an efficient business solution and cutting edge technology that's also benefitting society in a positive way and deliberately building an equitable future of work. 

We would like to partner with large companies looking for innovative ways to hire that will help move the market. We would also like to partner with organizations that serve the talent populations we want to connect with - formerly incarcerated, unemployment sites, immigrant, ESL, no college degree, veterans, etc.