Skillful.ly Hired

The employment economy is badly broken, and will overlook billions of dollars worth of qualified human potential without a more equitable alternative. Since the early 2000s when resume-driven legacy employment platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed and others launched and quickly became ubiquitous, hiring managers began to base their recruitment decisions almost exclusively around a small set of readily available, yet problematically exclusionary, data fields. As student demographics shifted, however - with less students enrolling in private target schools and many times more engaging with more accessible community, online, or other "non-target" universities - these legacy systems are woefully positioned to help hiring managers judge an applicant's true professional potential beyond these dusty points of pedigree. Skillful.ly is the alternative. Our technology de-emphasizes pedigree to focus on true professional potential, as judged across three dimensions: cognitive, behavioral and demonstrated job skills. The result is the equitable employment alternative for the future.

Millions of jobs each year are offered to candidates based on applicant pedigree rather than their demonstrated potential. Incumbent professional networks have inadvertently exacerbated this problem by equipping hiring managers with the tools to compare the pedigree of countless job-seekers at the click of a mouse, the ease of which has further supported most enterprise employers tacitly accepting some form of "target school recruitment" as their central employment practice. This results in two great inefficiencies. First, most employers tend to hire from the same target schools, prioritizing a brand name university over an applicant's demonstrated skills or unique match to the job. This has resulted in a steadily increasing cost to hire (currently $4,500 per graduate and growing) and cost to train (usually far more, particularly in highly-skilled professions). Finally, since pedigree is a poor proxy for job readiness, these hires are also less likely to stay through their expected term. Secondly, the majority of job offers go to that small pool of target school graduates, largely ignoring the potential of the far larger pool of "non-target" candidates. Our solution proposes a path to resolving these inefficiencies by equipping employers to see past pedigree and hire on more representative metrics.

Skillful.ly is an employment network that de-emphasizes an applicant's pedigree in favor of more representative employment metrics. We leverage cognitive neuroscience and best practices from online education to create an intrinsic map of each Learner's (our job-seeking users) cognitive and behavioral strengths, then utilize simulated workplace challenges to help them strengthen and showcase those job skills that matter most. The workplace challenges are sourced directly from our employment partners, large enterprise companies such as Deloitte, Barclays, Lazard, Slack, Salesforce and others. The result is that Employers (our customers) can access far more nuanced information about a potential applicant's unique match to the demands of a job, and Learners are confident that they are learning the job skills that will leave them best positioned to succeed in today's job market. We suggest Learners to our Employer customers based on their fit to specific roles while masking any other information that could be a potential source of bias. Employers see the metrics that matter most, while being blind to an applicant's race, age, gender, disability status or academic background. This serves to dramatically expand an employer's addressable candidate pool beyond the over-picked target schools status quo.

We exist to support those Learners who might otherwise go unrecognized in the hiring process. Employment equity is our publicly stated goal, and we accomplish this by creating a more level playing field for candidates from non-traditional academic pathways to be meaningfully evaluated alongside traditional target school graduates. Graduates from the community college system, online universities, and other more accessible educational institutions are disproportionally people of color, people with disabilities, or military veterans for whom the more traditional (and expensive) academic pathways weren't available or didn't fit their needs. By shifting employer focus from privilege-laden markers of pedigree to more universally accessible demonstrations of job skill mastery, we expand the addressable candidate pool for employers and increase the range of accessible employment opportunities for candidates from diverse communities. To better understand the needs of those communities we work to serve, we have partnered directly with leading non-profit advocacy organizations (like Black Girls Code, America Needs You, 100 Women in Finance, and more) to ensure our platform is designed for the specific use case of supporting their members. We are thrilled to welcome our first Learners from those advocacy organizations when we launch at the end of this year.

Skillful.ly aims to accelerate the pathway to employment for underrepresented communities. By breaking down barriers in recruitment practices, we are able to suggest candidates to employers in an equitably representative way for all demographic groups. Skillful.ly also aligns by offering re-skilling and up-skilling opportunities that are specific to employer verticals that job-seekers want to target in competitive recruiting processes. By equipping students to effectively target their efforts towards learning the skills that will matter most for their professional success, and directing employers to prioritize the evaluation of those skills, we can match hiring needs to more accessible learning opportunities. 

Yes! We plan to launch our platform to Learners in California, Texas, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, among other states, this December. They will then be able to interact with employers based in California, Texas, New York, New Jersey and Washington as early as January 2021. We have partnerships with several non-profit organizations based in the United States and are working with them to provide our employment platform to their members as a resource in their job-search process. We plan to welcome the first 1,000 Learners onto our platform when we launch in December and will quickly scale to 100,000 learners by the end of 2021.

We are a team of 4 full time co-founders, 5 part time advisors, and 3 student interns from the Haas School of Business at the University of California. Additionally, we employ 3 contractors and a full team of engineers based in Bangalore, India. 

Skillful.ly is the Public Benefit Corporation spin-out of the non-profit organization Portfolios with Purpose. As such, Skillful.ly is chartered with prioritizing our social mission (building the equitable employment alternative for the future) over any other financial motive. We are deeply - as well as legally - committed to introducing a viable enterprise-ready alternative to status quo employment economy incumbents that perpetuate the influence of discriminatory factors such as pedigree, privilege and implicit biases in recruitment practices. We have committed to supporting DEI both in our own company and team as well as with those employer partners we choose to work with. We are thrilled to work together with NGOs such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum in this mission to support global efforts to promote equitable access to economic opportunity with some of the world's largest employers.

Our solution brings scientifically validated neuro-cognitive assessments out of the laboratory and into a more universally accessible digital environment, democratizing the insights these assessments can generate. When administered in a lab environment these tests can take hours to complete and cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. This has placed the intrinsic confidence and self-knowledge these assessments can create out of reach for all but the most privileged candidates. By working with our Heads of Science (PhDs in cognitive neuroscience and UC Berkeley faculty members) we successfully created a version of these assessments that is fun and engaging to take, and takes no longer than the time it would take to populate a LinkedIn profile from scratch. Our business model then focuses on delivering these advantages to the communities of Learners who would benefit from them the most, operationalizing those insights to maximize their opportunity to access employment opportunities with some of the best employers in the world. Furthermore, once Learners are on our network, the unique data that makes up their profiles can be leveraged to connect them with other network members, facilitating novel interactions between other peer Learners, potential mentors, and future colleagues.

We leverage cognitive neuroscience to intrinsically map the unique psychometric attributes of our Learners, then leverage an artificial intelligence powered online education model to teach them the job skills relevant to their chosen career path. For our employers, once they are onboarded, we gather information from both their on-platform behavior as well as from the behavior of their current employee base to match our interview suggestions to their observed and stated hiring preferences.

Skillful.ly focuses on changing employer behavior at the top of their recruitment funnel. By de-anchoring employers from applicant metrics that only serve to reinforce the status quo character of their applicant pool, we broaden the range of candidates an employer meaningfully engages and assesses for available opportunities. De-emphasizing pedigree in favor of more universally accessible points of qualification like demonstrated job skill mastery presents the opportunity to structurally change the representation of historically marginalized communities in the workforce of high-value career tracks. 

By positioning our solution as a business model innovation for our Employer customers (paying to find more qualified yet less expensive candidates) they are economically incentivized to help us accomplish our top level goal of expanding economic opportunity and creating a more equitable employment system. We view our trained Learners as our output and the successful introduction to an employer (an introduction that leads to a job offer) as the primary outcome we plan to track in order to measure our success. 

We plan to establish ourselves as a viable alternative to widely used employment platforms such as LinkedIn, Indeed, Handshake, WayUp and others by the end of 2021. We have successfully engaged top employers in the finance, consulting and technology industry as our early Employer customers and pilot partners, which we plan to build from to expand into more employer relationships both within and outside those sectors. We are also testing our skills-training solution as a complement to existing educational providers such as Strategic Education Inc. (owner of the Strayer and Capella University online universities) and the CUNY (City University of New York) system of junior and senior colleges. These partnerships alone represent upwards of 100,000 new Learner beneficiaries each year. If successful we plan to play a major role in both the education and employment sectors by providing a more accessible pathway for students from historically disenfranchised and underrepresented communities to access the full range of available employment opportunities. 

Skillful.ly is a skills-based employment network where candidates are suggested to employers based on their demonstrated skill sets rather than academic or professional pedigree. As such, de-anchoring employer customers from prioritizing pedigree in the recruitment process (or at least at the top of the recruitment funnel, where we operate) has been a fun but necessary challenge. We are suggesting a novel “skills-over-pedigree” attitude to hiring, supported by scientific research and anecdotal evidence, but holdovers from the conventional pedigree-focused approach still exist and can be a headache in the sales process. Secondly, we are beginning to expand our customer focus from our early pilot partners (~5 companies) to the broader market, so positioning ourselves appropriately through our marketing collateral and public-facing communications is extremely important. Getting this in place as quickly as possible so that customers can be effectively engaged and onboarded would resolve another minor headache. Finally, we have run a VERY tight operation and stretched our early funding as far as humanly possible. Leveraging the success of our previous pilots and upcoming commercial launch to secure our first real round of financing would resolve another ever-present headache.

We have been able to most successfully surmount these barriers by recruiting a broad coalition of supporters and stakeholders within the industry-leading companies we have worked with to date. Almost universally we work hand-in-hand with DEI executives and HR managers tasked with improving the employment and retention statistics of their employer. These internal champions have consistently voiced frustration at the stubbornness with which old recruitment practices are maintained in the face of overwhelming scientific and anecdotal evidence that prove the human capital inefficiencies they create. Additionally, we have been able to align ourselves with external champions of diversity like diversity advocates within the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. These global authorities hold tremendous influence with the executives at the companies we target as customers, and their support for our work has been instrumental in speaking with a singular voice when suggesting alternatives to the broken status quo. Finally, we need to recruit investor funding from a mission-aligned investor willing to support a public benefit corporation like Skillful.ly. We are picky about investors and have turned down money in the past from specific investors because we felt it might restrict our ability to pursue our social mission in the future. We are confident that with the right partner at our back, our approach to employment could quickly scale to make a tangible difference in the character of employment practices around the world. 

As a small startup our data collection ability is extremely limited. We are excited to track our Learners from initial onboarding, through their initial job search, then on through the rest of their career. Under-representation in early career job positions is only one small piece of the DEI challenges facing the global workforce, and we are excited to apply our novel data to the challenge of increasing retention and inclusion beyond someone's first job. We would love to know more about the role that behavioral fit plays in job retention, as well as the potential impact that a professional network based on intrinsic attributes like cognitive and behavioral strengths could play in supporting an employee's success as they move through the stages of their career. Finally, we'd love to prove the efficacy of our skills-training methodology for late-career "upskillers". 

Brett (CEO) and Christina (COO) worked together previously as leaders of the non-profit organization Portfolios with Purpose (PwP), an organization focused on increasing the investment literacy of it's student membership to help prepare them for their future financial health and give them the basic training necessary to seek employment in the finance industry. PwP supports thousands of student learners each year, focusing disproportionately on students coming from underrepresented communities. Brett and Christina have been working towards greater equity in the financial workforce for years and have direct working relationships with the hiring directors for every major employer in the industry. 

Kelly (Head of Growth) was previously the founder of a company named FIT'D (Foot In The Door) that focused on equipping students from non-traditional backgrounds with the skills necessary to succeed in interviews and early positions in the technology industry. Kelly previously founded another company of her own in Africa, before which she worked as a management consultant at Deloitte for seven years. Her experience has been invaluable to Skillful.ly's mission of supporting underrepresented Learners. 

Skillful.ly currently partners with organizations for Learner (job-seeker) pipelines and with employers who are looking to hire candidates through Skillful.ly and supply meaningful content to job skill training and assessments. Our Learner partners to date include: Portfolios with Purpose, 100 Women in Finance, Net Impact, Girls who Invest, Black Girls Code and America Needs You. We have established MOUs with our partner organization to onboard Learners and obtain mentors who can work with our Learners on progressing through weekly skill challenges. We team together to inform their members and alumni about Skillful.ly and create a registration pipeline for using the platform in our commercial launch taking place in December 2020. Our employer partners to date include: Deloitte, Barclays Investment Bank, Salesforce, Citi, and Slack. Employer partnerships are expected to emulate our current pilot partnership with Deloitte, which includes participation in the commercial launch with active job opportunities as well as collaboration on the platform’s skill assessment content.

As a two-sided employment network, we create benefit for our customers whenever we facilitate an interaction between our Learners (job-seekers) and Employers. We are paid by Employers for introducing them to qualified candidates and giving them access to our unique Learner data after the candidate is hired.

For our Learners, we offer complimentary skills training that is explicitly sponsored by our employment partners. Learners team together to complete simulated workplace challenges sourced from real-life employers to be as representative as possible of current in-demand skill sets as possible. For example, a Learner might team up with 2 other peer Learners to complete a simulated consulting project with both the question prompt and the accompanying resources sourced from the Deloitte technology consulting group. Once mastered, these skills help Learners work towards the ultimate platform benefit: the expanded economic opportunity that comes from landing a job with one of our employer partners. 

For employers, our technology helps them make smarter decisions on which candidates to engage with for further interviews. Our technology platform equips hiring managers with highly nuanced insights into a candidate's intrinsic potential and their match to a particular role, ultimately decreasing the length of the hiring cycle and drastically lowering the cost to hire. Ultimately our employers become more effective in choosing who to spend their time and resources with when recruiting. We introduce them to candidates they likely wouldn't have had the chance to meet otherwise and maximize their efficiency in engaging with and hiring those candidates. 

We will begin earning Revenue in early January 2021 when our first crop of Learners is introduced to our participating pilot partners. We charge ~$500-$750 per qualified introduction, and are targeting $500,000 in ARR by the end of 2021. Once employers begin paying per lead for introductions to qualified candidates, we work to graduate them to a tiered subscription model of pricing that offers a greater number of included candidate introductions, as well as ongoing access to our proprietary data to help optimize the productivity of their human capital pool. 

We will also seek to raise our first round of external investment capital in February or March of 2021 to support the expansion of our technology platform and our core team. 

We raised a small family and friends round of financing in November of 2020, and intend to raise another round of seed capital after the completion of our upcoming commercial pilot in January. We are still pre-revenue but see a path to earning revenue from our services as early as January 2021. 

We will seek to raise $2.5 million in venture capital seed financing in early 2021. We are happy to provide a more robust investor pitch deck at your request to elaborate on the details of the fundraise and the uses of the investment capital. 

At our current level of growth we foresee expenses of approximately $1.25 million in 2021. This expense is primarily attributable to an expansion of our core team but is also driven significantly by our plans for further technology development.