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 Resumes and job descriptions are outdated and cut out half of the labor market - especially workers from underserved backgrounds. These processes are riddled with subjective measures that inhibit diversity and hamper business efficiency, including degree screens and referrals.

The Claira competency marketplace 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 a single 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 marketplace is a machine learning platform solution that uses translation and matching engines to connect users on both sides. While under the hood it is complex, the front end is easy to use for people of any technical background. Employers and workers create an 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, reflecting the needs and wants of everyone. 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. Generally, this 'middle skilled' segment of the workforce isn't on other job sites, because they don't have a degree or a resume. This makes it hard for employers to find them for middle skilled roles, which still make up the bulk of the jobs in the US economy. More than 80% of our workers come from marginalized groups, including veterans, ESL, women, people of color, and immigrants. 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.  

The Digital Workforce Challenge clearly aims to position workers for the future of work. This is the ethos of our business.

Claira is building a world in which everyone has access to work, regardless of where they come from. It shouldn't matter where someone learned their talents or if they have a degree. All that matters is if they can get the job done. We're leveraging cutting edge scaleable AI to build an equitable digital future of work. 

We launched our competency marketplace in November, and have since brought on thousands of workers in all 50 states from our target group of marginalized workers. 95% of them have indicated that they would like to work remotely. We also have 17 large enterprises interested in using competencies to understand their talent and hire differently. We secured 700K in our first fundraising round April of 2021 to scale and grow the business. 

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. 

We are creating a brand new data set for an inclusive digital economy. Supported by cutting edge machine learning, this competency library starts fresh. Using old data would bake in old biases - our new model levels the playing field for all.

Claira is an AI solution with a SaaS business model. It is a 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. 

The largest risk in building an AI powered competency matching marketplace is introducing bias into the process. We are mitigating this risk by building a bias-free first mentality into every aspect of our operations. Starting at the top of our user journey, we are reaching workers where other job sites have traditionally not. Further on in the journey, we never screen for anything but a person's competencies. Each individual is judged only on what they can do. Our translation algorithm is trained to remove bias and allows users to input and select custom competencies so they are not pushed into predetermined boxes.

Current: 4,000

One year: 20,000

Five years: 100,000,000

Imagine a world in which every single human's talents were dynamically mapped in a centralized competency library. This tool, coupled with a matching engine, would illuminate inefficiencies in labor markets. Every work opportunity could be filled, and every individual would be engaged in meaningful work that was perfect for their talents. This all happens while also illuminating bias from hiring by only matching people to work based on their abilities. We are building that to make an impact on millions of lives.

Our matching algorithm is already built and proven successful. Over time, more job seekers and employers will contribute to the data set, strengthening the algorithm with ML. In turn, we measure success through the real world connections that the matching engine produces. With our stated 5 year goal of 100,000,000 users on the platform across the globe, mainly in middle-skill jobs, we will be able to bring economic prosperity through gainful employment to the masses. This scale will come through the business dynamics of success, the butterfly effect will attract users to an ever compounding pool of talent and work.

Measurement of our goals is fairly simple: everything on the platform is built with the goal of making work connections in an unbiased way. In turn, we focus on the number of diverse workers and employers on the platform, as well as the amount they communicate and connect. These metrics provide us insights to push the platform towards the main goal of placing people in well-matched work opportunities without bias. 

10 total on the team: CEO, CTO, VP Product, VP Growth, and 2 developers are full time.

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. Katie builds competency libraries for companies, governments and know the science and methodology required to create and scale a user friendly solution.

The rest of the team brings broad experience, including decades in growth marketing, AI, project management, and software development.

Our leadership team is women led, has 4 countries of citizenship, over half a dozen languages spoken, and a broad range of ethnic backgrounds. We come from the whole spectrum of socioeconomic backgrounds and have all worked jobs that match our target audience. We put the team together with competency science, completely blind to any forms of bias.

We believe Solve and the Digital Workforce Challenge is a great fit for our goals and that solve is an incredible platform to showcase our impact. The Digital Inclusion Challenge aligns perfectly with our own organization goals. The challenge overview states the goal of finding solutions that "leverage technology and strengthen digital capacity-building to meet the needs of the current and future digital workforce." This is the very core of our mission as well. Removing bias from hiring will allow everyone, regardless of where they come from or who they know, to gain employment that is best for them.

Claira currently has users in all 50 states.

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.