PhiLance

Nearly 10 million Americans, including 3 million youth, want to work but face barriers to employment such as prior incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, mental illness, poverty and lack of education. Conversely, there are 7.5 million job openings that are unfilled because employers cannot find qualified workers. The good news is that there are hundreds of nonprofits and for-profit enterprises providing workforce development training and support to individuals facing barriers to employment. We want to address both sides of the problem by matching people facing barriers to employment, who have been trained and qualified by workforce development agencies, to jobs posted by businesses. We will achieve this mission through an AI-enabled jobs platform that empowers people facing barriers to employment and the agencies supporting them. If successful, our platform could provide jobs to over 2 million Americans and millions more globally.

The specific problem that we are trying to solve is related to the challenge of driving equitable and inclusive economic growth. Nearly 10 million Americans, including 3 million youth, want to work but face barriers to employment such as prior incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, mental illness, poverty and lack of education. There are hundreds of nonprofit and for-profit agencies that provide workforce development training to such individuals in the form of soft and hard skills that are required by potential employers. However, in order to place their trainees in jobs, these agencies rely on traditional job portals that do not highlight the requirements of persons facing barriers to employment, such as quick filtering of jobs that are appropriate for such individuals, fast and easy messaging between agencies and employers for follow-on support, video resumes, and partnerships with employers particularly interested in increasing diversity and inclusion in their workforce. Further, traditional job portals focus on individual job seekers and are not very usable by training agencies supporting those individuals. We want to address these problems so that individuals facing barriers to employment and having the support of workforce development agencies can more easily find living-wage paying jobs.

The population that we want to help with our solution includes individuals who want to work but face barriers to employment due to reasons such as criminal justice system involvement, homelessness, substance abuse, mental illness, poverty and lack of education. There are at least 7 million such individuals in the United States alone. The solution we are proposing will also help disconnected youth, of which there are at least 3 million in the US alone, who are neither enrolled in school nor working. In order to help these people find employment, we will work with nonprofit and for-profit agencies that provide workforce development training to such individuals in the form of soft and hard skills, to prepare them for jobs particularly in the areas of hospitality, food services, retail, and data entry. Our solution will empower such agencies to better highlight the skills of their trainees compared to existing job portals by using video, references, certifications and such. Our solution will also use AI technology to better match job seekers with open positions posted by businesses on our platform.

Our solution is an open-source, AI-enabled software platform that matches individuals facing barriers to employment to corporate jobs in collaboration with agencies that provide workforce development training to such individuals. We will initially release this software as a responsive web application running on the Cloud and subsequently release a mobile app version of it. Some features of this software platform that would facilitate job placement for individuals facing barriers to employment include:

• Ability for job candidates to highlight their skills and work experience using videos and photos
• Ability for job candidates to maintain a dynamic employment profile of themselves including recommendations and comments from previous employers, training agencies and colleagues, as opposed to a static resume
• Ability for workforce development agencies to manage the job applications of their trainees and support them through the process
• AI-enabled matching of candidates to open positions to optimize fit between candidate and job description
• Filtering criteria to quickly weed out jobs that are not appropriate for individuals with certain barriers, such as a previous violation, for instance. Instant messaging between job candidates, workforce training agencies and employers to speed up communication

Innovative features of our solution that differentiate us from other employment platforms like Indeed, Snagajob, Craig’s List, Ziprecruiter, etc include the following: (1) We are focused on serving individuals who face barriers to employment as well as disconnected youth. None of the other platforms are specialized for this population. Consequently, employers who post jobs on our platform would be aware of this and the jobs they post would be appropriate for such a population. (2) Candidates applying for jobs on our platform would be backed by service providers such as nonprofits, government agencies and social enterprises that provide workforce development and other wraparound services to these individuals. So, employers hiring through our platform would have the advantage of knowing that job applicants have gone through some sort of workforce development and training suited to their background and job aspirations. Other platforms do not involve service providers and go directly to jobseekers. (3) We will become the only open-source jobs marketplace as of today. (4) We are a Benefit Corporation with a social mission and our values will differentiate our company culture from most for-profit companies in this sector. We also plan to donate 5% of our profits to charities supporting disconnected youth and people facing employment barriers get jobs.

Our solution is a SaaS application with a mobile app interface to come. The application will have a responsive UI and will interact with a backend application and database running on the Cloud via REST APIs. Our solution will also utilize AI/ML technology to match job seekers with job postings based on closeness of fit between job requirements and the candidate’s skills, experience and education. Our solution will further leverage social networks to allow real-time messaging between job seekers, employers and workforce training agencies supporting the job applicants. We are building our application as open-source software so anyone can extend the application and add new features to it.

Our solution addresses the challenges faced both by job seekers as well as employers, and that is why we think it has a good chance of succeeding. For job seekers with barriers to employment, our solution provides better ways of highlighting their skills and capabilities. For employers, our solution provides a pool of candidates whose qualifications and skills are backed by workforce development agencies. And for both sides, our solution provides intelligent matching services, thus reducing the workload of sorting through job postings and job applicants. We will measure the success of our application by measuring the number of individuals who gain employment through our platform, the duration of their employment, the time it takes them to get employed, the wages that they earn after being employed, and the feedback they receive from their employers.

We are currently in the prototyping stage and do not have any customers or beneficiaries as yet.

By end of 2020, we hope to be serving about 15,000 job seekers who are facing barriers to employment.

In five years, we hope to be serving about 2 million job seekers facing barriers to employment.

We hope to scale in the next five years in the following ways:

• We have made our application open-source so that we can build a global community of software developers contributing to the features, enabling the application to be used in other contexts and geographies.
• We plan to engage with community colleges and vocational training centers in future to help their graduates get jobs, in addition to the current population of people we are serving, namely those facing barriers to employment due to reasons outlined earlier.
• Being a Benefit Corporation, we prioritize social impact over profits. We will therefore keep our payroll and expense costs to a minimum and plow back profits into programs that create jobs for some of our job seekers, such as funding projects run by nonprofits so they can employ people in those projects.

Some barriers we have to overcome by next year include:

• Release first version of the application incorporating AI/ML technology
• Partner with sufficient number of nonprofits and workforce development agencies to have a large pipeline of qualified job seekers on our platform
• Partner with sufficient number of companies posting jobs on our platform and looking for job seekers through our platform
• Get funding in amount of USD 500,000 to sustain growth for next 12-18 months

Some barriers we will have to overcome in the next five years include:

• Release a mobile app version of the software
• Become profitable and self-sustaining by charging companies for hiring candidates through the platform
• Expand the service to community colleges and vocational training centers

Here is how we will overcome initial set of barriers:

• Release first version of the application incorporating AI/ML technology: We have already developed a prototype of the application in collaboration with an advisory group of nonprofits who are working with individuals facing barriers to employment. We will continue to develop and test this software so that it is in a state to be released for a pilot by end of this year. We will also partner with universities and corporate partners to incorporate ML/AI technologies into the platform.
• Partner with nonprofits and companies: We will continue to expand our network of nonprofits, workforce development agencies and companies using the platform through word of mouth, partnerships and social media marketing.
• Get funding: We will work with various funding sources including impact investors and foundations to raise pre-seed capital.

We are currently incorporated as a Benefit Corporation, which is a for-profit with a social mission. We may change to a nonprofit social enterprise structure in future, relying on earned-income as our revenue source rather than grants or donations.

The founder, Ajay Kapur, is working full-time on PhiLance.

The CTO, Raman Sailopal, is working part-time.

We have 2 contractors working full-time on product development.

Our team has the technical and business development skills needed to succeed in delivering this solution. At present the team consists of the following.

Founder and CEO: Ajay Kapur, PhD. Prior to founding Philance, Ajay was VP of product development at Apps Associates which he joined as a startup and helped grow to a size of 800 employees. Ajay has experience in product development, business development and has a keen sense of emerging technologies. He also has a PhD in Neuroscience and has worked on Neural Networks and AI.

Ajay's LinkedIn Profile

CTO: Ramam Sailopal. Raman has over 14 years experience in system administration and oversees the AWS cloud infrastructure that the Philance platform is running on, as well as the software architecture of the solution. Raman is also very experienced in open-source development and with using GitHub.

Raman's LinkedIn Profile

Contractors: We have hired two full-time contractors to help develop the software product.

PhiLance is currently partnering with nonprofit organizations that provide workforce development training and career services to individuals with barriers to employment such as the Renaissance Club that assists people with mental disabilities.

Our key customers are companies looking to hire qualified low-skilled or unskilled workers, typically in the fields of hospitality, retail, data entry and food services, and who want to increase diversity and inclusiveness in their workforce. Our value proposition for them is to provide a pipeline of candidates who have been qualified for the skills they possess by workforce development agencies, so they are not wasting time sorting through applications that are not a good fit for the position advertised. Additional value propositions for companies include the use of AI/ML technologies for matching candidates to jobs so they are optimal, quick access to training agency representatives and job applicants via chat and messaging features, and ability to increase the diversity and inclusiveness of their workforce.

Our beneficiaries include job seekers facing barriers to employment and workforce development agencies, which may be nonprofits, serving those individuals. The value propositions for them include: (a) A platform that lets them create dynamic employment profiles including video, photos and recommendations as opposed to a static resume, so they are more attractive to potential employers. (b) Direct access to employer personnel making hiring decisions and (c) AI/ML based filtering of jobs so they do not waste time applying to jobs that are not a good fit. (d) A network of employers that are motivated to hire candidates from their background.

Our revenue model is to charge companies a monthly subscription fee or a per-hire fee for hiring candidates through our platform. Medium and large-sized businesses using our platform to hire employees may be comfortable paying a monthly subscription of between $50-$100/month. Smaller businesses may be more inclined to pay a fee for every hire they make, if the number of employees that they hire in any given year is small. We have not yet finalized the exact pricing for our services and will determine that after further discussions with businesses during the pilot phase of our deployment.

Solve can help us advance our work in many invaluable ways: (a) By helping us form partnerships with technology partners that will further the AI/ML technologies used in our platform. (b) By helping us form partnerships with nonprofits and social enterprises that provide workforce training and career services to people facing barriers to employment (c) By helping us form partnerships with companies, universities and government agencies that are looking to hire people facing barriers to employment and thus increasing the diversity and inclusiveness of their workforce. (d) By helping us attract investors and raise funding.

We would like to partner with employment social enterprises, nonprofits and workforce development agencies that provide workforce training and career services to disconnected youth who are neither enrolled in school nor working, and to individuals facing employment barriers such as criminal justice system involvement, homelessness, substance abuse, mental illness, poverty and lack of education. Examples of such organizations in the Greater Boston area include MoreThanWords, the Renaissance Club, and UTEC. By partnering with these organizations, we hope to provide services to their clients so they would create their resumes on our platform and use it to look for jobs.

We would also like to partner with corporations that are motivated to hire such individuals and would be interested in using our platform to find new hires. Typically, these organizations would belong in the fields of hospitality, food services and retail.

Yes, we would like to apply for the AI Innovations Prize. We will use the prize money to incorporate AI into our solution by partnering with academic and corporate partners to assist us in developing the AI solution. We will use AI in our application to: (1) Match resumes with job postings and rank resumes based on goodness of match to a particular job posting. Criteria used for matching will comprise of prior work experience, education and skills described in the resume and the job description and necessary qualifications mentioned in the job posting. (2) Recommend well-matched resumes to potential employers and (3) Recommend well-matched job postings to job seekers.

Yes, we would like to apply for the GM Prize on Community-Driven Innovation. We will utilize the prize to create economic opportunities for people facing barriers to employment and for disconnected youth, both of whom are underrepresented in our society.

Yes, we would like to apply for the Prize for Innovation in Refugee Inclusion because refugees face barriers to employment and so we will work with nonprofit organizations that provide workforce development and career services to refugees and help them get jobs through our platform.

Yes, we would like to apply for the Innospark Ventures Prize because we want to use AI/ML in our solution to match resumes with job postings and provide recommendation to both employers and jobseekers about well-matched candidates and jobs, respectively.

Yes, we would like to apply for the Morgridge Family Foundation Community-Driven Innovation Prize to create economic opportunities for people facing barriers to employment and disconnected youth.