“I’m a millennial, we did something bad to the HR market,” says Ben Reuveni, co-founder and CEO of Israeli career development and recruitment startup Workey. Part confessional, part company pitch, he argues that, different to the generation before it, millennials change jobs every two years, while so-called Generation Z are even more fickle.
And although recent data collected by the U.S. Department of Labor appears to contradict this, there seems little doubt that the way we search for our next job is changing as recruitment moves online, regardless of whether or not job-hopping is actually on the increase.
Specifically, job searching is becoming more passive: people aren’t necessarily looking for a new job but are permanently open to their next career move. At the same time, if this is made too explicit you run the risk of upsetting your current employment status, not least if you are caught in the act of job hunting. No employer wants people on staff who are actively looking to jump ship.
To address this trend and potentially build a decent business on top of passive job hunting, Workey has built something akin to a ‘Tinder for recruitment’.
The iOS app, initially launched in the U.S. and Israel, takes the form of a chatbot to ask you a series of questions related to your current job and the types of opportunities you are looking for.
It then uses machine learning to let you swipe through available job opportunities mapped to your potential career path, while on the other side recruiters can browse your anonymized profile. If there is a mutual match — ie you are interested in the job opening and the recruiter is interested in you — the two parties are introduced and an interview can be scheduled.
“During my own career, as a software engineer, I’d always ask myself: ‘Where do I see my career heading?’ My fellow co-founders and I realised that people hate that question and decided to build Workey,” says Reuveni. “Workey uses AI to compare your unique career history to millions of others to suggest highly personalised open career opportunities in real-time”.
On the hiring side, the Workey CEO argues that companies currently search for employees within a limited pool of applicants, which is another aspect of recruitment the startup is aiming to address. “Statistics show that 85 per cent of the workforce are open to a new job, however, only 12 per cent of them are actively in pursuit of one. This demonstrates the immense untapped potential that can be available to employees,” he says.
To that end, over 300 companies are already using Workey, says Reuveni. They include large tech companies such as WeWork, Dell EMC, Oracle, and Yahoo. The startup generates revenue by charging per successful candidate, but, following demand, is also experimenting with a subscription model.
