Fytster

For employers, hiring the wrong person is extremely expensive and time consuming. Turnover is a $630 billion a year global problem costing businesses $5,000 per hire, 47% of whom end up leaving their job within 18 months of being hired, thus restarting the recruiting cycle.

For candidates, job searches are incredibly inefficient, ineffective, and inequitable. The current process of applying to jobs individually is exhausting and hiring processes are opaque and biased. Candidates spend two hours on average to find and apply to a job and yet 58% of applicants never receive feedback on their submission. Most hiring managers never utilize objective data from psychometric assessments but when they do, candidates must take each assessment anew, regardless of whether they had previously taken that assessment elsewhere.

Fytster builds a 360-degree view of both applicants and employers based upon objective, psychologically-validated metrics that have been proven to enhance demographic and experiential diversity of applicant pools and organizations. Our platform reduces hiring to one final round interview, resulting in better employees with lower turnover and a more productive workforce that is more likely to be engaged in meaningful work.

Our initial target employers are hospitals with a headcount of between 100-3,000 employees with annual revenues of between $10M-$200M.

Our initial target candidates are nurses between 22-50 years of age, have a college degree, live within 20 miles of a municipality with a population of over 500,000, and are open to finding a new job.

Our vision is to find the right person for the right job at the right time to enable lasting, meaningful employment that helps people and businesses realize their potential. 

By assigning randomly generated numbers to candidates and hiding their names and photos from employers prior to a double opt-in match, we are reducing adverse impact and improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. After taking 20-30 minutes to complete their profiles , candidates can expect to receive email notifications when our matching algorithm indicates that they are a good fit for a particular job or when an employer expresses an interest in them based upon their fit. This reduces the burden on candidates to search and apply for jobs. 

Jordan Cooper (Founder & CEO) is a serial entrepreneur with experience developing products, building campaigns, and leading teams in startups, government, non-profits, and large corporations within a diverse series of verticals including technology, politics, healthcare, and communications.  Jing Cai (VP Technology) is a veteran startup and corporate senior full-stack developer, Krishna Rajagopal (Business Advisor) has had multiple exits as CEO of manufacturing businesses and is an angel investor, Andrew Belofsky (Legal Counsel) has been the lead software IP counsel for tech startups and publicly traded IT corporations, Eston Harden (Technical Advisor) is a lead database architect for a leading healthcare delivery system, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, Vishal Sadhnani (Technical Advisor) is a senior FAANG data science SaaS architect, Rich Rosenzweig (Chief Adoption Officer) has successfully exited a Health Tech nursing call center and educational video business, Rasheen Carbin (Marketing Director) has had a successful exit of HR Tech startup to an enterprise acquirer, and Heather Maitre (Strategic Advisor) has been an Ivy League University CIO with HR Tech consulting business exit. Fytster also has a Science Advisory Board composed of industrial psychologists who are leaders in their field. The full team of 13 can be viewed here: https://www.fytster.com/who-we-are/#our-team

All of our immediate challenges can be divided into two categories: 1) Execution and 2) Adoption. 

Under the umbrella of Execution we are looking to build out our technical backlog. This requires senior software developers and technical product managers to work full-time on our platform, which will be made feasible both by the securement of funding to disburse their salaries and through guidance from MIT's enormous bench of software talent among students, faculty, and alumni. 

Under the umbrella of Adoption we are looking for partnerships with and introductions to employers and candidates who are interested in creating profiles on our platform. This could manifest itself in myriad ways: an MIT alum may own a network of hospitals or serve as an executive of a healthcare delivery system in need of nurses. They could send a message to anyone who applied for a position in the past few years through their Applicant Tracking System advising the person that they once had an interest in joining the organization, that they are currently recruiting for many positions, and that to ascertain which position the person might be most qualified for, they ought to create a Fytster profile. The MIT career center might send an email to current students and alumni advising them to create a profile and simultaneously introduce us to regular employers of MIT graduates who are seeking to recruit MIT students but need to be connected to the student or alum who is the right fit (e.g. the Fytster platform is conducive to a having a virtual career fair with real-time results). There are a panoply of ways that a partnership with MIT could benefit the Fytster Adoption strategy. 

Fytster is a digital recruiting marketplace where employers and applicants are matched using psychometrics. Fytster enables applicants to add new elements to their application in order to create a more well-rounded profile that goes beyond a traditional resume and improves Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) for employers. Those additional elements are mutual interest, experience, education, self-reported skills, and personality, motivation, cultural fit, and technical skills-based assessments that have been validated by industrial psychologists. 

Our platform has the potential to eliminate search for applicants and employers and create unexpected matches for both. Fytster allows employers to see a 360 view of an applicant and hire the right applicant for the right job. With Fytster employers will see hiring reduced to one final round interview resulting in better employees with lower turnover and a more productive workforce.

Our marketplace deploys a matching algorithm that is conceptually analogous to the Medical Residency Matching Program algorithm, which automatically matches medical school graduates with teaching hospital programs in the US on a single day each year using a multi-layered preference matching algorithm. Our algorithm employs Machine Learning (ML) to improve on matching between applicants and employers by introducing a novel classification and recommendation model informed by leading psychometric assessment research.

In addition to developing novel data analytics algorithms and data processing techniques, we are also developing entirely new psychometric assessments designed to capture organizational culture, hiring team culture, hiring manager style fit, and motivational fit. We are building a digital exhaust web scraping tool to automatically assess corporate culture in addition to our self-reported cultural fit assessments. We are building an applicant-to-applicant community matching platform to connect individuals to each other using scientifically-validated, objective metrics. We are developing an assessment marketplace to sell third-party psychometric products and are implementing Natural Language Processing (NLP) classification models to extract keywords from uploaded documents and eventually do so with real-time video streaming interviews of applicants.

We are attempting to build that which has no direct precedent and we are doing so with the intention of redefining how individuals and organizations participate in the global economy. We believe there's a better way to find lasting, meaningful employment. Fytster is about providing people with the dignity of meaningful work where they are valued for the diversity of experiences and skills they bring to the table. Fytster’s vision is to create a platform that will introduce objective, standardized measures to evaluate applicant fit with a particular position posting, thereby reducing the subjectivity of traditional behavioral interviews and promoting meritocracy in the hiring process. Fytster is poised to disrupt the ways in which people contribute to the economy by presenting a more holistic and accurate depiction of who a candidate is and how well they fit with a particular position. We aim to help people and businesses actualize their potential and that mission drives our work each day.

We seek to enable the right person to find the right job at the right time to enable lasting, meaningful employment that helps people and businesses realize their potential. 

We seek to do well while doing good and do so based upon these foundational theses:

1. Every person can positively contribute to the global economy
2. Every person can be induced to leave their job if given the proper incentives
3. Finding a good FYT expands economic opportunities for individuals and
businesses, thus improving the collective mental and material well-being
while strengthening the social fabric of society

The only KPI that really matters is that candidates are being hired into positions that, one year later, both the employee and the employer feel has been a good fit. 

We believe that there is a place for every person in the global economy. Many people are denied the opportunity to make a contribution through a “decent” job because of some element of their background that is non-standard for the employer or because these individuals are not able to connect with those employers who would value the contributions that he or she could make. Fytster will facilitate the connection between employers and applicants across the world, expanding the total number of people employed in “decent” work as defined by the United Nations. 

By finding meaningful, lasting employment we aim to indirectly reduce the incidence of suicide, mass shootings, loneliness, mental health diagnoses, opioid addiction, criminal recidivism, Illicit drug use, and adverse impact in hiring practices. 

In sum, Fytster is the pathway for assisting humanity along the path towards actualizing its potential. We are the means through which our system of economic production will become more efficient, equitable, and just.

Fytster Inc is engaged in a systematic, intensive study, directed toward greater knowledge and understanding of workplace success and candidate-job fit, which we are directly applying to meet a recognized need in the healthcare industry to reduce attrition, improve retention, and introduce new efficiencies into the recruiting process for both applicants and employers.

We have designed anti-bias innovations in applicant classification to improve DEI. Our matching algorithms are innovative with advanced queueing systems leveraging node.js, react.js, and postgresSQL. Our deep psychometric assessments differentiate us from competitors’ previous attempts that have relied primarily on the resume. In sum, our prioritized, multi-layer matching algorithm is innovative both as a means of potentially augmenting DEI and as a way of streamlining the recruiting process.

Our future R&D work must be performed by data scientists, data systems engineers, Industrial/Organizational psychologists, and ML developers. The successful execution of this R&D work will not only break new ground in multiple scientific disciplines but will validate our hypotheses and will accomplish what has to date evaded the most well-funded Human Resources Tech corporations: automatically matching an applicant with a job based upon a scientifically validated, 360 view of both parties, eliminating the process of searching and applying for jobs individually, and of making hiring decisions based predominantly on the resume and subjective behavioral interviews. The consequences of our success with this R&D work will be that the foundations will be laid for this new approach to hiring in healthcare that has the potential to redefine how employees and businesses participate in the economy.

Our platform is live here (MIT evaluators of this application can sign up to create their own candidate profile to view the platform).

A video overview of our platform is available here. 

Our team is both demographically and experientially diverse though we try our best to operate as a meritocracy, hiring those who can best advance our mission independent of their identity. 

Fytster is intended for use by both candidates and employers in every market across the globe. Fytster Basic is free to use for both applicants and employers, both of whom are able to upgrade to Fytster Plus with monthly or annual subscriptions.

Fytster has five distinct revenue streams:

1.     Employer Subscriptions: Employers will be assessed a recurring subscription fee to access candidates sourced and vetted by Fytster.

2.     Candidate Subscriptions: Applicants will be assessed a recurring subscription fee to access premium product features.

3.     Targeted Advertising: Advertisements will be displayed in the form of applicant and employer profiles that appear between swipes.

4.     Assessment Marketplace: Transaction fees will be assessed on the purchase of third-party assessments by employers for assignment to particular applicants.

5.     Job Profile Creation Consulting: Industrial psychologists are hired out as consultants to employers to assist with the creation of job profiles.

We are an enterprise SaaS platform operating on a freemium model with revenues primarily driven by employer subscriptions for sourcing services.

We raised a Friends & Family round of $50,000 and have a hard commitment for an additional $50,000 should I issue a capital call. We are still pre-revenue but have numerous employers and thousands of candidates currently using our platform. We will have paying customers by the time this statement is read.