Magnifi

A recruiting platform that uses AI to connect companies to non-traditional talent. 

75% of organizations are struggling to find talent right now. At the same time, thousands of candidates are consistently passed over for jobs they are qualified for because they do not match the exact criteria on the job posting, such as having a 4-year degree or industry experience. Current recruiting tools like LinkedIn and Indeed only connect employers to the candidates that match based on skills and experience in their resumes - but they don’t look at what skills and experiences could be transferable to create a match. This causes employers to miss out on thousands of qualified applicants that could be filling their roles, while preventing career mobility for the millions of nontraditional and non-degree-holding candidates. 

Magnifi reinvents the candidate search by using AI to match overlooked but qualified candidates with employers. We are built on top of the SkillsEngine API which allows us to take in candidate information like resumes, military experience, transferable skills, and more, and transform it into a breakdown of hard and soft skills. We can do the same for the job posting, uncovering the real skills and competencies needed to perform the job. Then, we can match candidates to open jobs based on these common skill blocks. Additionally, our platform can show candidates careers that they are qualified for based on their transferable skills, encouraging them to apply for jobs they may not have known existed or thought they were qualified for before. With Magnifi, Employers can widen their candidate pool, fill their jobs faster, and increase the diversity of their workforce.

Our target population is “non-traditional” job seekers. This definition is intentionally broad but we predict our target population to be people looking to improve their careers who:

• Do Not have a degree but have skills to perform higher-wage work

• People who have been Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARS)

• People who were formerly incarcerated

• People who have taken time off work to be a full-time caregivers

• People who served in the military

• People who want to switch to a new industry they have no previous experience in

These job seekers are currently underserved because they are being cut out of talent pipelines at the top of the funnel - the resume screen. Their resumes do not match the “ideal profile” recruiters are looking for as they might not have the educational credentials or keywords present in their resumes, despite having the necessary skills to perform the job well. Our solution creates a new system for these candidates to demonstrate their skills to employers and be given a fair chance of employment no matter their background.

Our two co-founders have experience in the workforce development and education space. Jason Jabbari leads the education research portfolio at the Washington University Social Policy Institute. He works with research organizations and local communities to understand how policies, and practices interact with social and environmental contexts to impact education and economic outcomes. 

Sydney Nagorsky is a student who has gotten involved with non-traditional job seekers through volunteering in college. She volunteered weekly as a tutor for The Ritenour Adult Education & Literacy (AEL) Program during her first year, helping students prepare to take their High School Equivalency exam. Through this program she saw how so many adults hold skills and competencies through various life experiences that don't always come through in a resume or diploma, making it difficult to demonstrate value to employers. 

During her junior year, she was introduced to an organization called LaunchCode, a local non-profit that provides free coding education to people looking to switch careers and enter the tech workforce. LaunchCode was looking to launch their first coding class at Missouri Eastern Correctional Center (MECC), a medium-security prison nearby. Sydney joined the team as the first volunteer teaching assistant for the course, and has been integral in designing programming, supporting the students through the class, and helping alumni find jobs upon their release. These students, with extremely “non-traditional” backgrounds and resumes, face so many barriers to getting a good job upon their release, despite how motivated and talented they are. They have inspired me to help create a better system that provides them with opportunities fit for their skillset, instead of putting them into a box based on their past experience. 

Aside from our co-founders volunteer experience, our team of students has the right mix of skills and experiences to bring this solution to market. Our backgrounds include extensive experience in software engineering, consulting, and tech startups, and we all share a passion for using technology as a tool to create innovative solutions to social challenges. 

Over the last year this project has taken shape, we have gotten to speak with over 200 potential users and customers across different industries. We have attended career fairs to gain a better understanding of job-seekers goals and challenges, and we have spoken to HR departments to understand their hiring difficulties on the other side. We also have developed relationships with numerous local organizations working to help people get better jobs, such as Rung for Women, Jobs for the Future, Transformative Workforce Academy, Greater St. Louis, Inc., St. Louis Agency on Training and Employment (SLATE), and more. The support and feedback from these organizations have been instrumental in helping us design a solution that works for their constituents, as they have years of experience navigating the challenges that exist with improving employment opportunities for people who do not hold a degree or have non-traditional backgrounds. 

Our solution is innovative because it completely changes the way companies have been hiring talent for decades. The status quo of hiring relies on static information provided in resumes - but it does little to showcase what candidates are actually capable of- especially for those that are trying to enter a new industry or rejoin the workforce after time off. Employers know that their current processes are not doing a good job of filtering through candidates. In fact, a Harvard Business School study revealed that 94% of employers believe qualified, middle-skill candidates are vetted out of the process because they do not match the exact criteria established by the job description. However, after talking with employers about this issue, it's clear that there is no option in the market that allows them to keep their applicant pool size small while fairly evaluating everyone's unique backgrounds and strengths. 

Our solution offers a more equitable and accurate way for employers to reduce the size of their applicant pool without missing out on potential matches, as well as find more diverse candidates. It is the first step in moving the world of hiring beyond resumes, to a more dynamic, personalized, and skills-focused approach. This transition is inevitable, and we are excited to play a part in facilitating this larger market shift. 

From the job-seeker perspective, our solution provides them with a recruiting tool that was built with them in mind. They no longer need to worry about how to explain that gap in their resume, or how to convince employers that the skills they learned while being a full-time caretaker actually taught them more than their previous three jobs. They can easily demonstrate the professional value of their military experience, or show how their 15 years as a teacher actually gave them the exact skills needed to be a consultant. We are getting rid of the one-size-fits-all resume, uncovering the potential of the millions in our workforce who have never fit that mold. 

Our impact goals for the next year are to start placing non-traditional job seekers in better jobs. We define “better” as jobs that offer increased earnings or benefits, or allow the job seeker to enter their desired career path and grow professionally. Our solution enables these job seekers to demonstrate the wide range of skills they developed through their unique life experiences, and connect with employers who may never have considered them as applicants before. By breaking down barriers to entering or advancing in the skilled workforce, this solution will help diversify the workforce and transform the lives of individual job seekers and entire communities who have been disregarded by certain industries or jobs. 

Our platform relies on the ability to quickly access and discover skills and competencies from the experiences of non-traditional job candidates. To do this, we plan to utilize SkillsEngine’s API (https://www.skillsengine.com/) and their algorithm to diagnose job-seeker information (resumes, military experiences, caregiving experience, work in a correctional facility, etc.) and suggest possible roles and career paths best suited for them. We felt that it was more effective to contract an outside provider for our core technology due to proven efficacy and scale. SkillsEngine has built technology that uses machine learning to translate unstructured text into structured skill language, based-off an extended model of Department of Labor’s O*NET Content Model. Educators and employers have already used SkillsEngine to validate over 160k skills. We plan to leverage this skill-infrasture and apply it to a new use-case of creating a talent marketplace for non-traditional candidates. 

We have not launched yet, but are hoping to roll out a pilot program within the next 2 months. We plan to start with 10 small employers who are looking to fill 1-5 jobs each, so our projected pilot-impact is 10-50 job seekers. Once we have implemented our learnings from this program, we will expand to target larger organizations in St. Louis, hopefully reaching 50 employers and over 500 job seekers in our first year. 

Our main barrier that exists right now is the lack of financial capital to grow our team.

We are in progress of finalizing our partnership with BioSTL.

We use a tiered SaaS usage-based pricing model. Employers will pay a monthly subscription fee and an additional fee every time they “match” with a candidate (a match means getting the candidates’ contact information for an interview). The monthly subscription fee varies based on the size of the employer and how many positions they would like to post on our site at one time. This model allows us to provide scalable, usage-based pricing to our customers since companies hiring needs can change as they grow and as the economy shifts. Our tiered pricing model is expected to generate $11 million in revenue in year 5.

In addition to generating revenue, Magnifi will have a huge impact on increasing the diversity of the skilled workforce, and promoting upward mobility for millions of non-traditional and non-degree-holding applicants across the country. 

We plan to raise investment capital to finance the initial development and launch of our product until we can achieve financial stability through product sales.