Shortlist

Our vision is to unlock the professional potential of the masses.

We are seeking to fundamentally change how talent is matched with opportunity, away from the old world of "tell me what you've done" to a new world of "show me what you can do."

We believe that technology can play a catalytic role in this paradigm shift, by increasing efficiency, enabling all candidates to receive feedback, reducing bias, and helping hiring managers to make decisions based on measures that actually predict performance.

Jobseekers should be able to access the job market from any location with a basic internet connection, and should not be judged based on their pedigree, gender or other minority status, but for the abilities that they can demonstrate.

The CV is dead. Long live your future.

Female and disabled jobseekers continue to be at a significant disadvantage in accessing the job market in Africa. Both groups face especially acute challenges in finding work that both matches their skill sets and pays them equitably.

For disabled people, there is rarely an opportunity for the jobseeker to identify themselves as disabled, which can easily create an inherent sense of exclusion. Disabled jobseekers understandably assume that identifying themselves as such on an application form could easily lead to rejection before they have a chance to demonstrate their abilities.

Shortlist levels the playing field. We have created a technology platform that enables jobseekers to apply for jobs by "showing us what they can do" through real time competency-based assessments delivered in a bias-free environment. Our UI was designed by female product leaders and built for low bandwidth environments.

While Shortlist sources, screens and places a variety of youth jobseekers across emerging markets, we are seeking support from the MIT Community-Driven Innovation Challenge specifically to help female and disabled jobseekers to find job opportunities in the digital economy.

The innovation for which we're applying for grant support is to create a "talent pool" of high potential female and disabled jobseekers. In brief, we believe it would be possible to leverage Shortlist's digital platform and partnerships to Find, Engage, and Curate female or disabled talent for in the East Africa region in a way that has never been done before. We envision a programme along the following lines:

1) Find--we would broadly advertise to attract female and disabled talent from within our database and from other sources. All candidates would go through a customized chatbot and competency assessments designed for a selection of in-demand functions (such as finance, data analysis, or customer service), to collect information as to interest areas and abilities. We would use a mix of online and human screening to identify objective attributes of potential.

2) Engage--we can design and co-design a number of interactions to get female and disabled talent excited about careers in financial services as well as build up their skills/job readiness. Some examples: host "careers in energy and agriculture" events.

3) Curate--at the end of a 6-12 month period, we'd target have a set of ready-to-hire women and disabled professionals who can be made accessible to participating employers, with lots of objective data about their potential.

After demonstrating that this "talent pool" concept, we can scale the same concept to other minority talent pools and functional areas that are in high demand across Africa.

To our knowledge, there are no such solutions being implemented in Africa today. We are aware of examples such as "TheBoardroom Africa" though this talent pool is exclusively focused on highly experienced female executives who are suited for board-level positions and highly sought after.

No solution is geared specifically towards developing an entry-level female or disabled talent pool and marketing that talent pool to a pre-assembled cohort of leading employers. This would be the first of its kind.

1) We have developed a highly user-friendly digital user interface that has been used by over 500,000 jobseekers to-date, typically in low bandwidth environments on a mobile device in emerging markets. By building our technology using microservices architecture and Angular 2, we have enabled candidates with limited Internet speeds and limited time to complete our assessment process.

2) We have developed a digital platform to collect 'work samples' to demonstrate ability to do the job. Next to cognitive ability, one of the most predictive indicators of job performance is the "work sample"--an example provided by the candidate that mirrors the type of work they will be doing day-to-day. We are innovating in this area by developing a "work sample simulator," underpinned by case study questions but delivered in fun and interactive ways, including voice recordings and with plans to introduce mobile games that simulate a typical challenge the candidate would face on the job.

We will use technology to dramatically reduce the inequities for candidates applying for a job in emerging markets, and dramatically increase the effectiveness of identifying high performing future employees for employers.

We believe that by combining a competency-based approach to assessments, highly user intuitive visual interfaces for employers and candidates, and AI and machine learning to provide more accurate candidate-employer matches, we can help change the nature of how people are matched for jobs.

We are particularly excited and motivated to solve this challenge for minority job seekers, including women, disabled, LGBTQ, and candidates who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. 

We have placed over 1,500 youth jobseekers into well paying jobs with leading employers across Africa and India.

Candidates who Shortlist places into jobs see an increase in income of 35%, on average.

Our 12 Month Goals & Objectives.

1) Sourcing and screening of at least 1,000 jobseekers who meet our criteria, through a variety of marketing and awareness-raising efforts.
2) Identifying at least 75 employers willing to sign up as a part of our cohort, sharing their brands and target role types to help attract candidates.
3) Selecting at least 250 candidates who we would assess to be "highly employable" by our employer cohort.
4) Placing at least 75% of those candidates into roles.

Developing a custom flow of competency-based assessments built specifically for disabled jobseekers and sourcing a sufficient number of disabled candidates in a short period of time will be our biggest challenges and risk areas.

To mitigate these risks, we will:
1) leverage sector area experts to help us modify our existing assessment library to be better suited to disabled candidates
2) use a variety of marketing and outreach activities to promote our recruitment drive for disabled jobseekers. We have a detailed plan we can share around both of these risk areas.

75 employees

Shortlist is a 75-person company with offices in Nairobi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Palo Alto. We serve customers across Africa and India.

We are positioned to achieve our mission largely because of the quality of the talent that we have on our team. We have assembled a world class team of technologists, industry leaders, and talent experts to tackle this persistent but important challenge.

• We have currently partnered with RippleWorks to provide external expert guidance in key technical areas such as digital marketing.
• We have partnered with Mayer Brown to provide pro bono legal support

Our business model is to charge employers a fee (typically 10-12% of salary) when we successfully place a candidate who we have sourced and screened.

This Talent Pool programme would represent an evolution in our business model. Rather than waiting for employers to come to Shortlist with a specific mandate, we would proactively build out a specific candidate pool (by finding, engaging, and curating that pool) and then offering that pool to a cohort of employers who have a stated interest to hire from that skill pool, potentially for a range of jobs. This would entail much greater financial risk for Shortlist, as we would be investing up front in developing that talent pool, in ways that would need to be honed and tested for their effectiveness before rolling it out at scale.

We intend to reach financial sustainability in the following ways:

• Grow our customer base and overall operational volume
• Where possible and appropriate, leverage philanthropic capital to accelerate and test areas of innovation with high risk/high return outcomes.
• We will continue to raise investment capital to bridge the gap to overall company profitability and to provide capital to invest in growth.

If selected as a Solver, we would use the prize funding to hire a dedicated program director, supported from a part time digital marketing team, who we would contract. We would allocate a portion of the funding towards marketing, with the remainder used to hire team members and part time functional experts.

We would match funding with MIT on a 2:1 basis, where Shortlist would deploy 2x MIT funding to make further improvements to our user interface to make our product easier to use by disabled candidates.

We would love to partner with the following types of organizations or individuals:

1. AI experts
2. Data scientists
3. Organisations who can help raise our profile as a company
4. UI/UX designers who could help evolve our products to be even more friendly to disabled and female job seekers.