Skillist

We want to move the labor market to a skill-based hiring system to enable more effective hiring and a greater distribution of access to opportunity. Socio-economically disadvantaged populations face barriers in accessing good jobs that can offer them long-term economic mobility and growth. This can be addressed by creating a system that places higher value on the skills and experiences that are acquired by workers from all walks of life.

As new roles and industries emerge, Skillist can help companies connect with applicants who are acquiring skills outside of traditional higher education. Further, we can create labor market flexibility by empowering workers to understand their capabilities in terms of skillsets rather than job titles.

A skill-based hiring system can increase labor market access for underserved jobseekers and also allow companies to benefit from tapping into new pools of hungry, diverse talent that can succeed in traditionally hard-to-fill, high-attrition roles.

Skillist is a more effective hiring system that connects companies seeking entry-level talent to often-overlooked jobseekers. There are nearly 65M people who have pursued education beyond high school, but don't have a college degree - commonly known as middle-skill workers. At the same time, there are 7M middle-skill jobs posted each year, and at any given moment, nearly 50% of them are unfilled. This is a huge labor market mismatch, and it stems from a broken job application process.

Through our application process, candidates are evaluated on their skills and potential. We work with employers who are committed to building a more inclusive talent pipeline, and we protect our applicants from bias through our identity-blind application system. Employers use Skillist to translate job descriptions into a list of relevant skills critical to on-the-job success. Candidates use our platform to easily search and apply for professional-wage, upwardly-mobile opportunities that match their skills. This two-sided approach leads to far better outcomes for both parties.

We believe that by creating a better way for job-seekers and employers to connect, we can help millions of talented Americans without four-year degrees gain career-advancing work at great companies that value their skills.

Our target user-base is skilled, non-degreed talent who are seeking professional entry-level work but often overlooked for entry-level roles in favor of degreed candidates. By focusing on this user-base, we are to serve a diverse population of jobseekers including people of color, underemployed hourly workers, opportunity youth, and other socially disadvantaged groups. Existing resume screen technologies bluntly eliminate many of these workers because they are often overly specific and built on biased methods and processes. For example, job applicants are less likely to be selected if they have an ethnic name. Our solution aims to removes these barriers.

Skillist's hiring solution was designed to avoid pitfalls like these. Our application process circumvents resume screens and allows applicants to be assessed on what they can do rather than where they come from. Through Skillist, we have seen hourly workers marvel at the opportunity to interview with an elite employer like Harvard, and have seen a former Dunkin' Donuts employee successfully make the case to be hired at Blue Cross. We are thrilled at the reception our users have had at the opportunity to be judged on their potential instead of their past.

Our skill-based, identity-blind application platform is highly scalable. Since launching in April 2018 in Boston, we've signed a number of great employers including Wayfair, Toast, DraftKings, and ezCater. We're now helping several of our Boston-based partners in other markets including Omaha, Portland, and Jersey City; we also recently signed on several New York-area employers including Rent The Runway. We've designed Skillist to seamlessly integrate into the average recruiter's everyday tools, so that every middle-skill applicant can apply using Skillist - giving them the best chance of getting the job.

The advantage of our technology is that the skills a jobseeker fills out when applying through Skillist are saved to their 'Skill Library' and enable them to apply to more, relevant opportunities easily. In subsequent applications, previously written skills are auto-filled, making the experience easier and faster for the job-seeker, while providing the employer with the skill information they care about most. This functionality also enables us our technology to suggest high-potential job opportunities to workers based on the skills that are saved in their Library.

With each new role on the platform, our candidate pool grows rapidly. We also create strategic partnerships with community colleges and workforce training organizations, which allows us to reach growing networks of workers who wouldn't typically be aware of or apply to these opportunities. More than 6,000 jobseekers are now on the platform, and surveyed jobseekers report a +33% NPS (compared to negative NPS scores for sites like Indeed and Monster).

Our biggest competition is not a company, it is the resume itself. The chronological resume has been used as the standard interface between jobseekers and companies for hundreds of years. Most of the innovation in the HR/job space has been built on top of the resume - keyword screening software, predictive algorithms, etc. - without ever questioning if the data contained in a resume (highest degree attained, summary of last three jobs) contains the most valuable and relevant information.

Skillist takes a different approach that solves real problems for our customers. By working with the company to identify essential skills for on-the-job success and designing a more accessible application process, we substantially broaden the applicant funnel. Instead of collecting the insufficient data of resumes, we obtain rich information about candidates' skills. This helps companies make better hiring decisions, and allows us to build a much stronger dataset as well.

Skillist is not just leveraging technology to create positive impact for jobseekers -- we are actually building the technology that will enable thousands of community organizations and millions of underserved jobseekers to connect with the right employers more effectively. We see Skillist as the first true "job application system", a new category of HR technology that fits between today's online job boards and applicant tracking systems to create better alignment, transparency, and communication between jobseekers and companies.

Today, our platform provides a seamless and mobile-friendly application experience for jobseekers and utilizes automated in-app prompts/nudges to help users formulate high-quality skill examples. Employers are also able to use our technology to review candidates in a standardized, unbiased way -- alleviating the uncertainty and burden of the typical resume review process. We have already built integrations with existing HR tech tools such as Greenhouse, so that we can be implemented easily into employer recruiting workflows.

Longer term, we believe that the unique trove of skills data we are collecting will enable us to better understand how people acquire skills and direct those with skill gaps to relevant knowledge providers. We have already spoken with labor analytics companies like Emsi and SkillsEngine about potential partnerships in this regard. We are also evaluating integrations with assessment tools like the new SNHU Soft Skills assessment (via LRNG), as a way to provide direct labor market value to the next wave of competency-based evaluations.

Skillist creates a better path for economic mobility for jobseekers, from hourly or non-benefit eligible roles to full-time, salaried careers. A survey of Skillist users found that over 50% reported having incomes of $30K or less; the roles we post pay above $40K on average with significant opportunity for career growth. Given our ability to scale nationally and the huge number of jobseekers without 4-year degrees, we believe that we can have tremendous impact on career lifetime earnings and income trajectory. In fact, 60% of reported Skillist job offers have gone to applicants that do not have a college degree.

Approximately 30% of reviewed Skillist applications have been selected for interviews by employers (a 15X improvement in yield over the ~2% acceptance rate from online job boards), and more than 50% of Skillist applicants belong to one or more underrepresented groups in terms of ethnicity, gender, or education level. Underrepresented Skillist applicants are being selected for interviews at similar rates to other applicants, showing that our identity-blind process lessens the impacts of unconscious bias. Skillist jobseekers who have been hired with our partner employers are performing well and reporting high levels of satisfaction as well.

Our business metrics are: number of active employers, credits sold and used per month, and average credit usage per employer.

Our engagement metrics are: total active users, total applications started, total applications submitted, and average number of applications per jobseeker.

Our outcome metrics are: acceptance rate per employer, offer rate per employer, demographics of jobseeker pool and talent pipeline, and reduction of unconscious screening bias.

Our top three goals for the next year are to:
1) Expand to serving jobseekers and employers nationwide
2) Release next iteration of Skillist with enhanced functionality
3) Reach $1.5M in ARR by Q3 2020

Skillist faces many risks that other digital platforms face when getting started. Our goal is to build a two-sided job market that gets both jobseekers and employers involved in the "skill-based economy." Rather than pursue a costly, incentive-driven approach to seeding and aligning the platform, we have been inspired by Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon, who suggests platforms entice users to "come for the tool, and stay for the network." By building a unique, skill-based job application tool, we give employers a reason to list jobs with us and create a reason for jobseekers to join the community.

Externally, some risk comes from our competitors, especially those with larger teams, more funding, and pre-existing relationships with key employers.

Skillist, like many social enterprises, seeks to change the system it sees as suboptimal - in this case, the labor market. However, taking on a system is inherently risky, and thus rather than taking a "boil the ocean" approach, Skillist has course-corrected, learned a laser focus, and created a targeted, limited intervention that solves real needs for both employers and jobseekers while creating a platform for change that we can leverage as we grow.

We are taking great care to grow wisely so as to maximize our defensibility. By working with community partners like community colleges and workforce organizations, we create unique and meaningful relationships that create network effects by scaling connections between the employers eager for talent from these organizations and the organizations eager to place their graduates in great jobs. 

6 employees

The Skillist teamhas team members based in Boston, Palo Alto, New York, Philadelphia, and Ann Arbor. We see our distributed structure as an asset because it has enabled us to hire amazing people across the country, and we now have a physical presence in several major US markets.

Ananth (Co-founder & CEO) leads strategy and sales. He has spent his career at the intersection of the business and social impact sectors, previously working at organizations like UC Riverside, the KIPP Foundation, and Bain & Company.

Caroline (Co-founder & Chair) leads jobseeker experience, community development, and nonprofit partnerships. Caroline's background includes enrollment counseling for adult learners at Northeastern's College of Professional Studies, community management at Harvard, and mentoring at Year Up.

Matt leads product design and development. He brings years of expertise in human-centered design and the dynamics of digital platforms.

Ronethea leads employer partnerships and marketing. She's spent the last 10 years helping companies like PepsiCo, Google, and LinkedIn strategically transform their diverse talent pipelines. Ronethea is passionate about problem solving, especially around impacting career access and opportunity.

Isha leads business operations. As a consultant by background, she brings direct experience in human capital and talent solutions from her time at PwC and Philosophy IB, a Heidrick & Struggles company.

Nathan leads Skillist's engineering function. He is a full-stack developer and engineering manager who has worked at both established companies (TripAdvisor) and startups (Tamr).

Skillist operates as a for-profit enterprise so that we can grow and scale sustainably without depending on philanthropy. We generate revenue by charging employers, but not job-seekers, for use of our platform. Typically, we start new customers on a pilot engagement (one role for 3 months; ~$3000 total) and then after the pilot we convert customers into an annual contract (a package of "Skillist credits" based on expected annual usage; $10,000+). So far, 80% of our "target profile" customers who completed pilots have either renewed or intended to renew into annual contracts. Our revenue has nearly doubled quarter-over-quarter since launch, and we are now at ~$200,000 in ARR.

In total, we have raised ~$900,000 from a mix of education/workforce nonprofits (Strada Education Network; Robin Hood Foundation), venture funds (Flybridge Capital Partners), angel investors (Deborah Quazzo, Bill Sahlman, Shikhar Ghosh, etc), and accelerators (LearnLaunch Accelerator).

We are operating well as a lean team but see huge growth potential. Being selected as a Solver would give us the financial flexibility to spend additional resources on product development and embed skills taxonomies into the next version of the platform. We are also planning to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts and spend over the next 6 months, as we transition from initial customer validation to scalable customer acquisition. The recognition from being selected to MIT Solve would boost our credibility and generate additional employer interest, thus opening up more great career opportunities for our jobseekers.