This post originally appeared on ERE.net.
As mentioned before, out of Brazil, another startup (what else, right?) is blooming.
“There’s competition … every day we find a different one,” Joel Stern, a recruiter, says about human resources technology startups. “But no one has the market cornered.”
Stern is creating a startup of his own, one with a very interesting history. For that and info on a few other new companies, read on:
- Opening, which Stern is co-founding, will feature skills-based tests, personality tests, and short video clips about candidates (this is in the “crowdsourcing of assessments” genre that includes Smarterer). Stern randomly met another guy, an IT designer/consultant named Yared Akalou, in Brazil, where the two Americans are living while their wives (one in HR) are on assignment for Sodexo and Qualcomm. Stern and Akalou decided to address what they see as a slightly underserved area of recruiting attention: assessments. Targeting mostly small- and mid-size businesses at first, Opening will build up a library of tests, and employers will pick — pay for — the one they want to use, with the revenue split between the assessment-maker (a testing company, professor, consultant, etc.) and Opening. It’s looking to hire a chief technology officer, as well as add an economics professor and I/O psychologist to its board. The cofounders are moving back to the U.S. to build the assessment database, and are looking for investors in Utah and in California. “There’s money and interest in HR and startup products,” Stern says. “But we need to prove our model.”
- JobCritters is for managing your use of Twitter for jobs. The parent company, CareerCloud, says Critters helps you “search and save candidates through a premium search engine” and “post sponsored job tweets with awesome visual hiring images to stand out in job search results.”
- Knozen, for rating coworkers, is from a former Ladders CEO. He says he “wants his app to become a ‘personality API that businesses can tap into during the recruitment process.’”
- Intern.ly is competing with sites like Internmatch and Internavenue. Intern.ly is using a standard resume format that candidates need to fill out. It also has a basic applicant tracking system. It has two two entrepreneurs and two interns, in Finland.