This week, the Startup Spotlight shines on Talent Browser. Below is a conversation with Founder Janet Dwyer.
What is your background?
For the past 15+ years I’ve been working in I.T./Financial Services recruitment in the NY tri-state region as a combined client account manager and hands-on recruiter. In 2003, my business partner John Harney and I founded Integretech, our I.T. staffing firm. John has 20+ years of experience in I.T. architecture, project management and development, with a focus on real-time trading software integration in the top-tier financial firms. We’re also co-founders of our spinoff software company TalentBrowser, which is Job Matching software built on patented technology that revolutionizes how resumes are evaluated and how people are matched to jobs.
Tell us about the team you have built so far.
John and I are very experienced entrepreneurs, having built several successful businesses. Our dream has been to build a team of experts to take TalentBrowser out to the market to save the world from mediocre recruiting software. TalentBrowser is a mature, robust filtering engine with proven real world success that has been in continuous daily use by us at Integretech since 2003, when the proof-of-concept was first developed by John Harney. Convinced we had “built a better mousetrap,” we filed for U.S. Patents, which were granted beginning in 2009. In 2011, we made a strategic decision to prepare TalentBrowser for external commercial use and following the Lean Startup approach we assembled a seasoned core team of experts in development, HCI/Usability, Technical Writing, Graphic Arts, and Sales/Marketing. Additionally, we’re currently working with a dynamic team of HR Tech Advisors, such as Ward Christman, Peter Clayton, and Alejandro Guzman Acha tolaunch the product into the market.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
To date, we’ve been bootstrapping TalentBrowser with personal funds and revenues from our staffing business.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Missing the best candidate. With every resume being different, it’s a huge challenge to effectively sort and filter through incoming resumes, let alone search the existing database which has to be considered. Truly knowing which candidate is the best fit for skills is a monumental task that is only possible with the assistance of a world class search and match tool. TalentBrowser is this tool. An executive at a leading ATS company described the problem best: “The reality is that no ATS does a good job in search or match. Ours is the best, but it’s not very good either! We’re a mile wide but just an inch deep. I would describe TalentBrowser not as an ATS, but as a premier search engine.” Resume overload also causes the same problem of missing the ideal candidate(s). When response to a job post dumps a deluge of applicants on the typical recruiter, most recruiters don’t have the time to effectively review them all. Getting a pre-ranked list of qualified candidates is a recruiter’s dream. TalentBrowser solves this problem with ease, sophistication and elegance.
Describe the business, core products and services?
We built TalentBrowser to be an advanced analytical efficiency tool suitable for use in any company that processes a lot of jobs and candidates. TalentBrowser’s automated resume parsing, screening and scoring algorithms leverage a very robust, editable thesaurus of industry matching terms that brings the cream to the top and renders traditional keyword search obsolete. TalentBrowser eliminates unqualified candidates, maximizing the efficiency of hiring teams and the value of every database, so users can find the hidden talent within their existing ATS. The TalentBrowser engine is available as a bolt-on to your ATS, or it can be used stand alone. ATS companies can license the engine and individuals/companies can subscribe to the SaaS based offering.
Who do you expect your customers and users to be at launch?
We’ve built a solid pipeline of interested beta users, with the most interest coming from staffing firms and ATS companies. The product can, in the future, create solutions for corporate HR, RPO companies, as an ATS for the SMB market, and as a white labeled embedded solution inside other HR platforms.
Where do you stand right now with regard to funding?
There is a lot of interest from investors and strategic partners, but we are being very selective, to ensure we choose the right fit growth partner. We are currently working with the LaunchPad business incubator on Long Island and have been pursuing various opportunities for funding to scale the offering and the company to meet the huge market opportunity.
What is the business AND revenue model? What is your strategy for profitability?
We will be delivering our automated job matching engine via license arrangements with third parties (ATSs & HRISs) and via subscriptions to end users (Recruiters, Hiring Managers, etc.). Our core business is further enabling industry specific matching libraries atop the matching engine. Although the system allows users to create their own matching rules, we expect clients to use TalentBrowser to create customized matching rules during ramp up to get intelligent results using the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model. Due to the sophistication of our solution, we also expect revenues from consulting fees derived from the BOT approach.
Our strategy for profitability is to control our growth by focusing on one market segment first, the 1.7m user ATS market, before using that revenue to bootstrap into the wider market of HRIS systems. Thankfully, since we already built the technology for our staffing business, a significant portion of our costs are derived from user support, so these costs only occur as clients come onboard.
Did anyone tell you this wasn’t going to be successful?
No. When people in the trenches of talent acquisition see up close what TalentBrowser’s capabilities are, they say it fixes a massive problem and will be a huge success! One of our clients on Wall Street calls it “The Brain” – we love that nickname, who wouldn’t want a second brain?
How will you measure success 12 months from now?
Success to us will be a solid, growing base of empowered, happy TalentBrowser users, and when we win the ERE new product of the year award!