A New Recruiting Platform That Has a 98% Candidate Email Open Rate

Every so often you see a new product that makes you go wow! In our industry you would think this happens a lot, especially with all the ‘new’ recruitment and HR  start-ups, apps and products seemingly being released every week, but it doesn’t. It appears that everyone is trying to fix similar issues - ATS’s, candidate experience, social engagement, social sourcing, social referrals etc.  So when I saw a new product last week that just takes all the ‘existing rules’ of recruiting, rips them up and throws them out of the window, I knew I just had to share it with you.

For all the HR and recruiting purists reading this, you need to park traditional recruiting for a moment while reading this. Instead of text, Workshape.io think about work in terms of time distributed over tasks and want to display it in a way that doesn’t require interpretation but can be unambiguously understood by both companies and candidates alike.

Workshape is based on eliminating the false positives from the typical recruitment process of text based searching and job adverts. It is not a product aimed at giving you 100’s of results. Instead it will give you (as a candidate) a small number of well designed jobs that match what you want to do. From the company perspective the same applies - it produces a small number of specific candidates that meet the job that they have designed. The tool is using sentiment matching, and is focusing more on your future and less about your past. It is a visual matching tool that does not use job descriptions or CV’s, but instead uses shapes to represent both you ( and the ideal job you want to do) and the job itself (designed for the actual skills they want).

UPDATE: Since I wrote the post, WorkShape have created a video showing the product - which makes it much easier to show you how easy it is to use.

It is unlikely that any two people will ever be the same, and their individual shape graph will be unique to them. Here are some examples:

According to Hung Lee, the Co-Founder and CEO of Workshape.io, the premise of recruiting is that when you (candidate) apply (for a job) you lie, meaning it is not then a trusted piece of information from the employers side! It then takes time proving/disproving the validity of the information to make a decision on whether you want to interview and hire them. He is looking to make the recruitment process honest, by remove the application as we know it, and creating a ‘blind application’ based on the job you want to do, not the ‘gaming’ of an application against a job spec. The companies who then design their work shapes, get honest candidate matches not manipulated applications (false positives).

So what does this look like in practice?  This is how you create the workshape. The role is made up of ten tasks and the hiring manager simply drags either the slider or points on the workshape graph to allocate the time he wants the person focusing on that part of the role.

This then produces the design for the work shape for the position, like this below. Note that there are some hard key skills (PHP, MySQL and ElasticSearch)  been added and a role level (Mid-Level) added to the profile. This is ready - how long do you think that took the hiring manager to do - 1 minute, 2 minutes? Much quicker than getting them to complete (or copy) a job description for you!

All the candidates on the site do exactly the same, creating a Workshape for themselves based on what role they want to be doing, with hard skills and level. So when the company has finished the profile and hits, ‘match’, any candidates are shown, with the Workshape match shown over the top of the company Workshape for the role:

This is staging server data - in real-life, all the persons social profiles links - Github, StackOverflow, LinkedIn etc - will soon be shown under their name.

The final part of this simplified process is the communication between the candidate and the company. Initially this is done either via  short instant message type interface, or via an email sent to the candidate saying his workshape has appeared in a match for a new company Workshape profile.

Workshape are currently getting a 98% email open rate from candidates when they are sent notifications they have been matched for a role with a company. This is unprecedented on any medium, and has to be down to the level of belief that these users have in the platform. They obviously are not getting their time wasted or being spammed by recruiters - in fact the Workshape motto is ‘high signal, zero spam’. One thing to mention is that names and some profile details are held back from the company when matches are made initially so it restricts companies from ‘farming loads of similar candidates.

To put all this into some context, Workshape.io is a tech startup and as such has focused on the developer/engineer jobs initially, as it has been gaining new clients. It now has over 160 companies using the platform, with 221 live positions and over 4,375 candidates registered and using the system.

Now I am hoping by now you have seen the terrific potential for this product within recruitment. As recruiters we are always complaining about hiring managers and HR taking huge amounts of time to get new roles created and signed off. And then have they written  a new role and cross referenced all the competencies or have they just copied and pasted an old version for simplicity? This Workshape.io platform would actually make creating job descriptions easy and fun to do, and with a visual output. Then factor in the potential collaboration of your employees. Imagine you have a number of people doing a similar job currently, why not get them to create a Workshape graph for the role from their perspective, as opposed to what the job description says? Which do you think will produce a more accurate assessment of what type of individual you will need for the role?

Then what about assessing existing teams - what their job descriptions say verses what they are actually doing? Or maybe it could be used for appraisals - what the individual thinks they are doing verses what their line manager believes them to be doing. Again it is very quick and very easy to see the differences in opinion  such as these examples below

When you factor in the many uses, you realise that Workshape.io becomes a workforce management platform not just a recruiting tool.

Next up for Workshape.io is to look at Sales - which is notoriously difficult to assess based on the strength of a text based CV.

It is worth checking out the Workshape.io blog which further explains more about their innovative platform. If you are interested in speaking to the CEO Hung Lee about Workshape in more detail (and you should) you can reach him on hung@workshape.io or via @hunglee on Twitter

Remember, not long now until my new book gets published. You can still get a 25% discount off RRP for Social Media Recruitment – How To Successfully Integrate Social Media Into Your Recruitment Strategy by clicking here.