Many professionals don’t have a good handle on what their skills are really worth in the marketplace nor who would likely hire them. As a result, when they are next looking for a job, they tend to take the first warm offer that comes along.
Lax Chandra, the founder of Step.com, would like to fix that.
Still in beta, Step sends anonymized resumes of tech professionals to recruiters and hiring managers who then give feedback on whether the company would likely hire the person, what they’d pay, and if they wouldn’t hire them, why not. It’s like reverse candidate relationship management with professionals building a pool of companies likely to hire them. And of course it’s a mutual thing, from the company’s point of view Step is providing a pool of candidates.
Do we need this service? There is already a lot of information about which companies are hiring, just go to Indeed.com. There’s also a lot of information about salaries at PayScale, Glassdoor and SalaryFairy. What Chandra observes is that while the quantity of information is not in doubt, the quality is an issue. A much finer-grained, more personalized take, on what you are worth and where you can work is what’s wanted.
And this gets us to the general problem afflicting recruiting. Pre-internet we had too little information. Now we have loads of information, but recruiting is still painful for both sides. What’s missing is high quality information. What’s the best way to get this high quality information? That’s hard to say, but we can be clear about what it would feel like. As a job seeker we’d feel confident about quickly finding a good job with good pay. As a company we’d feel confident about quickly finding a candidate with the skills we need. That’s what Step is shooting for; let’s hope they get there.
