In its infancy is a startup hoping to match job candidates up with companies based not on resumes but on the type of culture where the candidate would best fit.
“We have consciously stayed under the radar,” says co-founder Sean Storin. “We really haven’t been enough of a story until now.”
The One Degree story was launched in Chicago but employees are also in Austin, Texas, and Silicon Valley.
To match them up with the right opportunity, candidates are asked:
- What they want: Do they prefer set hours, or flexibility? A lot of feedback or a little? A lot or a little risk?
- How they live: Is work their life, or is work work, and life life? Do they want routine or adventure?
- What they know: Public relations? Taxes? HTML?
The goal is to connect them with like-minded people, and with employers, with whom they’ll share the profile of who they are, encapsulated by those three want-live-know things. In the future, employers will be able to describe their culture and then match it to employees based on their preferences.
“There is lots of math and computer stuff behind it all,” Storin says, “but in the end it is about creating one degree of separation between skilled people and the opportunity they belong in.”
One Degree is catering, Storin says, to an audience ages 18-29. It has raised $1.2 million to design and build the product, and is in the process of raising more. It’s in beta with a big insurance company, and is “developing with a Fortune 100 financial services company,” Storin says. “We are also working with Notre Dame to model our channel to university students.”