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How Rolebot Wants To Eliminate The Resume, With Shane Bernstein

Anyone who hires anyone, or has ever looked for a jobs knows how important a resume is. However, in the technical arena--as a programmer, developer, or software engineer--it's hard to tell from a resume how good you really are. Plus, it's often difficult to find that technical talent, which might not be looking for a job. That's where Los Angeles-based Rolebot (www.rolebot.net) comes in. The startup has developed a system which uses information from online forums, source code sharing, technical communities, and the like to help find and rank technical talent. We spoke with founder and CEO, Shane Bernstein, on why he thinks the company's system is far superior to using a resume to find technical talent.

What does Rolebot do?

Shane Bernstein: We're an evidence-based, recruitment engine. We help rank the talent pool, objectively, by their accomplishments in the ecosystem.

How do you do that?

Shane Bernstein: We look at actionable data points and data metrics which are quantifiable across the web, and we qualify them and normalize that data, and sort them based on what they've done.

What kind of data are you gathering?

Shane Bernstein: We're looking at things from a lot of different sites, and using big data to process them. That includes hundreds of thousands of sites on the web today. We're targeting the talent pool on those sites in forums, who are participating in skill assessment tests, or answering questions on forums, putting up code snippets, and so for. We're capturing what value they are bringing to their career, so that companies can see what they are doing. We're going up against the game of the resume, because we don't serve up bullet points of technical skills, we only surface data that shows tangible accomplishments. There are only two, real types of data. One is community or peer evaluation, which are things like Github stars and forks, seeing where you fork code or are copying and pasting code into open source. We are also looking at data on LinkedIn—but only the items that are peer-evaluated, and not self written. We also look at skill assessment data, from sites like HackerRank, and provide a datat set from sites like Stack Overflow, where people have given answers to questions and gotten scored. It's all based on raw data, and we don't manipulate that at all, and normalize the data. That lets us compare and contrast users across individual sites, and help rank the talent pool accordingly, and rank them subjectively. It's all objective data. It's entirely based on the ecosystem, and how people rank in order for the specific skillsets, applied to the talent pool. The second part of the platform addresses other aspects of recruitment, including prequalification, and the other is around engagement, where we've just launched a LinkedIn plug-in that's an engagement tool.

What's the problem you are solving here for companies?

Shane Bernstein: We're out here to eliminate how sourcing is done. Right now, there are humans who have to figure out who they want to talk to, and prequalification is sixty percent of the recruitment effort. It's all about sourcing and the workflow of recruitment. The other forty percent is engagement with prospects. So, we're eliminating sourcing. Based on what skills you select, we can provide people who are already prequalified across the entire ecosystem.

How did you end up starting the company?

Shane Bernstein: I've been in the business for over fifteen years in recruiting. I was inspired looking for a tool to increase output as an agency, and decrease our costs. Oftentimes, I felt like we were spending a lot of money just bringing in bodies, rather than optimizing our existing team. It took four years to build this tool, because no one else did. I felt like, if we could build this and bring it to the masses, to other agencies and companies, we could help them more efficiently recruit without the expense. The team is myself and my co-founder, Alex Mostafi, our CTO, and we also have a sales director and director of engineering up north in San Francisco. We have a distributed team, with customer success in Bogota Columbia, and a small data side in Romania.

So what's the status of the company, and what kind of funding have you received?

Shane Bernstein: We raised $750,000 last January, and we've just become revenue positive and started making money, although we're not profitable yet. We've just started to go out to look for a seed funding round.

Are people using the product now?

Shane Bernstein: There are two products, with one derived from the first one. The first product is a platform, a technical recruitment engine. That's really for staffing firms, for B2B staffing. We went out to both staffing firms and individual companies, but we got the most traction with staffing firms, who identified with it. Companies all around the country are now using it, including some big regional firms. The second tool is our Chrome extension, which sits on top of LinkedIn. That's an engagement tool. That enables anyone to engage with other people on LinkedIn, with the goal of getting a phone interview. It's pretty cool, and allows you to have unlimited outreach, and you only paid for results. We have several local customers using it now, quite successfully.

Can you really get enough candidates through using those online web sites—and do all that many developers use those sites and tools?

Shane Bernstein: If you exist on the web, you exist. It's a 100 percent passive pool. We've built an artficial intelligence platform, which tells you who is more active than others, based on their behavior. If you look at Github, there are 15 to 20 million users. There are 100 million if you look at Stack Overflow, all of Github, all of HackerRank, and all of Kaggle. Right now, we are really targeting the largest concentration of tech talent, the biggest consortium in terms of talent pool. We target 20 different sites, and are adding new ones all the time. There are thousands of them, and we're adding the biggest ones with the biggest niches. For example, Kaggle is very data science friendly, and most likely, a data scientist is likely on Kaggle. DevOps folks are most likely on Github. Stack Overflow has 10 million, and HackerRank has 2.5 million. We're really getting the largest talent pools we can capture, the concentrated talent pools before we go out to smaller niche sites.

So it sounds like developers really need to try to be active on these public sites, for any visibility?

Shane Bernstein: It's really hard to game this, you just have to be more active in a community. Some of the sites are scoring based, such as Stack Overflow. You might go and answer a bunch of questions to get rank, but on some sites, for example on Force.com, the Salesforce site, based on your questions and answers with peers you get different karma points. It's really about seeing how much you are putting into a community. It's not about trying to shine, but participating. Most people do it anyways, especially the 20 to 25 percent of the workforce who are Millennials. That said, we do have people who only exist on LinkedIn, but that's why we sought to include LinkedIn, because we didn't want to exclude that talent. However, I think 75 percent of the talent pool, in general, has surfaced in some capacity on these sites.

Finally, what's next for the company?

Shane Bernstein: It's really about messaging. We're trying to find the talent without a resume, engage that talent, and figure out how to find them where they sit. We want to connect with them, and see where they're headed.

Thanks!