AI, music, and AI: interesting new recruiting sites and services

Geez! I can’t believe it’s been almost a year since I did a round up of new recruiting sites and services! So many services have risen, fallen, and been renamed. Well, I’m still going to give it a shot – and if you want even more, be sure to check out the Chad&Cheese podcast, where they take down new companies all the time, and Tim Sackett’s recurring T3 reviews. Both are great resources. Let’s take a look at what caught my eye:

• AllyO: AllyO essentially automates a number of functions for recruiters to make them more efficient. They say, “Ally is an AI recruiter that utilizes natural language processing and machine learning to automate and self-optimize the end-to-end recruiting workflow.” (Notice that they call themselves Ally in the text but AllyO on the site? Odd.) They’ve managed to raise about $14M so I assume we’ll be hearing more from them. I expect this use of AI to become endemic in our industry over the next 5-8 years. So listen up, job boards!
• NextPlay: They are offering Ellen, which is an intelligent mobile app that personalizes career development tailored for every employee, at scale. (Interestingly enough, I’ve also seen parallel apps for the education market targeting students). At its core, it matches employees to mentors based on what it can extract about the employee – and (of course) provides the employer with lots of analytics.
• YouTeam: This Y Combinator-backed company claims to give you access to engineers available for dedicated contractor jobs at top IT consulting firms ‘that you can’t find on other sites’. Why can’t you find them? Because they’re working for IT consulting firms – but just happen to have some free time for your job. Interesting idea.
• Jamifind: Think of it as Craigslist for musicians: ‘Jamifind is a free platform for all level musicians to find band members and music lessons.’ What I like about it (being a former musician and all) is the combination of self-rating for various skills, geolocation, and convenience. I’m sure there are other similar services but this is the one I found!
• Pathrise: What they say: ‘Pathrise invests in a small number of ambitious university students or recent graduates by coaching them to get a competitive internship or job. The program is completely free upfront. In exchange, Pathrise fellows agree to pay back a share of their first year’s salary if and only if they get hired.’ A different model, indeed! And by the way, we’re talking 7% of the 1st year’s salary. Not sure how it scales, but it allows participating employers to cherry-pick their future employees.
• WorkTheSeasons: Not AI, not blockchain – just a traditional employment hub for people who want to pursue seasonal work (primarily agricultural). This New Zealand site (also in Pakistan) is a product of a training company that appears to be partnering with regional and national governments to employ the under-employed. Great idea!
• Celestial.ai: Because you gotta use AI in your name, right? On the candidate side, Celestial says it will ‘automatically build your professional graph based on what our platform can find about you on the Internet’, then send you jobs. On the employer side, they rank those same candidates and try to match them to the right jobs. Nothing earth-shattering – unless it works.
• Elevator: This tech-focused hiring site revolves around the idea that software development happens in teams – so why not hire one? In other words, this is an organized aqui-hiring site. Intriguing idea, and one that would be cool – if it can survive and scale.
• VCV: Gotta have one more AI site, right? They say that ‘VCV is an AI-powered Robot-Recruiter that searches for candidates, calls them with questions using voice recognition, and then invites them to record a video interview.’ Either creepy or the future, depending on your own personal biases. VCV claims to save major amounts of time in the hiring process, though.

OK, that’s it for now. I will do my best to be a bit more punctual about these round-ups going forward. If you’ve seen a cool new service or site, let me know!

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