inploi is another jobs app that wants to kill off the service industry CV

Walking around the neighborhood handing out CVs in the hopes of scoring shifts in a local cafe or restaurant has never been an efficient job search process. But workers in the service industry still do it. London based startup inploi is hoping to change that — it’s gunning to replace the paper CV with a mobile profile and location-based jobs platform.

The founders say they came up with the idea after trying to find hospitality work themselves during their university holidays — a process they found to be time-consuming and frustrating. “We realised that employers were also spending too much time and money, hiring the people they need.”

inploi, which launched in beta late last month, is actually one of several European startups chasing high turnover service industry jobs with a new recruitment modus operandi via a smartphone chat app — with the likes of Accel-backed JobToday, Barcelona-based CornerJob and Atomico-backed jobandtalent all spying similar opportunities here: looking to leverage the speed, familiarity and convenience of mobile messaging to kill off the paper CV.

But inploi, which is backed by £200,000 in pre-seed financing at this point (raised in January from a group of friends, family, angels, a Chicago-based family office, and a Johannesburg based investment fund), reckons it’s positioning is a little different vs the better resourced regional competition. It argues rivals are taking existing structures — such as the job board model or the staffing agency model — and optimizing them for mobile. Whereas it claims it’s aiming for a more radical rethinking of how recruitment is done in this sector.

“‘Agency’ model startups still act as intermediaries, charging significant markups on the labour that they broker. Optimised jobs boards (like JobToday for instance) still uses the volume of candidates that they can send an employer as a selling point — we think that this misses the point. inploi is working to drive the candidate-to-hire ratio down by reimagining the process entirely, saving everybody time, and money,” co-founder Matthew de la Hey tells TechCrunch.

“On one level we are building a recruitment driven ‘LinkedIn’ for the service economy, rather than a mobile optimised jobs board. On a more macro level we want to change the way that staffing works at this end of the economy entirely, providing workers with credible ‘working passports’ with which they can get more and better work.”

Job seekers using the inploi app create a profile with their experience and skills (users can also create a short intro video for their profile if they wish), as well as specifying their hourly rate and location, in order to be matched with relevant job opportunities — applying in-app if they wish to do so.

de la Hey concedes the matching element is “fairly binary” at this nascent stage, but the intention is to hone it over time based on data generated by usage of the platform — such as response rates and reviews.

The platform covers both gig economy one-offs and full-time positions. So as well as matching job seekers with permanent roles, the aim is also to be a marketplace for one-off staffing needs, such as for festivals or corporate events, starting at one shift to up to five days’ work. In that instance inploi handles the entire transaction in the app, with payment powered by Stripe.

A key facet of the inpoli platform is ratings, with de la Hey noting that both staff and employers are expected to be rated. (For gig work, ratings are provided at the point of payment after the work has been completed; for full-time roles employers are prompted to rate hired workers “after a period of time” and vice versa.)

“The review system is mutual,” he notes, talking up inploi’s wider “mission” to try to equalize the relationship between employers and workers which he argues is “too often skewed towards the former”. “The reviews employers receive from workers are private. Workers are rated across five areas — punctuality, presentation, co-operation, communication, and quality of work, in addition to short written feedback. These are public.

“However in order to avoid possible ‘downward spiral’ situations we will only make an employees reviews public once the employer reviewing them has received five or more 4/5 Star reviews from workers, rendering them a ‘trusted employer’.”

“Employers who consistently receive bad reviews from workers will be removed from the inploi community,” he adds.

inploi also offers a dashboard view for its enterprise users, providing them with what it dubs “key HR data” on things like staff hire costs, applicant volumes, labour turnover rates and market wage positions. “To our knowledge this is unique. In time as the data we have becomes more comprehensive our matching algorithm will become smarter and develop into a key piece of our technology,” adds de la Hey.

inploi launched its mobile recruitment platform on iOS a couple of weeks ago (an Android app is slated as coming soon), focusing initially on London and the UK, and on the hospitality industry specifically. Although de la Hey says he also sees future potential to expand into other sectors with similar characteristics down the line, such as retail, domestic work, security staff, construction and railway workers.

At this point, inploi has 65 employers signed up to offer jobs through the app, ranging from single site establishments to multi-site chains — including Bill’s, the Corbin & King Group, YouMeSushi, Daylesford and Deliveroo.

While the potential reach of signed up employers is around 700 sites across the U.K. less than 50 jobs are listed at present, and inploi has less than 500 job seekers. So it’s certainly very early days for the startup, albeit no one dominant mobile app network has emerged yet for this segment so there’s plenty to play for.

And while inploi is U.K.-specific right now, with an “immediate focus on EMEA, the team’s wider goal is to build a global marketplace — with de la Hey noting possible future expansion opportunities in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In terms of business model, while the platform is free for job seekers to use, inpoli charges employers seeking to fill permanent positions on a freemium tiered basis — so it’s free for small employers with limited hiring needs but larger employers with more activity are charged if they wish to interact with candidates applying for jobs they have posted, including using the in-app chat feature. In order to do this employers have to connect with applicants and it charges for the number of connections on a volume driven sliding scale, says de la Hey.

For gig work, via its QuickShift marketplace, inploi adds a service fee onto the total amount paid by the employer at the point of paying the finished job.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says tech industry is underutilizing diverse talent pool

Many tech companies in Silicon Valley like to blame the lack of diversity on what they call the pipeline. Their argument is that there are simply not enough qualified female and/or underrepresented minorities qualified to fill these high-tech roles. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has effectively called bullshit on that.

Of the people graduating from top engineering programs, 9 percent are black and Latino, but representation at tech firms typically falls around 5 percent, according to the EEOC’s recent analysis of the 2014 EEO-1 data the agency collected. That means the current talent pool is being underutilized, EEOC Chair Jenny Yang said today at a public meeting between EEOC commissioners and a panel of experts including Kapor Capital Partner Benjamin Jealous, McKinsey & Company Partner Kweilin Ellingrud, AARP Foundation Senior Attorney Laurie McCann and others.

Orrick Partner Erin M. Connell at the EEOC teleconference in San Francisco. On screen is Benjamin Jealous, partner at Kapor Capital.

“While there is some truth to the ‘pipeline’ theory and anxiety over the ability of the US educational system to provide a sufficiently large, well trained, and diverse labor pool, there are additional factors at play,” the EEOC’s latest report, Diversity In High Tech, states. “For example, about nine percent of graduates from the nation’s top computer science programs are from under-represented minority groups. However, only five percent of the large tech firm employees are from one of these groups. This presents the unlikely scenarios that either major employers in the field are unable to attract four out of nine under-represented minority graduates from top schools or almost half of the minority graduates of top schools do not qualify for the positions for which they were educated.”

The report also outlines a few “concerning trends,” like how the tech industry nationwide employed a larger share of white people, Asian Americans and men than the overall private industry, according to 2014 EEO-1 data.

Among leading tech firms in Silicon Valley, 57 percent of executive employees were white, 36 percent were Asian American, 1.6 percent were Hispanic and less than 1 percent were black, according to the EEOC’s 2014 data analysis. Among the total employed at top Silicon Valley tech companies, 47 percent were white, 30 percent were women, 41 percent were Asian American, 3 percent were black and 6 percent were Hispanic.

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Diversity and inclusion in tech, as it turns out, is a top priority for the EEOC. That sentiment was made clear today in Yang’s opening remarks and in the EEOC’s latest report. Although the meeting took place in Washington, D.C., I was able to sit in at the teleconference at the EEOC’s San Francisco district office, where Connell participated via the livestream.

Ultimately, today’s meeting was a big brain-picking session around issues relating to diversity and inclusion, with the intention of bringing the topic to the mainstream and getting commissioners focused on it. The next step for the EEOC is having conversations with tech companies, though, the solution Jealous put forward to create a national mandate is one that could be really effective.

“At the end of the day, it comes down to companies being reluctant to change,” Jealous said during the Q&A portion.

There was also a lot of conversation and discussion around age and disability status. Although there is no data about the number of disabled people working in tech, we “can probably assume that there is underrepresentation,” EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum said. She went on to say that getting that data is something the federal government can work toward. Around age, AARP’s McCann noted that age discrimination is real in Silicon Valley and that, often times, job descriptions show a preference for new or recent graduates, or “digital natives.”

“Just because someone is a digital native,” McCann said, “doesn’t mean they’re an expert in technology.”