This week, the Startup Spotlight shines on RightFit.
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What is your background?
Sincia Liu, co-founder, also serves as President of Comrise, Inc. Rob Bigini, co-founder and VP of Product and Ops for RightFit, is the former Head of Product Development for D&B, and VP of Global Operations for Comrise, Inc. In addition, Rob serves on the advisory board for the FSRM Master’s Program at Rutgers University. Steven Grover is the Head of Growth for RightFit. Prior to joining RightFit, Steven led marketing for Comrise, Inc.
Tell us about the team you have built so far.
To date, we have 6 full-time employees and 3 part-time employees. Amongst the full-time employees, in addition to Rob and Steven, we have 3 software engineers and a data scientist.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?
Our seed round was funded in Q1 2014 by our parent company, Comrise, Inc. – a global staffing firm with offices in the U.S., China, and Hong Kong.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Our products were built to leverage the existing candidates and data that reside in applicant tracking systems and vendor management systems.
Many companies have paid fees to external staffing firms for candidates they have previously recruited for other jobs or who have applied to earlier positions. This commonly occurs because searching their own resume data has become very difficult or even impossible for HR and talent acquisition professionals due to inefficiencies and limitations that exist within ATS and VMS systems. It is very common for companies to never tap into their own resume data and as a result, qualified candidates are getting lost within the ATS. Our products were built to help HR and talent acquisition teams’ better leverage the candidates and data within their ATS.
Describe the business, core products and services?
The first tool, known as RightFit, is a patented candidate prioritization algorithm which improves the searching, filtering, and ranking functionality of candidates within an ATS. It does this by prioritizing candidates based on their probability of being a fit for a job instead of solely by the number of times a keyword appears on their resume.
Our second product is an ATS data visualization tool known as RightView, which provides end-users with a global view of the candidates and data stored within their ATS. Results from searches conducted within RightView are grouped in the form of visualized clusters with readable labels gathered from the common phrases contained within the returned resumes. This helps end-users more easily visualize and sort through search results. It can also help them understand what types of candidates already exist within their ATS before having to use external sourcing tools. In addition, RightView can be used as an educational tool to help recruiters & HR professionals learn common terms associated with the jobs they are staffing.
Our team received the patent for the RightFit algorithm in June 2014 which was when we decided to take our products (which had previously only been used by the Comrise recruiting team) and sell them to the market.
Who do you expect your customers and users to be at launch?
Our customers will be corporations with 500+ employees and staffing firms, as well as VMS’s and MSP’s. In terms of users, we anticipate that our products will be used by talent acquisition teams, i.e. recruiters and sourcers, as well as program managers and hiring managers.
Where do you stand right now with regard to funding?
We raised our seed round in Q1 2014 and we are planning to fundraise in Q3 of 2015 to help further accelerate the development of our product and expand our sales and marketing teams.
What is the business AND revenue model? What is your strategy for profitability?
We plan to sell directly to corporations and staffing firms, as well as license and/or white-label our technology to ATS platforms. Our goal is to leverage demand from the customers of ATS’s to push for an implementation directly into their platforms.
Did anyone tell you this wasn’t going to be successful?
Absolutely. Like with any new idea, there will be naysayers. The doubt around RightFit and RightView was in being able to prove to customers that our prioritization algorithm provides better results and surfaces higher quality applicants than their current ATS’s. To assuage these doubts, we’ve been able to leverage metrics such as source-of-hire and time-to-submit to prove the business impact that our products provide.
How will you measure success 12 months from now?
Success will be measured by the improvement our clients’ bottom lines as a result of the use of our products. We believe growth will happen organically once our customers realize the value of being able to easily and efficiently tap into their own resume data.
