UPDATED 07:30 EST / FEBRUARY 09 2016

NEWS

Startup aims to turn tech recruiting process upside down

A new website for technology professionals launches today with a mission to turn the traditional recruiting process on its head.

Woo enables tech professionals to define their criteria for employment via anonymous profiles. Prospective employers can then pick and choose promising candidates and pay a fee to connect with them. The service is aimed at passive job-seekers, or those who are aren’t actively in the market for work but are open to inquiries from employers who have job opportunities that closely match their interests.

Woo upends traditional recruiting by letting job candidates specify what they want out of a job. This can include things like interests, salary, location, benefits, training and work environment. Woo imports data on candidates’ profiles from places like LinkedIn, Github and Stack Overflow, then strips all personal identifiers using a proprietary anonymizing technology.

Once an employer asks to connect to a candidate, Woo provides the candidate with information about the job, employer, culture, funding and other background. If the job seeker asks for an introduction, Woo enables a direct contact.

Because the service removes much of the uncertainty about matching candidates and employers, response rates are orders of magnitude higher than popular recruiting platforms like LinkedIn, said Liran Kotzer, CEO of Woo. “Because all the employers do the same spray and pray LinkedIn becomes a very noisy platform for candidates,” he said. “We see a response rate of 75% [of employer inquiries] because we show only candidates for whom there’s a probability the employer can provide what they want.”

The Tel Aviv- and San Francisco-based Woo, which has raised $2.35 million in seed funding, has signed on more than 100 employers, including Adobe Systems Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and AOL Inc., Kotzer said. However, it costs companies nothing to sign up, since they pay only when a match is made. Woo currently charges a fee of 10 percent of the candidate’s first-year salary, but it is experimenting with subscriptions and other pricing models, Kotzer said. There is no cost to job-seekers to enroll.

Woo is currently available on an invitation-only basis to technology professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the company plans to expand to other industries and geographies soon. Request an invitation at the company’s website.


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