As more people are looking for work than ever, PitchMe offers services to both employers and potential employees to rethink how candidates are represented in the recruitment process.

PitchMe is a skills-based talent marketplace that matches candidates’ soft and personal skills with the right jobs and upskilling opportunity, as opposed to simply their work experience and education.

Dina Bayasanova, CEO and co-founder of PitchMe, says that the traditional CV is outdated, and allows for bias to take control in the recruitment process. PitchMe, however, is here to make recruitment an equal playing field for all.

PitchMe has just raised over $1 million in investment, what impact will that have?

It will help our business to sustain a growth which we have already been experiencing for half a year. It will help us to grow a team to move faster in terms of what services we want to offer and how we want to expand our product to our users and customers. At the same time, we will keep working on our never-ending technological development.

How are you looking to expand?

In terms of the business, we’re already operating globally, so we are expanding the services. We are offering specific tools for employers and adding additional services which we’ve never done before on the platform, so they don’t need to look for additional providers anymore. We are going to launch some interesting product solutions for our candidates, and our customers, like candidates, hopefully, will become our ambassadors.

How does replacing the CV eliminate bias?

We present a multi-layered profile of a person, so it’s not only professional skills and tools that the person knows, but also the personality traits and soft skills which a person possesses, which enables us as employers to make a culture and team as well. When we encourage employers to look at the profile of skills, they are more eager, or they’re more curious to meet a person without knowing any information about the background name, nationality, age, and so on. They are focusing on the core of the person, like how this particular individual might help them to solve a business problem. Then when they already see the competences and the full spectrum of skills, they are more open-minded to interview.

Are skills more important than experience?

Tech giants and the most progressive companies in the world already admit that the traditional way of acquiring skills is rudimental. So, people acquire skills via non-traditional routes like online education, freelance work, and project work. In our experience, this is a combination of different factors. We wouldn’t downgrade the traditional education altogether, but we would say that formal education complemented with online courses enhances your skill set and helps people to find a fit in the employment market sooner rather than later after graduating. What I would say is that traditional education on its own is becoming less and less important.

Can graduates go straight into their dream job nowadays?

So, the profile which we generate helps people to reflect on what skill set they possess, and what skills are demanded in their particular sector for that specific role so that they can work on their career development or their learning paths.

We work with people individually and recommend modules that can enhance their employability or make them more able to survive the competitive job market. Instead of making a blind choice, graduates and young professionals can then actually make a more rational decision on what job they want to get into because their skill set will be ready for it.

How does PitchMe benefit employers, too?

Blind screening opens up a horizon of search, so they’re not limited by the image of an ideal candidate, which you had before. Removing subjectivity from a pre-screening process is very important to land into the further selection process, to find candidates who wouldn’t be qualified otherwise.

The second important thing about the overall selection or recruitment process on PitchMe is that it is based on a very accurate matching algorithm. We merge not only the professional skills of the person, but also match their personality to the company culture, which in traditional recruitment is done later.

When we offer this multi-layered profiling, we see the shortlisting resulting in real numerical results. For example, one in 14 candidates shortlisted on our platform receives a job offer, in comparison to other means of recruitment, where it’s one in 30. The overall talent search process takes only three weeks with us, as opposed to eight to 12 weeks in traditional recruitment. That’s quite a lot of benefits.

Why should we encourage employers to begin recruiting people again?

It is an unprecedented time when highly qualified talent has entered the job market in other conditions, which in otherwise they would never be available. Originally if you wanted to hire these people, you’d have to convince them to move from one company to another. The pandemic has brought an organic growth of unemployed people, so people are taking an opportunity to change careers.

There are highly skilled professionals available on the market, looking actively for jobs. This is a fantastic opportunity to refresh new blood into your company. Many employers are taking this opportunity and advantage of this market situation to upskill their existing teams and enhance them with the talent they would never be able to hire in other circumstances.

Competition from tech giants in terms of hunting for tech talent, or in general for talent is decreasing. These companies also need to make sure that existing employees are mentally healthy and that everything is working smoothly. They are more focused on actually surviving rather than growing. In the pre-COVID-19 scenario, as a small startup or as entrepreneurs of growing businesses, you would be competing with giants, and you can’t do anything about it.