Mindlessly submitting resumes and receiving zero feedback is every job seeker’s nightmare. The whole process of finding a new position can be time-consuming, and quite frankly, miserable. It all seems to rely on one sheet of paper summarizing your qualifications, which is both limiting and often doesn’t do your experience justice, not to mention the unavoidable biases that come when an employer views your resume.
However, one local business is changing the rules of job seeking. CredHive creates an anonymous platform that allows employers to evaluate job seekers based solely on the work they have done, while also giving job seekers more control in the relationship.
“We infused anonymity into the search,” says CredHive Founder and CEO Tracey Parsons. She describes the platform as, “Evaluating your talent based on what you actually did.”
So how does it work?
A job seeker registers on CredHive and receives 250MB of free cloud storage to upload examples of their work – power points, documents, websites, articles, etc., with accompanying visuals – which are then labeled as a cred. Parsons advises talent to think of all the work that has unfortunately been left behind at past positions, and use CredHive as a place to memorialize portfolio samples. When it’s time for the hunt to begin, a job seeker raises their antenna, making their creds visible to employers.
Employers browse the anonymous creds, evaluating a job seeker on their samples alone. If they find something they like, an employer will ping a job seeker with more information. CredHive empowers the job seeker to decide what is a fit for them. Talent can either release their contact information to the employer, or turn down the offer. If a job seeker passes on the opportunity, their antenna will ask a few questions to evaluate their preferences.
“Your antenna is smart. It wants to learn everything it can about you so it’s not wasting anybody’s time,” Parsons says. The tool determines what the job seeker finds undesirable about an offer, and hides their creds from other employers that fit the same criteria.
Thinking ahead, CredHive has eliminated the worst-case scenario of your current employer finding you on the site.
“When you are uploading a cred, it asks you your employer and it blocks that employer from seeing your creds,” Parsons says.
An employer will never post an ad or a job opening on CredHive. They are only allowed to look for talent. As an employer browses creds they have three options – save a cred, view all of a candidate’s creds or contact the job seeker. When an employer reaches out, they send more information on the position they are trying to fill, and highlight why a candidate would want to learn more.
With CredHive, an employer won’t be able to make decisions based on your years of experience or that gap in your resume where you couldn’t find a position, or even make assumptions based on your name. Decisions are made based on talent shown.
This concept is a departure from typically over-idealized job postings and resumes. A brewing problem while seeking talent, Parsons remembers sitting in a meeting with a Fortune 50 company in 2008 as they complained about spending large sums of money to advertise positions that ultimately didn’t help them find the right talent. Parsons sees relying on just a resume as relying on an antiquated document that hasn’t changed for 100 years.
You can’t continue the same process and expect different results, so ChedHive was ultimately, “Born out of a necessity to give them a better way to find talent,” Parsons says.
In trying to create a better way to assess talent, CredHive is receiving largely positive feedback.
“Everybody keeps telling us they feel like this is the future,” Parsons says. As they exit private beta, the company is positioned for growth as they focus on garnering attention for their new job search platform.
For more information, visit credhive.com.
