It's a universal complaint among job seekers. "I put out at least five or six resumes a week," said Beth Bobrow. When asked if she ever heard back from those employers, she said, "Most of the time I do not."
This era of applying for jobs online has created a climate of frustration for the applicant and too many resumes for employers to review.
"Applicants are pretty much spraying and praying. They're going online, they're check-boxing the jobs they want to apply for and they're just applying for thousands of jobs," Bright.com CEO Steve Goodman said.
Goodman believes Bright.com is the solution. The site developed an algorithm, similar to what Google did for search, that evaluates your resume and produces a score employers use to identify candidates to interview.
"Over two million resumes, 8.5 million job seekers, 20 million job descriptions, about 75,000 man hours and development, and it took us about a year and a half to get there," Goodman said.
Bright.com indicates that the more people who use the service, the more accurate the algorithm will be in terms of predicting success between the applicant and the company. There's no cost to job seekers because the employer pays.
Clarissa Cua is a graphic designer and she's using Bright.com for the first time. However, as an older worker, she was taken aback when asked for her graduation year and level of education. "You're discriminated upon your age and you're discriminated on your education," she said.
Goodman says applicants don't need to worry. "The algorithm never looks at that data. It only looks at the meat of the resume, the core of the resume, so therefore you never have to worry about any human bias towards a resume," he said.
A San Francisco-based company, Bright does have strengths and weaknesses. "A tech position in the Bay Area will score very well and we'll find great candidates for great jobs. For other industries, such as agriculture, we won't perform as well because we don't have a ton of those jobs on our site," said Jacob Bollinger, a senior data analyst.
By doing a better job of matching applicants to jobs, Bright.com might be taking the "search" out of job search.
