The job hunt can feel hopeless. There you are, throwing your résumé into the dark abyss that is Craigslist, painfully aware hundreds of others are blindly doing the same. Worse, you never even know if the job is real.
"People have a negative connotation about job boards," said Vasilios Alexiou, admitting he had mixed reactions of his own after graduating from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business with Jason Rivas in 2012. Each have corporate backgrounds; Alexiou worked in consulting and Rivas, finance. But, they weren't looking to climb that kind of ladder.
"We wanted to be in the startup space and do something cool and different," Alexiou said. "But we didn't know where to look."
Sure, companies had come to campus, "but they were the ones with the time and money," added Alexiou. "The rest were going under the radar."
Within two years of graduating, however, the duo made it their job to bring those startups to the forefront.
They launched FirmPlay, a job search website dedicated to taking hopeful applicants behind the scenes of companies through photo and video.
Companies can take the unused content hidden on their "About" page or buried in their social media streams to capture the culture and feel of their office. If they don't have that content readily available, FirmPlay will send a videographer and photographer in.
Alexiou said they spend anywhere from four to eight hours with clients. "We walk through their culture soup to nuts," he added, noting they sit down with a company's executive team to determine what makes a good hire, the average workload and offered employee perks, among other factors.
Applicants can search for the factors that matter most to them using FirmPlay's proprietary "WorkplaceDNA." Keywords include: "City," "Industry," "Dress Code," "Pace," "Work Style" and "Hours." What's more, they can search for free; businesses are the ones charged a monthly fee to have their profile on the site.
"We let you search for the look and feel inside," Alexiou said. "What Pandora did for music, we're doing for company culture. … We're letting people search in a totally different way that no other tool lets them do."
FirmPlay is focused first on startups, according to Alexiou, because that's where they see the real hiring need. "They're all chasing after the same five engineers," he said.
The duo, currently working out of Cambridge co-working space Workbar, would like to take the job search site national. To achieve that, they are about to start fundraising efforts Alexiou would like to see result in a seed round they could close early next year. With more money in the bank, they could build out a team big enough to start providing the additional features users and companies have asked for, such as the ability to flesh out their profile or add content on their own.
Area companies currently on the site include Promoboxx, Nanigans and Wayfair, Boston's e-commerce darling now trading publicly.
"We try and lead by, 'This is the environment you're going to be working in,'" Alexiou said. "It's a different way to tackle the job search."
Images via FirmPlay
