This is a First Look: It's the first time any news outlet or blog has covered this startup. You can read more First Looks here. (We do this a lot.)
You've heard the expression, "If the product is free, you are the product." It's the principle behind Facebook, gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter and any number of other services that harvest the content you freely give, selling it to more powerful and deep-pocketed entities who want a piece of your precious time.
In the case of LinkedIn, Nachi Junankar has a more pointed way to put it: The professional social network is an "exotic game farm," he says. Recruiters are the hunters and you, job-seeker, are the exotic game.
Don't get upset: they're shooting at you with money after all.
But Junankar, a serial entrepreneur (OpenMobile, Retail IQ) gets heated about the imbalance between recruiters and employers, who have tools and software to make them more effective, and job seekers, who are out in the cold.
"The HR game has its own rules," he said. "People don't know the rules."
So, they send résumés that are missing the keywords needed for the job. An automated job filter zaps that résumé before any human eye sees it. This is the first problem FaceForward, a startup founded by Junankar and Marv Goldschmitt (Lotus, DecisionPath), intends to solve.
They are betting job hunters will pay about $20 a month to use a service that generates multiple résumés, each customized for a specific job listing, designed to emphasize keywords that get the applicant past those job filters. They're adding to that with a kind of productivity tool that reminds users when to follow up and suggests opportunities.
If FaceForward is successful at proving job hunters will pay for a service that puts job-finding tools in their hands, it will be a step forward in professional networking not unlike what LinkedIn did to Monster, when it added social networks and user-generated content to the online job board. (Veterans of Monster love to tell the tale of how Monster had a shot at buying LinkedIn, back when it was valued somewhere in the 8 figures.)
FaceForward has a long way to go. So far, they've got about 50 users in a closed beta. According to Junankar, 100 percent of those users have said they would recommend the service. 78 percent have said they would pay for it. (That's not bad.) They're planning a wider beta in Q1 of 2016. They've started the company with a little of their own money, and are in the midst of raising a $1 million seed, starting with a $450,000 AngelList syndicate round on the BOSS Syndicate, led by PayPal's Max Metral.
When Junankar and Goldschmitt first got together to come up with a new startup, they talked out 23 different ideas.
"We wanted to find something that you could use your data for your own good," Junankar told me. They looked at family, health and jobs as categories before they settled on jobs and what would become a startup called FaceForward. "This was the 24th idea."
