myPitch

Recruiter phone screens waste time. myPitch is a talent platform that leverages the power of asynchronous video to make faster, cheaper, and better hiring decisions.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for myPitch comes from the two sides of the recruiting industry: applying as a candidate and company recruiting.

Job Candidates The early stages of the recruiting process for applicants is very impersonal. Typically, candidates apply to jobs by answering some basic questions, uploading a resume and maybe a cover letter in the hopes that will be enough to catch a recruiter's eye. This causes candidates to simply cast a wide net when applying to jobs which is not the best. Unfortunately, the current state of the early-stage application process doesn't allow candidates to showcase their personality, passion, and ability which is essential in determining company fit.

Recruiters Recruiters typically have a few hours a week blocked off to have introductory conversations with candidates to determine if they are a fit for a particular role. These conversations can run from 15-30 minutes long depending on the seniority of the candidate (i.e recruiters may have more questions for junior candidates than senior candidates). These introductory calls can either lead to the candidate beginning the interview process or the candidate might not be a fit in which case the recruiter may follow up in 3-6 months. This process is the status quo for the top of the recruiting funnel and could be made more efficient by replacing the introductory phone screen with asynchronous video powered by Loom.

What it does

myPitch is a video-based recruiting platform.

On the candidate side, we provide functionality for candidates to create videos (powered by Loom) and share them anywhere on the internet along with some basic profile information. An example public profile is located here: Public Profile Demo. Candidates can share the link anywhere on the internet and people will be able to view that profile. The intended use-case would be for individuals to share their videos in job applicants but could easily be shared on social media outlets (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). This gives candidates the ability to bolster their job applications by showcasing who they are instead of simply being defined by a job history on a resume.

On the recruiter / company side, you can think of myPitch as an applicant tracking system (ATS). Recruiters create, edit, and publish job postings that candidates can apply to. These job postings are similar to what exists today with the exception that recruiters can pose questions to candidates. Those questions are then answered with video instead of text. For example, a question that a recruiter might ask a candidate is: Tell us about a project that you worked on at your current company that you're proud of. This is a common question in phone screens and even late stage interviews. By allowing the answer to be recorded on video it can be used throughout the interview process to assess the candidate as a whole. This saves all parties involved time and energy. Additionally, the candidate can answer the questions on their own time and not be required to schedule a phone screen during the middle of a busy work day.

(Example Live Job Posting)[https://www.mypitch.io/jobs/1]

How we built it

myPitch is a pretty simple fullstack application. The backend is written in Typescript and we are using the nodejs runtime with expressjs as the web framework. Additionally, we are using Postgres + Prisma for the database and ORM respectively. We are using Firebase as an authentication provider to protect sensitive backend routes as well as handle user management on the frontend. The frontend is built using React + Chakra UI for quick prototyping. Lastly, we are using Stripe for payment integrations. The entire app is deployed using Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we wanted to make myPitch a platform just for candidates but midway through the project we decided we wanted to add the Recruiter ATS. We ran into DB Schema migration headaches because of the early assumptions that we made based on the use-cases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud that we were able to build a functioning product that both candidates and recruiters can leverage to simplify and personalize the recruitment process. The team comes from a tech background and has a myriad of stories to share about how inefficient and time wasting early phone screen calls can be.

Another neat thing we are proud of pulling off is dynamically creating record buttons for each question in a job application which allows them to be linked to the correct question.

What we learned

  1. Chakra UI -> This was the teams first time using the React UI Framework and it was amazing. Chakra makes it super easy to build components and prototype applications.
  2. Prisma / Postgres -> In the past the team has leveraged mostly NoSQL databases (Firestore, MongoDB Atlas) to store information. However, given the relational nature of the data models, it made the most sense to use a SQL solution. We assessed a few ORMS (TypeORM, Sequelize, and Prisma) and determined that Prisma was the easies to set up and get started.
  3. Stripe Subscriptions -> Historically the team members have used Stripe to accept one-time payments so this was the first time the team used Stripe for subscriptions and naturally it was rather easy to implement.
  4. Loom -> Both Loom's recordSDK and embedSDK are used heavily throughout the application. It was really great to see how easy it was to implement in our app.

What's next for myPitch

The myPitch team is going to keep iterating on the application and adding some features. Additionally, we are going to try and acquire some early (paying) customers so that we can gather feedback and hopefully continue to build a product that companies, recruiters, and candidates want to use.

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