The UK-based startup Otta has raised £850,000 in seed funding for its job search and recruitment platform, according to TechCrunch. The company’s platform prioritizes the needs of job seekers, an approach they say is long overdue in a recruitment market worth £35 billion in the UK and $150 billion in the US.
They’ve now raised seed funding from the UK venture capital firm LocalGlobe, as well as angel investors such as Indeed co-founder Paul Forster, Spotify investor Shakil Khan, and Nested co-founder Matt Robinson.
“We started Otta to reinvent a broken industry that wasn’t putting candidates first. Recruiters charging 15-30% of salary can only offer jobs from their clients. LinkedIn orders its search results by the companies paying the most, not what’s best for the candidate,” said co-founder and CEO Sam Franklin.
“We have committed to only making money in a way that improves the experience for candidates. For example, this means we don’t charge companies to post jobs, so we can give candidates access to all of the world’s most innovative companies.”
The company was founded earlier this year by Franklin, Theo Margolius and Xav Kearney, all former employees of the real estate startup Nested, and all younger than 25.
Franklin says that other platforms, such as LinkedIn, overwhelm job searchers with thousands of results. Recommendations are often sorted only by pay, with limited options for filtering.
And recruiters only offer opportunities from their clients, leading job seekers to miss out on roles at other growing, innovative firms.
Otta starts the job search process with a quiz to get an initial sense of a job seeker’s experience, preferences, and goals. Users are then shown relevant jobs one by one, with an algorithm personalizing the results further based on their responses. They collect data on each job, including experience required, visa sponsorships, and technology used in the role.
“Similar to how Spotify makes recommendations based on what you listen to, we use machine learning to recommend you jobs based on which jobs you like and dislike,” Franklin told TechCrunch.
It’s an approach that focuses, above all else, on connecting job searchers to the roles they’re best suited for.
“We also won’t allow companies to pay to influence our search results, as we want to show candidates their best roles first,” according to Franklin.
The company says thousands of job searchers have used the platform since it was launched in August.
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