By Springrole team
March 15, 2018. This article was originally published here
We live in a world where it’s hard to trust everything you read on the Internet. It feels like anyone can call themselves an “expert” or “ thought leader,” without the credentials or experience to back it up. There’s a lot of noise out there, and it can feel incredibly overwhelming.
In the recruitment industry, trusted professional attestation makes the difference between the right hire and the wrong hire, and consequently the success or possible failure of the enterprise.
Hiring the wrong candidate is costly.
Can you trust the references that someone provides? How can you be sure that their skill level is at par with your expectations ?
These are not mistakes that employers can afford to make — each new hire is incredibly costly, and the ‘wrong hire’ is even costlier. Studies show that replacing a ‘wrong hire’ costs on average 6 to 9 months salary in recruiting and training expenses and replacing a highly skilled candidate can cost a company up to 213% of the candidate’s annual salary.
And it makes looking for a job even harder.
As a job seeker, finding a new job can be difficult and stressful — after submitting endless applications, candidates hopelessly wait for interview requests which may never come. The lucky ones that do receive interview requests, may not hear back afterwards.
How can you make it clear to prospective employers that you CAN do the job at hand, when they may already have let go of 3 people before you with similar credentials and experience? As the job market becomes more competitive every day, it’s more imperative to find ways to stand out from the crowd.
At SpringRole, we’re taking the guessing game out of hiring.
After years of experiencing firsthand the frustrations of finding great talent (our team has personally sourced hundreds of hires for companies), we saw that there was a need for change in the industry.
The advent of blockchain technology and its ability to promote trust and integrity gives us capacity to create the change the industry needs. By employing the power of the blockchain, we are able to provide a platform for validating skills, credentials and experience of prospective hires.
We are creating a system that’s better for both employers and job-seekers, by providing employers with the trusted information they need to make sound hiring decisions, and by creating a system that increases discoverability for talented candidates and lets the best hires rise to the top. It’s a win-win that we see both sides of the hiring process embrace.
SpringRole creates a global pool of talent for a borderless economy
53% of resumes are estimated to contain some level of inaccuracy. This creates a need for the employer to use background verification and reference checks in an attempt to validate the information — a time consuming and costly endeavor.
With our system, repeated background and reference checks will be a thing of the past.
Users will reach out to their educational institutions, employers, and qualified endorsers to verify their education credentials, work experience, and skills. This verification will be conducted securely and once complete, written directly into the blockchain via the SpringRole protocol.
Through the protocol, employers will be able to access the prospective hire’s information and feel confident that every piece of information on their profile has already been rigorously verified. The implications of this are far-reaching: expanding our idea of what is trusted and verified, employers can hire more effectively, streamline teams, increase productivity and even increase wages.
Beyond local? Yes. Think global.
Here’s an example: In the US, engineers are more in demand now than ever before. We have long known that Asian markets have an astounding supply of engineering talent. Seems simple enough to connect the two, right?
Until now, it’s been difficult, if not impossible, to identify which potential hires have the skill and competency level desired. As a result, employers have either been hesitant to hire offshore talent, or disappointed to discover that hires were not actually able to meet their needs.
Enabling the best talent to access a new world of opportunity
In the past, you could be the most talented Python developer out there, but looking at your online profile, you’d be virtually indistinguishable from someone who learned to code a few months ago. In a system where anyone can provide a recommendation or an endorsement, it’s impossible to know who to trust.
Candidates were unable to differentiate themselves from their peers and prove their capabilities.
SpringRole, however, allows its candidates to shine, enabling a true meritocracy to emerge. Individuals are no longer limited by the borders of their hometown, city, or even country. As the global demand for talent is ever-increasing, we’re giving individuals the tools to secure the work they want, wherever they want.
We envision a new world.
A world where an employer can hire someone on the other side of the planet without questioning their capabilities. We’re doing it through a system that incentivizes both sides of the talent equation.
Most social networks (e.g. LinkedIn) take in your personal data and monetize that data — but there are no rewards for the user. SpringRole is a system thatincentivizes and rewards users for participating.
Users are incentivized to take actions that strengthen the network, for example, when you refer a friend, a company, or an academic institution to join the platform, SpringRole rewards you with SPRING tokens. You can then use SPRING tokens to invest in people you trust.
By contributing a small portion of your tokens to attest the previous experience of a colleague, you increase their chances of getting hired. If someone you endorsed gets hired through SpringRole, you (and everyone else who endorsed that individual) gets rewarded with tokens.
In this way, we’re creating a system in which everyone wins — where both businesses and individuals are able to meaningfully share in the rewards of creating a trusted network.
Paving the way for a trust based world
Through SpringRole, we are ushering in an unprecedented level of trust and transparency. We are also delighted to see that our vision is shared by many others in this space. Several universities are lined up to partner with SpringRole to issue degrees on the blockchain.
We have also partnered with Civic, Bloom and WorkCoin who are all trying to leverage the power of blockchain in their own domains. While Civic is dealing with the all important issue of providing users with an decentralized identity, Bloom is focused on making sure that credit scoring is inclusive and in the control of the users. WorkCoin is partnering with SpringRole to bring a massive change in the freelancing ecosystem and will rely on SpringRole to make sure that the profiles of the freelancers is verified and trust worthy.
Who we are
The SpringRole Team is group of dreamers, blockchain engineers, machine learning experts, artificial intelligence dorks, with experiences in recruiting and sales. Our advisors are industry experts, hailing from Bitcoin Core Committee, LinkedIn, BranchOut and Hired.com.
Our CEO, Kartik Mandaville is the former CTO of Science, the LA-based technology studio that has incubated startups such as Dollar Shave Club and DogVacay. Prior to Science, Kartik earned his Master’s in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon. He has been involved in blockchain since its beginning, building the USD to Bitcoin exchange in 2013.
Are you ready to join the movement?