04.30.24-Startup-Ecosystem-Conference-Startups-Meander

CHRIS MANNION: Back on Earth. Hi, everyone. My name is Chris Mannion. I'm the founder of Meander. So we're an AI talent marketplace designed to connect top professionals with leading companies without using external recruiters. And so the seed idea-- the idea really came from my time at MIT as the class of 2016 at MIT Sloan. I went through the recruiting process and realized how great that was. But it wasn't until I got to the corporate world before I realized just how important hiring the right people actually is.

So the actual cost of an unfilled role is estimated to be around $100,000, which means that for MIT right now, which has 350 roles on its job board, there's a $35 million gap in their P&L. But this problem is only going to get worse. By 2030, we're expecting to have 85 million roles unfilled due to skill gaps globally, at a global cost of $8.5 trillion a year.

And the existing tools that we have won't solve that problem. They were designed for a time that hasn't changed since Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first resume back in the 1400s. So we decided to try and change that and upend the status quo by building a career management platform that helps connect top performers with leading companies, using AI tools.

On the job seeker side, that means that rather than waiting with frustrating job applications and trying to figure out the right career path, we have to give you all the data and all the tools to manage the career process that will lead you to achieve your career goals whilst staying true to the values that are important to you. On the hiring manager side, we're bringing all the tools that a great recruiter would have but enable a self-service process using competitive and historic talent intelligence to reduce the impact of a bad hire.

What this actually equates to is that we're speeding up the hiring process. We're increasing the hiring quality. And we're reducing the overall HR costs that many companies are facing today.

And what's most exciting is that over time, as we think about how this integrates into an internal talent marketplace, we're integrating more learning and development products, which are going to enable people to build their own skill map and career path without having to think about moving externally, helping companies to retain and grow the best talent and fill skill gaps, not just today but tomorrow as well.

So far, we've worked with many different companies since we built the first prototype at the end of 2021. And there are two main prototypes that have really stood out. The first is helping companies to make better, more informed hiring decisions, using data, to avoid the cost of a bad hire. We know that a bad hire can cause the company six or seven figures in damage due to the blast radius of that person leaving.

We worked with one company that had churned through two heads of product in 90 days while working with external recruiters. We helped them to use our model to reassess how they were hiring. And they were able to close their first head of product within 30 days, hiring from one of the big tech companies, who has stayed there for the last 12 months and is thriving in the role. They've also used the same process to make more than three engineering hires on their team without any external recruiting help.

On the other use case, we're looking at increasing hiring velocity by reducing bottlenecks in the hiring process. So we worked with one company that was preparing to IPO and was increasing the size of its sales team but couldn't quite figure out how to translate the skills and the qualifications in the core markets they'd operated in into new markets across the US and globally as they were expanding to Australia. So we helped them to analyze the new markets and turn their insights into data that we used to accelerate the hiring process and cut overall recruiting time by a third, increasing recruiter output by 50%. This was the very first model that we tested.

Since then, we've continued to expand. And the product just launched two weeks ago, with the hiring module going live this week. So we're really at the final stages of our first product, which is designed to help small- to medium-sized businesses to grow.

What I'm really excited about is exploring ways that we can help larger companies to build their internal talent team and avoid losing top performers to external recruiters. So the partnership path that I'm looking for today is a large organization that identifies a critical need to fill skill gaps in the future where we can partner closely and really help to build an internal talent marketplace that's custom to that role and that organization and make sure that the organization continues to grow.

I would love for anyone to stop by the booth. We were just next door. Talk about AI and HR. I can tell you a lot more about the product road map and give you a demo of the hiring module, which is due to be released this week. Thank you.