Startup Aims to Make Silicon Valley an Actual Meritocracy

Gradberry is on a mission to send companies skilled candidates whose résumés don't drop all the right names.
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Silicon Valley really, really wants to be a meritocracy. Companies and VC firms say they always want to hire or invest in the best person for the job, independent of other factors. But the lack of diversity in the tech industry suggests other factors are coming into play. A recent analysis by Reuters of prominent venture capitalist-backed startups found that the people succeeding in tech have a pretty homogenous background.

What does that background look like? Summed up in one word: pedigree. According to Reuters, an overwhelming majority of the startups it looked at were founded by people who had held a senior position at a big technology firm, worked at a well-connected smaller one, started a successful company, or attended one of three universities---Stanford, Harvard, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a world where good ideas are supposed to trump all, who you know and what names are on your résumé still matter a lot.

Iba Masood, who freely admits she doesn’t have this kind of pedigree, can relate to the frustration of being overlooked because of her background. She’s the CEO and co-founder of Gradberry, a Y Combinator-backed startup that today released an artificially intelligent recruiter for tech workers that aims to address Silicon Valley's meritocracy problem. It’s called TARA---short for Talent Acquisition and Recruiting Automation---and essentially, it helps companies recruit skilled tech workers by looking at an objective measure: analyzing the code they’ve already written.

“People can excel in different fields—it really does not matter what your background is, where you’re originally from,” says Masood.

Gradberry
Automating Employment

Gradberry joins other matchmaking startups that seek to connect technical workers with employers, including HackerRank, Hired, and LearnUp. Beansprock, which originated from the MIT Media Lab, is another company seeking to infuse the tedious task of job hunting with an artificially intelligent touch.

Once a candidate links their online portfolios and projects—usually Github repositories—to Gradberry, the platform analyzes whether or not a candidate has written good-quality code. It checks syntax, makes sure the code has no runtime errors, and examines the code to see if it's been plagiarized. It can see whether a candidate’s code is influential within a certain community—checking how many contributions a candidate made to a platform like Github, for instance, or how much of a candidate’s code received acknowledgement from the rest of the community through ratings or by noting others who have built on the original code.

Gradberry

In the process, Masood says, Gradberry surfaces extremely qualified candidates that may otherwise go unrecognized. For example, she says, a 20-year-old coder had one of the most impressive Github profiles she and her team had ever seen. “He was one of the top ten coders in his area, and excelled in Java in particular,” Masood remembers. “But he had no work experience.” After Tara highlighted him as a strong candidate, he was promptly hired by gaming company Kamcord.

Along with evaluating their code, Gradberry provides advice to job candidates on how to better highlight the desirable aspects of their profiles. Eventually, Masood says, it will recommend ways they can improve their coding abilities. Right now, Gradberry already shows its user base which coding languages are trending based on the actual demand they see from employers.

As for the employers themselves, they receive a shortlist of candidates tailored to the skills they're seeking. Employers then send feedback based on who they decide to hire in order to, in effect, train Gradberry's system to send them an even better list next time. For its trouble, Gradberry receives a commission of 5 percent of a candidate’s first-year salary once he or she is hired.

Measuring Success

By a lot of measures, Masood and her company are thriving—Gradberry has recently closed a seed round of investment that included funding from Y Combinator, a number of well-known venture capital firms, and a host of angel investors. Its recruiting platform has 255 companies on board hiring for 379 open positions. More than 3,000 engineers are on the site looking for jobs. If all goes well, Masood says, Gradberry could scale to dig into recruitment efforts in other fields, including sales and business development. The long-term vision, according to its CEO, is building out a full-fledged applicant tracking system for companies.

But success for Masood and Gradberry didn't come overnight---an effort that fed inspiration for the product itself. Gradberry has spent three years in the recruitment space---a long time in startup land---and the product went through multiple versions before finally culminating in Tara.

Looking through hundreds of resumes a day, Masood says she realized she could leverage technology to address the tech industry’s fundamentally broken hiring system. Tara itself, in some ways, is also a reflection of how she felt she had to prove herself given her background---not from the US, not from an Ivy League school.

And looking through those résumés, she says she could tell that non-Ivy League candidates were just as good. "It all depends on their motivation to produce good work,” she says. Instead of just trying to argue the point, she built an AI system to prove it.