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Meet HireKeep, ‘the eHarmony for sales recruiting’

HireKeep founder Paul Murskov just wants to help salespeople find jobs they love.

There's got to be a better way to find a job you love, right? (Photo by Flickr user kate hiscock, used under a Creative Commons license)
Job hunting is the worst.

Not only is it a time consuming and energy-intensive process, it’s also emotionally fraught and made all the worse by the fact that HR professionals are often so inundated by resumes that job seekers never hear back.
Spend a few weeks on the job market and you’re likely to be convinced that something, somewhere is broken.
Paul Murskov agrees, and he founded HireKeep to make things better — at least for sales professionals. Why begin in the sales area? For one, that’s where Murskov’s own background lies, as well as that of his team. More importantly, however, Murskov believes this is an area where a company like HireKeep can make a big impact.
According to Murskov, sales professionals are costly for a company to hire, onboard and train, and once they get there they tend to have exceedingly low job satisfaction. And Murskov is passionate, really passionate, about job satisfaction.
“For me, just to hear someone say ‘I love my job,'” he said, trailing off with a wistful look.
So how does HireKeep improve the hiring process and contribute to job satisfaction all at once?
“We’re a little bit like the eHarmony for sales recruiting,” Murskov said. Essentially HireKeep goes “beyond the resume” by analyzing key relationship and culture data both on the side of the company looking to hire and on the side of the job seeker. An algorithm then matches candidates to jobs based on how well-aligned their respective values are.

Job seekers, the clients in the HireKeep equation, are provided with one match at a time, allowing them a level of focus that is unusual in the modern “machine gun” method of application processes. “The job application process should be like a DNA match rather than search and destroy,” Murskov said.
HireKeep’s process and product is different from others out there because the company is looking to innovate rather than automate, Murskov says. For now the HireKeep process is almost a bespoke experience — featuring a lot of personalized interaction between the humans involved in the hiring process.
These constraints on scale are intentional at this stage, Murskov says. He’s intent on proving the value of his method before introducing automation to the process. The proof he’s looking for? Happily hired clients who maintain job satisfaction over a period of months or years.
For HireKeep, these kind of results are only just starting to roll in. The company officially launched in March 2015, and, after months of working out of Murskov’s apartment, the team finally moved into new digs at 1776 just weeks ago. The company is still completely bootstrapped.
The other reason happy clients are a priority is because that’s where HireKeep’s revenue lies. The company works on a kind of traditional commission system — they get paid when a company hires one of HireKeep’s client candidates and that hire stays on for a period of months.
Of course, changing the hiring process is not without its challenges. On the company’s side, HR professionals can feel threatened by HireKeep. Murskov told Technical.ly, however, that his intention is to work alongside these people, something he says they embrace once the “get” it.
Meanwhile, on the job seekers side, the HireKeep process is a marked change from the usual process of applying to as many jobs as possible to increase the odds of being hired. However Murskov says he’s confident clients will see the value once they give it a try.
After all, who doesn’t want to meet their perfect (business) match?

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