This app wants to make it easy to get those job referral bonuses

We met Mohit Chopra in a Starbucks in Rockville, Md., where he comes almost every night to work on a way to make the job search process more efficient. Two weeks ago, Chopra released an app to do just that.
The app is called Cliquify and for recruiters, it works like this: recruiters make an account and add friends to their network, or “clique.” Then recruiters can post a job and a referral reward. Recruiters wait to receive applicants who are referred by users in the recruiter’s clique. If any of those applicants are hired, the referrer receives that reward amount.
Cliquify is actually two apps: the app for job hunters, available for Android and iOS, and the app for recruiters, available on mobile and desktop. The recruiters’ app lets users share job postings on social media, chat directly with applicants, create notes, and track applications with hiring teams, according to Cliquify’s website.

Chopra said he had long thought of ways to improve the job hunt process, which is laborious and time-consuming. He said his wife’s job search inspired him to create an app, but that the app didn’t gain traction until he demonstrated an (accidental) proof of concept: A colleague of his once got laid off, and Chopra knew a manager at a different company was looking to hire.
“Just go talk to him and I will send him a note,” Chopra said he suggested to his colleague. “If you get the job then reward me, which I meant and said as a joke.”
His colleague got the job the next day and offered him $400. That’s when Chopra’s cofounder, Kamal Arora, was convinced about the idea that referrals within trusted networks works.

That was two years ago. Chopra and Arora have been developing the app ever since, working at Starbucks and Chopra’s basement in Bethesda.
Both cofounders are 38 and grew up in India before moving to the U.S.
“Mohit is a month older than I am and so he is the CEO,” joked Arora, who’s the CTO.
Arora, who grew up in Hardwar, India, and now lives in Gaithersburg, moved to the U.S. ten years ago. Chopra grew up in Ahmedaba, India, and moved to the D.C. area in 2005 where he completed a master’s in finance at George Washington University.
The two met in 2010 when working at the Export-Import Bank of United States in D.C.
Although their platform may sound similar to LinkedIn, Chopra and Arora explained Cliquify features some key differences.
“Cliquify is so unique because everyone in the network knows who is hiring [and] who can be reached out for referrals,” Chopra wrote in a text to us. “We have added gamification [and] referral rewards to engage the network. LinkedIn only charges the users to give them better insights where they stand.”
Currently Arora works full time on Cliquify, and Chopra splits his time between the app and his his day job consulting for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In addition to the cofounders, the startup also employs two freelancers.
Chopra and Arora are currently bootstrapping the business.
In the two weeks after the release of the app, Chopra says there are 50 app users. He told us the plan is continue growing that user base “city by city,” starting with D.C.