This startup hopes hiring algorithms can make recruiting suck less

Sean Boyce, StaffGeek cofounder and Drexel grad, spent some time working for large corporations, but things just didn’t click.
When he turned to hiring services for a way out, it was to no avail.
“I tried several companies, and they weren’t even telling me the truth,” Boyce said. “I was winding up in interviews where I had already been, and that was not what I was looking for.”
Boyce has another insider angle that allowed him to have a fresh take on hiring services: his father, Charles Boyce, has been an executive recruiter for 30 years.
Alongside cofounder Matt Reed, Boyce started StaffGeek in 2014 as a way to help companies land talent in spite of the faults of the hiring industry. (A similar desire led Everett Reiss to found JaneHires.)
“[Recruiters] are incentivized to get anything through the door,” says Boyce of the competition. “We knew we had to change that.”
Following a quiet R&D period and a few iterations of their platform, they are now hitting the streets with revamped branding by Conshohocken-based design shop 20nine, which also helped develop the platform itself. The bootstrapped company currently has a staff of 10, working out of the Pipeline Philly coworking space.
“The branding made us look like a Fortune 500 company, but they’ve also provided operational advice,” Boyce said of 20nine’s help. “We’re going up against some very large partners, so it’s got to look exactly right.”
Changing the revenue structure was key for StaffGeek, which is why the company shifted to a subscription-based platform, offering companies a $5,000 a month fixed-price deal. StaffGeek is targeting companies in the 50-500 employee range.
“That figure is not dependent on placements, how many people companies hire or what their wages will be,” Boyce said.
People searching for their dream job can join the online service for free.
StaffGeek’s cofounders say that the true added value comes by way of their MatchTech algorithm, which takes values from a detailed questionnaire to sort both companies and possible hires in a specific set of categories.
BTW, we loved question 17:

“A hot dog is a sandwich.”

• Strongly Disagree
• Neutral
• Strongly Agree

(Tweet at Technical.ly Brooklyn Lead Reporter Tyler Woods for the correct answer.)
“Staffing can no longer be thought about as matching job descriptions to résumés,” said Boyce. “It’s about humans hiring humans and candidates connecting with cultures.”
The system, patent pending, also promises to remove bias and increase candidate matching by taking culture as a key factor (though one researcher warns of the dangers of letting algorithms do the hiring when it comes to diversity).