A smart job search for strategists wants to stop irrelevant leads

Looking for a full-time job can sometimes turn into a full-time job. When you break down where time goes in your business, how much time and resources are invested into your recruiting practice? How much time is spent looking for qualified employees?

Siftly is a service that’s on the lookout to recover that lost time. Launching in spring 2016, Siftly is a smart matching job discovery engine that wants to help creative professionals and strategists find their next job.

In a recent op-ed on PSFK, company founder, Frank Striefler laid out the logic for this product:

“Advertising already has a very high turnover rate. With millennials being the largest cohort in the workforce and not remaining at companies for as many job anniversaries as previous generations did, the need to fill positions faster will only continue to accelerate. And as people get used to better services from other categories, job seekers will not tolerate getting spammed with irrelevant job alerts or wasting their time with sending applications to the black hole of job searches: job boards.”

Siftly is a blind-matching job site that lets users discover jobs or find employees using simple filters including role, experience, desired salary and location. Using the five key criteria it identifies as critical, Siftly can quickly sift through its talent pool to identify candidates whose job preferences match the recruiter’s’ job specs perfectly.

The service claims to tackle the issue of irrelevant leads as it will deal exclusively with strategists working in the larger advertising industry. As the future of recruiting approaches,we could see the game change: it will boil down to what you know, not who you know.

Once the platform has identified a 100% match, the user will be automatically notified about any relevant openings to which to submit their resume. Will this change the way that bonafide strategists discover their jobs? For talent, Siftly takes the work out of finding work and aims to level the playing field by giving more people access to more jobs that are fit their skill-set and interests.

What makes it blind: A user’s resume never get submitted to companies without the user’s permission and recruiter’s info does not get shared with candidates. A candidate’s salary expectations must match a recruiter’s salary range. This ensures that both parties are on the same page without directly exposing the number to either party.

“Currently, Siftly is focused on ad agency gigs. I’m a strategist. I know this vertical. So that’s were Siftly started,” says Striefler. “The challenge to changing recruiters’ behavior was one we recognized early. We have already built a network of over 1,700 recruiters across the over 2,000 agencies (with a split of 1:2 when it comes to internal and external recruiters) but are posting more jobs every week and are already getting repeat clients.” There can be many obstacles to launching a two-sided market place like this one. He adds:

“One misperception we still want to overcome is to be seen as a tool primarily for in-house recruiters. External recruiters should see us as their secret weapon. There are plenty of agencies that who still want a full service (from screening candidates for personal & cultural fit to negotiating the contract). There is no reason for external recruiters not to use us to be able to interview more qualified and interested candidates to get more options in front of their clients to succeed sooner in submitting ‘the one’. This said, the split of job posts (so far) between in-house recruiters and external recruiters is roughly 4:1.”

Striefler tells PSFK that in the next few months Siftly will roll out to account management and media. “These departments have been underserved. We’re answering that need. Eventually, we will serve more departments and more industries. But for right now, we are focused on becoming the go- to resource for people looking to hire a great strategist or to find their next strategy role.”

Siftly

Searching on a tablet via Shutterstock

Originally published at www.psfk.com on February 12, 2016.