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When it Comes To Talent, HireArt Lets You Try Before You Buy

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If you are in charge of hiring people, you know that it involves kissing many toads that don't become princes. If only there was a way to know before kissing that you'd get a prince.

That's where HireArt comes in. It presents candidates with online challenges that are similar to what a candidate would do if they were on the job at your company. If those candidates excel at the online challenges, the odds are greater that they turn out to be good hires.

Candidates take HireArt’s interviews and then HireArt matches them to employers. For example, a company might post a job and get 100 applicants. But of those, only 80 would take a HireArt challenge. And some of those would have typographical or grammatical errors in their applications. Thus HireArt would end up referring only 10 candidates that looked promising.

Much like a traditional recruiting agency, HireArt gets paid if a candidate gets hired. HireArt also delivers its service as a platform for which it charges around $500 per month for a specific number of candidates.

And HireArt has gone beyond the idea stage. It has happy customers like short-term rental site, Airbnb, and Marketing Labs. Jill Riopelle of Airbnb is pleased with HireArt. As she said, "At Airbnb HireArt has tangibly impacted the speed and quality of our hiring, especially in the international realm. It enables us to quickly see how candidates problem solve and communicate, and also allows the candidates to differentiate themselves by giving them a platform to go above and beyond, which is not possible in a resume."

Start-ups need to be picky in their hiring process, and using challenge-based interviews is one way that they can get a better understanding of the skills their applicants have to offer, and also give candidates a better sense of what’s really required of them on the job.

In a November 30 interview, co-founder, Elli Sharef explained that she got the idea for HireArt from her tenure at Apollo Group (APOL) subsidiary, University of Phoenix. After Yale -- which she loved, she worked at McKinsey from which she joined University of Phoenix as a strategic advisor to the CEO.

While there, she saw that many candidates who had completed their degrees could not get jobs because of the mixed reputation of the online education provider. This led Sharef to realize that employers were overlooking talented people who could do the job if the employer could get a low risk way to see these candidates' skills.

She wanted to be part of the start-up community and had an opportunity to enter the Y-Combinator in November 2011. In January 2012 she co-founded HireArt with Nick Sedlet who had worked at Goldman Sachs (GS).

HireArt has raised a seed round and has five people. But it could grow if it can get a bigger piece of the market for hiring 60 million people in the U.S. that generates commissions for recruiters averaging $3,500 per hire.

HireArt offers a potential employer greater efficiency in hiring since the candidates are better screened and matched to the employer's needs. But HireArt also hopes to establish itself as the Google (GOOG) of helping candidates get "cool jobs."

In other words, HireArt hopes to make the phrase "Did you do your HireArt application?" a catch phrase among workers seeking great opportunities.

Sharef believes that a key ingredient in realizing HireArt's vision is "building an excellent team." And a key element in doing that is finding people like her who "really believe in what we're trying to do."

If  it can hire enough true believers and persuade companies and job candidates that they should share that vision, HireArt may be able to turn that vision into a reality.