When I attended Automate in Chicago a few weeks back, multiple people thanked me for TechCrunch’s semi-regular robotics job report. It’s always edifying to get that feedback in person. While it’s true that the industry has seen ups and downs in terms of both funding and hiring in recent years, there’s never been a more […]
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The Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 to ban the use of most noncompete agreements on Tuesday. This ruling means companies can’t require their employees, that aren’t senior executives, to wait a set amount of time before joining a competitor or launching their own company in the same category. While the FTC’s ruling will impact industries like financial services and hedge funds the most, due to the prevalence of such agreements in those industries, it could also impact startups.
The ban could actually be positive news for startup founders and hiring managers in a number of ways. For one, it could open up the hiring pool, says Nick Cromydas, the co-founder and CEO of hiring and recruiting startup Hunt Club.
“Now there will be more potential crosspollination of companies that really understand businesses models and spaces,” Cromydas said. “I expect you will see more hiring with direct domain experience than you’ve seen in a while.”
Ryan Vann, a partner focused on employment law at Cooley, agreed. He said that he’s had clients that were too anxious to hire potentially game-changing talent away from larger companies for fear those companies would act on the noncompete agreement.
Banning noncompete agreements could also encourage startups to foster a strong company culture that makes people want to stay, as opposed to using threats to keep them, Cromydas said.
Some members of the startup community seem happy about the ruling as well — rare these days when it comes to decisions by the FTC. Sarah Guo, the founder at AI-focused VC firm Conviction, tweeted that banning noncompete agreements is a win for innovation. Cole Harrington, the co-founder and CEO at ThoughtWave AI agreed with her.
Understandably, some startup CEOs are worried about how the end of noncompetes could impact the security of intellectual property, but Cromydas said there are other ways for companies to protect themselves. Startups can have employees sign non-disclosure agreements regarding intellectual property, or spend more time filing patents. Instead of blocking an employee’s future employment, such alternatives prevent them from using the previous employer’s intellectual property knowledge at their new jobs.
Startup employees might not see much of a change for two other reasons: noncompete agreements were already very hard to enforce, Vann said, and they were trending out of vogue among startups anyway. Certain states, including startup-heavy California, have existing state laws that restrict them. Although, he added that any client of his that can use them, typically does despite the low-rate of them actually coming into play.
“Even without this ban, it is really, really hard in virtually every court in America to enforce a noncompete unless you have something added that are bad facts like theft of confidential information, soliciting customers before you go, trying to set up competing business before you go,” Vann said. “I would almost never go into litigation unless I was armed with that kind of evidence or misappropriation of trade secrets.”
Given all that, noncompetes are becoming less common, according to company data from Hunt Club. While five years ago 90% of offers that came through Hunt Club’s platform included a noncompete agreement, that figure now is about 40%. Although, Cromydas said he wouldn’t doubt it they were rising again in hot sectors like AI where intellectual property is crucial and the war for talent is high.
So what should startup CEOs do if they currently use noncompete agreements with their employees? Absolutely nothing, according to Vann who questions whether the ban will actually stick. Multiple lawsuits against the ruling have already been filed including one from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and another from tax service firm Ryan LLC.
Vann thinks this potential ban could be struck down by numerous courts. If it does clear these legal hurdles, startups wanting to hire someone that may have signed one can terminate existing noncompete agreements incredibly easily.
“The worse case scenario if you are a startup, and hire someone with a noncompete, is all you have to do is issue the notice to say that your noncompete is not enforceable,” Vann said. “I would keep it at status quo right now and monitor what’s happening.”
Companies that offer role referral bonuses do so with the assumption that their employees know their work culture — and a role’s requirements — best. But what if companies were to open up those referral bonuses to people outside the organization?
That’s the idea behind Draftboard, co-founded by Zach Roseman, the former CEO of mobile app dev group Mosaic. Draftboard lets employers post referral bonuses and have referrers compete to earn them by scouring their networks for talent.
“If you’re a large enterprise, you’re getting thousands of resumes per role you post,” Roseman told TechCrunch. “So you either have a massive talent team spending inordinate amounts of time poring through each one, or you’re spending six or seven figures a year on an AI screening solution that undoubtedly has big downsides, like privacy, bias, errors and so on.”
Draftboard is Roseman’s first project after Mosaic and IAC, the American holding company that owns a number of consumer brands including Allrecipes, Handy and Care.com. At IAC, Roseman was senior director of strategy and mergers and acquisitions, and frequently had to deal with finding the right fits for talent.
“The thought behind Draftboard was, why not leverage existing referral bonus programs and the power of a networked world to identify the best candidates?” Roseman said. “You get a much smaller, but much higher-quality, funnel of applicants — allowing you to hire faster.”
So how does Draftboard work?
Image Credits: Draftboard
Free for companies, Draftboard notifies its roughly 1,000 referrers — in Draftboard’s parlance, “scouts” — as referrals move through the different stages of companies’ recruiting processes. Referrers are graded on the quality of their referrals, and Draftboard takes a 20% cut of each referral bonus.
I asked how Draftboard found its initial group of referrers. Cold calling, Roseman replied.
“We started by putting out calls to our network — via WhatsApp groups, listservs, LinkedIn, etc. — for people who ran and owned tech communities,” he said. “I’d do discovery calls with them and ask them what their pain points were … On top of that, every time I had a call with a founder or talent person to try to get their company to list roles on Draftboard, it almost always ended up with them saying, ‘I know three people who would be great scouts — I’m going to ping them right now.’”
Aren’t there requirements to be a referrer? Not really, Roseman said — which might sound like a massive risk for companies to take. But he asserted that, in fact, it democratizes the process in a sort of meritocratic way.
“There aren’t requirements to be a referrer — and that’s by design,” Roseman said. “I thought, why not make the system data-driven and self-reinforcing? Companies set minimum scores; if your score is lower than their minimum, then you’re not allowed to send referrals to them anymore. So rather than us top-down policing who can and can’t be a referrer, we let the referrers moderate their own behavior in a bottoms-up way all by themselves.”
But, you might say, isn’t Draftboard essentially contracting out headhunting and recruiting without calling it that? Roseman claims this isn’t so — and that in fact many recruiters support the platform, which they use to run side hustles.
“Scouts run the gamut, from Substackers to recruiters to everyday employees at tech startups like Amazon, Spotify, Deel and TikTok,” Roseman said. “We think referrals can and should be open to everyone, not just company employees — as long as you can control for quality, which we do via our reputation score system.”
Image Credits: Draftboard
The business model certainly seems to be appealing to brands. Around 70 are on Draftboard today, including SeatGeek, Via and Formlabs.
It’s evidently intriguing to investors, too. Draftboard has raised $4.1 million from investors, including Founder Collective and Twelve Below, at a $13 million valuation.
“Job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed and ZipRecruiter exist to connect job seekers and companies, which results in some funky incentives and selection bias,” Roseman said. “We don’t do that. Instead, we connect referrers with companies, and those referrers bring the talent — whether they’re active job seekers or simply open to opportunities passively.”
New York-based Draftboard, which has 10 employees, plans to spend the bulk of its early capital on hiring and growing both sides of its marketplace — referrers and companies.
It’s tough out there — and yet, doing my semi-regular jobs post always gives me hope. Seems every time I post one of these, the number increases. At 74 companies, this is undoubtedly the largest list we’ve made, by a wide margin. That means more work for me in putting this post together, but if it helps a few folks find some work, it was definitely worth it.
I love hearing stories from folks who got hired by clicking on a link in this post, so please drop me a note over on LinkedIn if that applies to you. As always, good luck. You got this.
1X Technologies (23 roles)
Advanced Construction Robotics (4 roles)
Aescape (5 roles)
Aethon (5 roles)
Agility Robotics (5 roles)
Allvision (2 roles)
Ambi Robotics (2 roles)
ANYbotics (25 roles)
Apptronik (16 roles)
Astrobotic (23 roles)
Atomic Machines (2 roles)
Aurora (40 careers)
Baubot (10 roles)
Bear Robotics (13 roles)
BHS Robotics (8 roles)
Bloomfield Robotics (5 roles)
Boxbot (3 roles)
Carnegie Robotics (1 role)
Cepheid (4 roles)
Chef Robotics (15 roles)
Civ Robotics (5 roles)
Collaborative Robotics (10 roles)
Covariant (20 roles)
Dexterity (42 roles)
Edge Case Research (1 role)
Ekumen (3 roles)
Enchanted Tools (50 roles)
Engineered Arts (1 role)
Exotec (174 roles)
Eye-Bot (4 roles)
Forcen (4 roles)
Formant, Inc. (4 roles)
Formic (8 roles)
Formlogic (12 roles)
Four Growers (4 roles)
Foxglove (2 roles)
Fulfil Solutions (15 roles)
Gecko Robotics (18 roles)
GrayMatter Robotics (11 roles)
Hellbender (6 roles)
Johnson & Johnson Med Tech (1 role)
Keybotic (2 roles)
Matic Robots (10 roles)
Medra (3 roles)
Mine Vision Systems (2 roles)
Near Earth Autonomy (4 roles)
Neocis (15 roles)
Neubility (1 role)
Neuraville (8 roles)
Neya Systems (9 roles)
Nimble Robotics (8 roles)
Nuro (40 roles)
Onward Robotics (2 roles)
Plus.ai (3 roles)
Polymath Robotics (2 roles)
Pudu Robotics (2 roles)
Pyka (10 roles)
Reliable Robotics (36 roles)
Roboto AI (1 role)
Robust AI (14 roles)
Sanctuary AI (14 roles)
Sakar Robotics (6 roles)
Scythe Robotics (11 roles)
Seegrid (10 roles)
Sphinx (5 roles)
Stack AV (40 roles)
Sunnybotics (2 roles)
The AI Institute (19 roles)
Titan Robotics (3 roles)
UnitX (8 roles)
Vecna Robotics (7 roles)
Vention (20 roles)
Viam (4 roles)
Volley Automation (10 roles)
Siadhal Magos and Shahriar Tajbakhsh were working at Uber and Palantir, respectively, when they both came to the realization that hiring — particularly the process of interviewing — was becoming unwieldy for many corporate HR departments.
“It was clear to us that the most important part of the hiring process is the interviews, but also the most opaque and unreliable part,” Magos told TechCrunch. “On top of this, there’s a bunch of toil associated with taking notes and writing up feedback that many interviewers and hiring managers do everything they can to avoid.”
Magos and Tajbakhsh thought that the hiring process was ripe for disruption, but they wanted to avoid abstracting away too much of the human element. So they launched Metaview, an AI-powered note-taking app for recruiters and hiring managers that records, analyzes and summarizes job interviews.
“Metaview is an AI note-taker built specifically for the hiring process,” Magos said. “It helps recruiters and hiring managers focus more on getting to know candidates and less on extracting data from the conversations. As a consequence, recruiters and hiring managers save a ton of time writing up notes and are more present during interviews because they’re not having to multitask.”
Metaview integrates with apps, phone systems, videoconferencing platforms and tools like Calendly and GoodTime to automatically capture the content of interviews. Magos says the platform “accounts for the nuances of recruiting conversations” and “enriches itself with data from other sources,” such as applicant tracking systems, to highlight the most relevant moments.
“Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet all have transcription built in, which is a possible alternative to Metaview,” Magos said. “But the information that Metaview’s AI pulls out from interviews is far more relevant to the recruiting use case than generic alternatives, and we also assist users with the next steps in their recruiting workflows in and around these conversations.”
Image Credits: Metaview
Certainly, there’s plenty wrong with traditional job interviewing, and a note-taking and conversation-analyzing app like Metaview could help, at least in theory. As a piece in Psychology Today notes, the human brain is rife with biases that hinder our judgement and decision making, for example a tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered and to interpret information in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs.
The question is, does Metaview work — and, more importantly, work equally well for all users?
Even the best AI-powered speech dictation systems suffer from their own biases. A Stanford study showed that error rates for Black speakers on speech-to-text services from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft are nearly double those for white speakers. Another, more recent study published in the journal Computer Speech and Language found statistically significant differences in the way two leading speech recognition models treated speakers of different genders, ages and accents.
There’s also hallucination to consider. AI makes mistakes summarizing, including in meeting summaries. In a recent story, The Wall Street Journal cited an instance where, for one early adopter using Microsoft’s AI Copilot tool for summarizing meetings, Copilot invented attendees and implied calls were about subjects that were never discussed.
When asked what steps Metaview has taken, if any, to mitigate bias and other algorithmic issues, Magos claimed that Metaview’s training data is diverse enough to yield models that “surpass human performance” on recruitment workflows and perform well on popular benchmarks for bias.
I’m skeptical and a bit wary, too, of Metaview’s approach to how it handles speech data. Magos says that Metaview stores conversation data for two years by default unless users request that the data be deleted. That seems like an exceptionally long time.
But none of this appears to have affected Metaview’s ability to get funding or customers.
Metaview this month raised $7 million from investors including Plural, Coelius Capital and Vertex Ventures, bringing the London-based startup’s total raised to $14 million. Metaview’s client count stands at 500 companies, Magos says, including Brex, Quora, Pleo and Improbable — and it’s grown 2,000% year-over-year.
“The money will be used to grow the product and engineering team primarily, and give more fuel to our sales and marketing efforts,” Magos said. “We will triple the product and engineering team, further fine-tune our conversation synthesis engine so our AI is automatically extracting exactly the right information our customers need and develop systems to proactively detect issues like inconsistencies in the interview process and candidates that appear to be losing interest.”
Hiring portal Indeed has redesigned the profile page for users, allowing individuals to use an AI-powered writer to fill up work experience, and also added support for multiple resumes. The company has also launched a set of smart sourcing suites for recruiters with features like AI-powered candidate summaries and custom messages.
Recruit Holdings-owned Indeed is revamping its profile page and adding AI-aided features to better compete with rivals like LinkedIn, Talent.com and ZipRecruiter. The new AI-powered work experience writer helps people form better descriptions of different projects.
The company is also adding support for saving up to five resumes so that an individual can easily pick the most relevant copy when applying for different kinds of roles. Both the features will roll out soon, Indeed said.
Image Credits: Indeed
The job seeking portal already had a toggle to make a user’s profile visible to recruiters. But now the company is turning it on by default and making it easily accessible on the settings page.
On the other side, the company is releasing a smart sourcing suite for recruiters to reduce what they are calling “irrelevant outreach” — when employers reach out to candidates that don’t match the job profile. Apart from advanced search filters, companies can also access AI-powered candidate summaries.
Image Credits: Indeed
Indeed is also adding AI-powered smart messaging and automated interview scheduling. The AI-assisted messaging tool enables hiring managers to create or modify communication with job seekers. During the testing phase, the company said it observed that recruiters that used the smart sourcing feature for hiring saved up to six hours per week.
When we asked the company about how it avoids biases or ensures that AI-powered summaries don’t miss out on key details, Indeed said that it employs a responsible AI team to thwart harm.
Indeed’s rival LinkedIn has also infused AI into multiple aspects, such as learning, recruitment, marketing, sales, messaging and profile enhancement.
Deepti Patibandla, senior director of Product at Indeed, told TechCrunch over a call that the company wants to continue its focus on getting people hired.
“While LinkedIn is more of a professional social network or a platform, at Indeed, we want to get more people hired. That is the core value of our business. As a differentiator, we want to make the hiring process easier,” she said.
“We want to make sure that people are getting the right jobs and not getting inundated by random jobs. Those two are our main focal points for now. Long term we see the opportunity for users to come to Indeed to set their career trajectory path.”
Last year, Indeed laid off 2,200 employees, or 15% of its staff. At that time, CEO Chris Hyams said that the organization was “simply too big for what lies ahead.”
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