Rather than going through the long and expensive traditional recruitment process to determine whether a candidate can actually do the job they were hired for, companies using SkillSoniq are able to quickly assess candidates on a trial basis before deciding to hire them as a full-time employee on the payroll.

Launched in 2019 in New York, SkillSoniq made $350k in gross revenue and onboarded 6,000+ freelancers in our first year. In a world where one-third of U.S. employees have done freelance work in the past year and 72% of hiring managers are continuing or increasing their use of freelancers, we believe SkillSoniq is already making a splash. 

Source

Hiring the right candidate for a job can be time-consuming and expensive. To make matters worse, even after spending considerable time and money to select the right person for the job, companies may soon find out that the person they hired isn’t as qualified or hardworking as they seemed to be during the interview process.

*1: Source 

We believe that interviews are not the best use of time for companies and job-seekers, so we are replacing time spent on interviews with time spent actually working with a potential hire. SkillSoniq lets companies take new employees for a test drive on a freelance basis, without all the hoops of hiring expensive recruiting agencies, sifting through resumes on a job portal, or taking a gamble on unvetted and potentially unskilled talent on freelance websites.

Once a company is satisfied that their freelancer has demonstrated they’re a match for the position, our web app allows them to easily convert the freelancer to a full-time employee on their payroll, at a nominal fee.

In 2018, there were roughly 5.6 million “skilled” freelancers across tech, creative, and professional job types. Collectively, these workers generated an estimated $135 billion within the freelance industry.

Source, Source

Source 1, Source 2

*Data above is based on public resources and internal trends in 2019 - 2020

According to this report, we averaged the growth rate of the fastest-growing countries in South America (Brazil), Asia (Pakistan), and Europe (UK) to estimate 50% growth. (Source 1, Source 2)

Now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than one-third of U.S. workers freelance, and 58% of non-freelancers who are new to remote work due to the pandemic are considering freelancing in the future. At the same time, 72% of hiring managers are continuing or increasing their use of independent professionals.

Sources: 1*, 2*, 3*, 4*, 5*

SkillSoniq launched in New York in 2019, a year in which we generated more than $350k in gross revenue and onboarded 6,000+ freelancers to our platform. In Q1 2020, we had gross revenue of just over $117K.

We cater to small businesses, many of whom went on a hiring freeze due to COVID. We expect demand to pick up in 2021.

In Q2 of 2020, we closed our first round of seed funding (100% over-subscribed) from 240+ investors.

Since New York, we have launched in four more cities across the U.S. and Canada, and we currently have 12,000+ freelancers and 300+ companies on our platform.

A company posts its open position on our app. Our patent-pending AI-powered matching technology does the work of finding an optimal candidate among our vetted network of freelancers. In as little as a couple of days after the original post, the candidate starts work on a trial basis.

If it’s a great fit, the company has the option to extend the trial or “buy out” the freelancer, making them a full-time employee on the payroll. If it’s a flop, the company, and the freelancer part ways, and the company hasn’t spent a cent on what would have been a failed hire on the payroll through traditional recruiting channels.

Throughout this cycle, our AI collects data to further hone its candidate curating power.

“Take Rate”: Freelancers pay a 10% commission on every dollar paid by the company to the freelancer.

“Buyout Fee”: Companies pay a nominal fee when they decide to convert a freelancer to their payroll — Longer a company has worked with a freelancer on trial, the smaller this fee gets.

Job portals create a hiring process that can take months as managers sift through hundreds of resumes and applicants apply to dozens of jobs without ever hearing back.

Staffing agencies charge a premium for their manual, human-driven services.

Freelance websites often provide low-quality employees that would never make the cut for a full-time hire.

SkillSoniq is powered by an AI system that continually collects data and allows us to efficiently connect the right candidate to the right job—meaning a lower cost and less time spent.

*The above information is based on internal research and management's experience

We hope to disrupt the traditional recruiting process for good. Our ultimate vision is to make hiring as simple as speaking into Voice-Enabled Devices like Amazon Echo or an Apple Watch, where you would be able to start working with potential employees within seconds, without conducting any interviews.

In the SkillSoniq World, companies will automatically be assigned the best workers for the job through our app, and be given personalized recommendations on their next “individual or team” hire making it very easy for companies to scale teams.

*The information is for illustration purposes only, actual technology has not been developed.

In the next five years, we want to be present in every major freelance-heavy city and country across the world, aiming to become a leader in the category.

Our founder, Abby (Abhinav Verma), has spearheaded two successful entrepreneurial ventures in the past, and our Board of Advisors consists of high profile entrepreneurs, tech executives, venture capitalists, and an author of best-selling business books. 

Collectively, our team has 40+ years of experience in sales, marketing, finance, and tech and is true problem solvers. We are driven to succeed because we have all felt the pain of hiring via traditional recruiting methods or the pain of finding a job. 

If so, it’s time to invest in a recruiting app which has taken the age old concept of “Temp to Perm” and added multiple layers of technology to it to transform the way companies hire talent. We believe this is needed now, more than ever, as companies invest in growth while staying lean, especially as they recover from the wake of the pandemic. We have already begun to see favorable metrics on our platform as companies see the value of hiring on SkillSoniq: 

In 2021, we believe many companies will begin to scale up their hiring processes, which could provide huge tailwinds to our business. Internally within SkillSoniq, we are at an inflection point with proven sales channels, attractive unit economics, happy customers, rapid release of new product features, and a great deal of learning. With momentum building around freelancing and remote work, we believe that funds raised in this round will help us further capitalize on extremely favorable market trends we’ve seen.

Thanks for reading our story! We hope that you will invest in us to help us change recruiting for good and become a leading talent marketplace globally.