Blockchain-powered recruiting startup SpringRole weeds out fake resumes

SpringRole is building a blockchain-powered professional profile attestation protocol

Many people fudge their resumes to present their best side to bag a job, posing a challenge for HR managers to hire genuine talents. A study revealed that about 53 per cent of job applicants lied on their resumes at some point or the other, making false claims about their degrees, capacities and work experience.

Founded in 2014, SpringRole, a blockchain professional network company, is looking at resolving the issue through its platform.

Co-headquartered in Bengaluru and Santa Monica in the US, the company has recently raised $1.3 million through a private token sale. Investors in SpringRole include AlphaBlock Investments, DNA (Brock Pierce and Scott Walker’s blockchain investment and consulting firm), Isaac Lee’s BlockWater and Wavemaker Genesis. 

“SpringRole is taking an important approach towards solving a massive problem in the HR industry globally. By focusing on India — where the problem is particularly acute — SpringRole has an excellent opportunity to capture market share quickly and build a set of blockchain and API standards that can open them to additional opportunities as they grow,” Scott Walker, co-founder of DNA and an early SpringRole backer, said.

The company is building a blockchain-powered professional profile attestation protocol. “In this world of unverified and possibly unauthentic online professional profiles, SpringRole profiles will be verified and attested on the blockchain to ensure the highest level of authenticity. For employers, it solves the problem of requiring a verification process before every new hire. With SpringRole, everything on a candidate’s profile is pre-verified, which negates the need of a separate verification process. This will save time, money and effort,” said Kartik Mandaville, founder and CEO, SpringRole.

On the candidate’s side, it will make the hiring process faster, efficient, and transparent. It will also provide an online blockchain-based platform, which is linked to other blockchain platforms for seamless integration with other blockchain services.

Presently, solving the challenges of hiring technical professionals for Indian BPO industry, the company is also keen to foray into other sectors like health.

It will open a host of new opportunities, and eliminate the middleman to speed up the process, said Mandaville.

Before SpringRole, customers were using third-party companies for verifying and they had a manual verification process that takes weeks to complete. Against the existing standard of verification, which takes around 10 days, SpringRole takes two to three days. In India, SpringRole will be charging Rs 300 per verification from the companies.

As its revenue stream, the company has a model to charge per verification among other traditional recruiting models like pay per hire.

It has around 40 hiring companies as customers; all are based in the US. The company earlier had the referral machine learning technology platform.

Around 15,000 profiles have been created on the SpringRole’s platform. It plans to have 100 companies by October this year and 50,000 resumes.

“We will be using the funds to build our blockchain product, with the main feature of having a fully verified professional profile. At the same time, we will focus on partnerships with universities and companies worldwide,” he added.