How does Salary2Me work

I have a telegram channel about IT. Its target audience can be defined as qualified staff from tech companies in Belarus. I found it useful to put these people and recruiters in touch. However, you can’t just ask subscribers to send their CVs, I have to give some kind of motivation for them. So that’s how I came up with an idea to create a service, which would give the information about the market salary rate in different cities.

We successfully realized this idea and launched Salary2Me at the beginning of May. Everything is simple — download your CV and get your result. “Under the hood” there is a parser, which analyses the CV and splits it to the keywords. The neuro network analyses the list of keywords and gives a result — market labour valuation. We created the dataset with the help of a telegram-bot, where the audience could share data about their skills and salary. Also, we parsed job-websites: we had to mastermind a few features to get the precise salary numbers from them.

On the larger amount of data, we learnt to distinguish some patterns of the labour market. Now, we don’t need a lot of data to enter a new country and forecast salaries there.

We’ve already reached the high accuracy of the forecasts and continue to raise it with users’ questionnaires. We have a “Help project” form where one can share his or her salary. People are actively using it.

The results of our work are evaluated by recruiters — it is one of our main “features”. We give them a possibility to blindly evaluate candidates and compare their opinion to colleagues’ opinions. Thanks to these evaluations we increase the service forecast accuracy.

From a tool for forecasting market salary rates, we chose the way of creating more added value and user value. Our major idea is to make an assistant, who will help to build careers.

Based on a large amount of data, we can help small and medium businesses predict the career path and work-duration of their employees. In particular, to detect and prevent negative situations for the business in time: emotional burnout, key employees sudden leave, conflicts in the team.

We develop the web-version of the service as it is the most universal solution — it works everywhere. The majority of our users visit our website from desktops, as they are at work at this time.

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CV 2.0

We are masterminding a new CV standard — CV 2.0. The generally accepted CV form only shows hard skills and completely misses soft skills. It is a big mistake, as you quite quickly can change your proficiency, while psychological options are hard to change.

In the brand new CV 2.0, we add the psychological profile of a person to the general information as it helps to select the person to your team considering not only his competencies and work experience. It is vital: if a person from an alien culture joins the team, for him, it will be hard to work efficiently.

From my personal experience, I’ve seen many examples of teams, which did work as one solid mechanism. The office was completely silent — not even a sound! I have also seen different situations — the office was like a boiler factory — an impossible environment to work. Everything depends on the temperament of anchor-people in the team.

We are setting two goals. We want to learn how to analyze the culture of a whole team and a separate person, so we can find compatible employees. And to learn how to advise different development variants of a specific specialist according to his psycho-type and skills; long story short, advise what companies, teams and directions pay attention to. It is also possible to gather your dream-team. We are developing such a service.

You can download the CV and complete the test on the one page. The user can add test results to the CV if desired. The average user passes our test in 12 minutes. We’ve optimized questions and we can analyse such data without losing accuracy. We provide related services, to motivate users to complete tests. For example, a pair compatibility test. It is interesting to know how psychologically compatible you and your colleague are.

We can already see a large viral effect of our product. The users are trying themselves and sharing results with their friends. This condition lowers expenses for the advertisement, which are still yet to come.

More than two thousand CV’s came to us the day we’ve launched the web-version and new users are coming to us, at least 10 per day. This is organic traffic, we don’t attract users from advertisement channels.

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B2B and B2C

We are going to monetize the service in several channels. We will create a premium-version for users and payable products for recruiters. We will test hypotheses and see, where we can be as useful as possible.

We are planning to start monetization on B2C services, as they are faster to launch. Also, we are going to have a paid version with advanced features.

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In collaboration with Laboratory of Brain

We have gathered a strong team with my partner. It wasn’t hard with our CV-database and networking. We’ve covered all necessary technological competences, in addition, we have business analytic in our team, as well as a specialist on client attraction. An integral part of our service — a team of psychologists, who are creating a special test.

We are working in collaboration with specialists from Moscow Laboratory of Brain as they have acknowledged psychological competences. The topic of emotional burnout is covered by Andrey Miroshnichenko, a specialist from Belarus.

We test our work results in the “field”: we communicate with teams and get feedback. As for now, we are working with small teams from our network. At the next stages of testing, we will involve larger companies, sports teams.

One part of the team works with us for the prospect of growing together with the project, while some tasks we give for the outsource. Some of the tasks are performed by beginners under the guidance of experienced mentors. With such a flexible scheme, we get a good result for pretty competitive money. The burn rate is relatively low. We are a small submarine, sailing quietly through the depths, looking for a treasure.

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Looking for competitors

Value my CV is a British service, which is the closest to us by functionality. They have a database of one million CV’s, which is a planetary number for us. For some reason, they only work in Great Britain. The rest of the European market isn’t covered.

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Starting from the EU

The European Union is our major market. It is a large market, which is comparable to the American market by the size of the economy. It is convenient to work in the EU because there is uniform legislation on data retention. Our audience is white-collar workers who speak English. Therefore, Europe’s multilingualism does not scare us.

If we look a bit forward, we are interested in the Asian market, first of all, it’s about India. There are many programmers and companies, where English is a must. The USA we consider in the far future, the market is very developed and attractive, but it is overstocked and there are difficulties with legislation about data retention.

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Data privacy

The data of psychological tests do not fall under the strict restrictions of the GDPR, since they do not contain biological information. However, we do not allow any freedom regarding the test data of our users. Only they decide whether to add the result to their CV or not.

If the user decides not to show test results that he received from us, then we will use them only in anonymized form for internal research. We guarantee non-disclosure of the information.

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Not looking for investments

We develop the project on our own expense, and we would like not to disclose the sum that was already spent on the project. This year, we are planning to become self-sufficient. We have a few hypotheses how exactly we want to do this and we will start testing in the nearest time. As for now, we don’t buy the traffic, as we didn’t start the monetization process.

When we see our unit economy, then we will consider the option of raising investments. If our hypotheses about monetization work, then we may not need any additional funding, we will make money on our own. As for now, this question is open for us.