Sydney startup Presumi helps job seekers track how employers interact with their resume

The job seeking experience for many people, to put it bluntly, sucks. After hours upon hours of looking for jobs, fixing resumes, researching companies, and writing cover letters, the reply to an unsuccessful application is often just a generic email one sentence long. Not every application can be successful, but it would help applicants down the line to know what was wrong with the ones they sent in.

Of course, sending every unsuccessful applicant a breakdown of why they didn’t get the job – or an interview – is too time consuming for employers, so to provide some insight through data tracking and analysis is Sydney startup Presumi.

Founded by Hayden Bleasel earlier this year, the Presumi platform allows users to create and send out a trackable job application and resume, and helps them manage each application from start to finish.

“I came back from an internship in Silicon Valley and had to apply for graduate positions. I started applying for Atlassian, Dropbox, and Twitter, and the more jobs I applied for, the harder it became to manage everything and the more nervous I got when people didn’t respond. So I built a small tool to help me combat these problems,” Bleasel explained.

The initial product, Bleasel said, was a simple job application management tool, a sort of CMS for jobs built to help keep people up to date with what companies they were applying to, application deadlines, interviews, and contacts. From there, Presumi started focusing on resume tracking, the tool Bleasel said saw the most interest from job seekers.

Presumi currently tracks how many times a resume has been opened, what links have been clicked, and how long it has been viewed for, per view. Bleasel explained there are more analytics to come soon, but the focus is not so much on the pure data a job seeker can view, but the insights the startup is gathering.

“With our understanding of the market and the constant influx of data we get, we can help job seekers really understand what’s happening with transforming that data into insights, such as why you didn’t get the job and what you can do to improve,” Bleasel said.

A job seeker can sign up to the platform, upload a resume, and then begin applying for jobs by inputting some simple data about the application, such as company name, the role, application deadline, and a link to an online job listing if there is one. They then send the application in.

The platform is essentially free for job seekers in that they can send out resumes through the platform for free, however they must buy Presumi Credits in order to unlock analytics on their applications and advice on how to optimise their resume. At the moment, $1 dollar gets a user four credits.

“We recently switched from a subscription model to a credit model so that a user can pay directly for results rather than a promise,” Bleasel said.

However, the startup’s target customers are not job seekers – of which there are over 1,500 on board – but rather educational institutions such as universities and TAFEs, which in a competitive job market are increasingly focused on helping their students find jobs after graduation.

“We made the mistake of charging job seekers before which lowers their chance of using the platform and clouds our judgement when building a product to focus on [customer lifetime value] instead of the important things, like whether we solve their problems in the best way possible,” Bleasel said.

“We want to help the job seeker as much as possible, so our solution to focus on the education system is twofold. They’re more interested in paying for a solution like this as they can positively impact their students on a massive level and we can focus on creating the best experience for our users without worrying about money.”

As such, Bleasel said the pitch to institutions is quite simple, with the focus on the fact that Presumi can equip their careers centres with the tools to help them measure and improve the effectiveness of their service, and increase student employability.

The University of Technology Sydney was the first to come on board, perhaps not a huge surprise given both that the university is particularly focused on equipping graduates with practical skills for the workforce, and that Presumi has been taking part in the university’s startup accelerator program, Hatchery+. With UTS having given its final year students access to the platform, Bleasel said the startup will look to focus on UTS and perfecting its offering before looking for further partnerships.

“UTS has proven to be very forward-thinking and passionate when it comes to increasing student employability so we’re excited to work with them,” Bleasel said.

He added that the experience at Hatchery has also been “better than I ever could have guessed”.

“I was building a glorified product, but not a startup. There’s so much to take into account when creating a startup that I took for granted initially, such as really understanding your customer’s psychology and focusing on their emotions rather than actions,” Bleasel said.

In looking to understand Presumi’s customers, Bleasel has also been looking at potentially creating solutions for employers in order to fix the issues across the whole recruitment process. Given it was created out of the job seeker’s experience, the platform started out with the narrow view that all the problems applying for jobs for on the job seeker’s side, then found that employers have an equally difficult time hiring.

From Workible to OneShift, TalentVine to EmployMe, there is no shortage of startups in Australia working to solve an issue in the recruitment space or another – fellow Hatchery+ startup myInterview aims to fix the interview process by letting employers conduct video interviews. It will be interesting to see how the space continues to develop and whether there is scope for these startups to work together.

There is a lot to do in the space, but Bleasel said the Presumi is focused on steadily growing its team to help solve the problems it’s currently working through before moving on.

“There’s plenty of problems for us to work with, but we need to decide what’s important and we’ll look at it again once we’ve solved our current market’s issues.”

Image: Hayden Bleasel. Source: Supplied.