Meet Clustree, a French startup that uses big data to find the right person for the right position within big companies. Clustree will help both good employees who feel stuck in their jobs and HR departments who might not think to check their own companies for the perfect candidate.
“Clustree is a SaaS platform for talent management,” founder and CEO Bénédicte de Raphélis Soissan told me in a phone interview. “We analyze the career paths of millions of people and create data charts of people hopping from one job to another. We calculate the likelihood and make recommendations.”
At first, Clustree downloaded tens of millions of résumés on the web to find out trends — this was just used to get a head start. Now, Clustree is much more useful as you can upload résumés from your own company. You can also manually add data about your employees using a form. All this data is anonymized and will help building better recommendations for all the other Clustree customers.
Overall, it makes hiring much cheaper than having to work with a talent agency or spending countless of hours interviewing candidates. And it might be benificial for existing employees as well — they might end up with a more fulfilling job.
“We want to break traditional career paths,” Raphélis Soissan said. “We want to say that there are opportunities to jump from one job to another. Sometimes, there are even brand new jobs, and you can’t find any typical profile for these jobs.”
And it works. Big French companies with more than 2,000 employees started using Clustree for their own talent management. GDF Suez was the first client — at the time, Raphélis Soissan wanted to test the market. The product wasn’t even done. Yet, she wanted to see whether a company would buy it. In other words, she sold the product before her team developed it.
The idea behind Clustree comes from the founder’s personal experience. When Raphélis Soissan wanted to quit her job and find a new one, she started searching for hundreds of similar profiles with the same background to see what she could do. Instead of picking the logical next job, she founded her own company to help people in the same situation.
The company recently raised a $760,000 (€600,000) seed round from Alven Capital and business angels, such as Jean-David Blanc, Fred Montagnon and Florian Douetteau. It is currently working on a major product update that will make it more useful. For example, it will be possible to restrict search queries to companies working in a particular industry.
HR departments should definitely use more data to make educated decisions, and that’s why Clustree is an interesting startup. It’s still very early for the young startup, but there are many potentially useful features behind Clustree.