With a down economy, and an overwhelming number of job applicants to any open position (well, maybe not in tech startups, but everywhere else), there’s a real need for tools that help businesses better sort through their over-crowded inboxes to find the best candidates from among thousands of emails with attached files, photos, resumes and cover letters. A new company called SortBox wants to help address that problem by getting rid of the email inbox altogether. Instead, it’s offering a simple, customized inbox designed just for the purpose of moving through job applications quickly.
The SortBox inbox was created to be very easy to use, however it joins a crowded market of companies innovating the talent acquisition/hiring space : there’s The Resumator, HireRabbit, Firefish Software, Jobvite, Ovation, and Sendouts, to name just a few, and Oracle acquired top competitor Taleo at the beginning of the year.
But a lot of the companies that are designing tools related to hiring are offering something robust, with a lot of features and configuration options. Obviously, that serves a need in this market, but SortBox wants to provide an alternative for businesses that don’t need that level of complexity. Its target market is not the enterprise, but rather the mom-and-pops, the small businesses, recruiters, and yes, even startups who are just looking to keep their actual inbox clutter-free.
Explains SortBox founder Justin Sherratt, “we purposefully removed many features, both on the scope and even commented out code because we wanted to come to market with an MVP product that was super easy to use,” he says. “In time we are going to add products and functionality.”
To get started with the system, you just click “create a Sortbox” from the SortBox homepage to create a web presence for that particular job. You then fill out the title, description, and other any other details about the position. Once posted online, when anyone visits the page, they apply by clicking the big blue “Apply” button at the bottom and upload their images, bios and their resume into the SortBox job listing. The system then organizes the content so that it’s all neatly laid out on one page for the business owner or hiring manager to view.
And you can really fly through the job applications, thanks to SortBox’s color-coded “Yes,” “No,” and “Maybe” buttons at the top of each application. The system also supports multiple SortBoxes so you can advertise for more than one position at a time, and keep everything related to hiring in one central resource. Currently there’s no auto-posting feature included, but companies can post the custom link SortBox generates to places like Craigslist, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter on their own. In the future, support for auto-posting will be added.
SortBox was founded in April 2011 during Sherratt’s participation in the Founder Institute program in NYC. His background includes time spent at startups (RxCentric.com, 300 Monks, NinjaFinder), at recruiting agencies, and in film (producing, directing, and cinematography). Having been involved with the hiring process directly in many of these efforts – and even building tools like NinjaFinder to fix the problem of finding creative talent – he knew first-hand how difficult the current hiring process is today. This experience inspired him to build a tool that could simplify the process for any industry.
Prior to today’s public debut, the company has been running a private beta test with under 50 customers, which included startups like Wello.co and Kindara.com, and restaurants like Mixt Greens and Split Bread. Pricing for SortBox has not been worked out, but it will be a freemium-based service. You can try it for free from here now.