Silp is a new startup created by Dominik Grolimund, who previously founded and built secure online storage Wuala. He is now bootstrapping this new startup with three other co-founders. Wuala was a complex product, but ahead of its time. So now Grolimund is turning his attention to jobs, kicking off with a focus on the tech industry (engineer, design jobs, etc).
Now, clearly there are career-oriented startups out there leveraging platforms like Facebook. BranchOut springs to mind in this field. Skillpages is building something similar but is closer to Taskrabbit in comparison.
However, Silp is aiming to focus on people’s actual talents, matching the jobs out there with the skills out there. In an ideal world Silp brings the jobs to you, instead of you searching for the jobs – at least that’s what they hope. Most people find jobs through their network of friends – Silp is going to try to automate and supercharge this process. There is no need to actively manage a network or a profile. It can be used by anyone from potential employees, employers and recruiters.
Here’s how they do it. First up it’s a face Facebook app, which you then send to friends in a simple app request – or you could just share the site via your stream. Then Silp matches jobs with skills and interests by taking various criteria into account, such as the user’s professional information on Facebook (work, education, location, etc.), skills, interests, and job preferences. And since most people link to other sites from their Facebook profile, Silp attempts to mine, parse, and extract skills and interests from other online profiles as well (like Twitter, Blog, Tumblr, LinkedIn, About.me, GitHub, Stackoverflow, Behance, Zerply, Dribbble, etc.). The matching improves over time as Silp learns from feedback mechanisms, such as a user’s reactions to suggested job offers.
Why did they not build this on LinkedIn I ask? “You recommend a job to a friend, but not to a contact you met for 5 minutes at a conference,” says Grolimund. “We built it on Facebook because we want to bring jobs and friends together. Personal job recommendations.”
Silp also matches jobs with the social graph so that when an employer posts a job vacancy, they, their co-workers and friends can see who in their extended network (friends and friends-of-friends) might be a good fit for the position. Anyone can recommend the job to others thus letting the job travel the social graph until the right candidates are found. That’s assuming you aren’t connected on Facebook to your boss and he sees you being interested in a job, right?
Anyway, When a job match is found, users get an email or a Facebook message from a friend. Silp claims that its matching algorithm will mean users will only get jobs they’ll really want, but that’s to be tested out.
Back when Dropbox was also just getting going Wuala was a P2P file storage network out of Zurich which exited to a sale to drive-maker LaCie in 2009, which in turn got acquired by Seagate in 2012.
It will be interesting to see if the talented Grolimund can pull it off again. And once again out of Zurich.