Dear Startup Investor,
My colleague Adam and I had lunch with Daniel Freedman yesterday. Daniel is the chief strategy officer and head of business development at Apploi. We recommended Apploi to Startup Investor members in June last year.
Daniel confirmed our own observations. That the company is making good progress, having picked up some major clients along with hundreds of smaller ones over the past few months.
It’s also pressing ahead with contracts spearheaded by local government agencies (plus the one with the White House).
Daniel says government agencies spend at least $1 billion a year on workforce initiatives and programs. Apploi has partnerships with the states of New York and Washington, along with the city of Baltimore and several other jurisdictions, but can play a much larger role in this lucrative market. It’s just scratching the surface.
Some more notes from our sit-down with Daniel…
- Apploi attended this year’s recently concluded South by Southwest trade show. It’s now following up on several client leads it picked up at the show. By the way, Tech Cocktail named Apploi one of its 10 favorite startups at the show with this entry:
Apploi (New York City): Apploi’s mission is to revolutionize the quality of the job application experience for those on both sides of the hiring fence. They make hiring simple and accessible for all by utilizing mobile technology on a Zillow-like interface that displays available jobs in your area on a map. In-store kiosks in turn provide an immediate solution to employers with “walk-in” applications, and the geo-location feature on Apploi ensures that applicants searching for jobs on a personal device will be shown the jobs closest to them first.
- Apploi has joined the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline initiative, making 15 of its jobs kiosks available for students across the five boroughs. They’ll be able to tap into Apploi’s job platform to learn about training and upskilling.
- Apploi is partnering with my hometown, Baltimore, to help promote job opportunities. Daniel said 2,000 people showed up at a recent hiring event for Amazon. A third didn’t have access to a smartphone or the Internet. And another third had a smartphone but didn’t have a data plan. These are the kinds of job seekers Apploi is successfully reaching out to.
By the way, Daniel wrote a great book review for The Wall Street Journal on Google insider Laszlo Bock’s book Work Rules.
Here are a couple of excerpts, but the entire review is worth reading…
Mr. Bock notes more than once that it’s harder to get a job at Google than it is to get accepted at Harvard. Yet despite receiving around two million applicants every year for a few thousand positions, Google spends twice as much as a percentage of its budget on recruiting than the average company.
Recruiters are encouraged to think like Astro Teller, who heads Google X, which is responsible for innovations like Google Glass and self-driving cars. “If you want your car to get fifty miles per gallon, fine. You can retool your car a little bit. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas for five hundred miles, you have to start over.” In that vein, I would encourage Google and other companies to more actively recruit from communities that traditionally won’t apply for those jobs – new immigrants, minorities and people from poor communities.
Apploi now has over 3,500 brands signed up to its service.
Invest safely,
Andy Gordon
Startup Investor Portfolio
