Montreal Startup: MatchFWD Socially Connecting For The Job Market

MatchFWD is a startup based in Montreal that is hoping to change the paradigm in the job hunting game. They want to cut out the middleman by leveraging social media and sharing. MatchFWD provides a platform that allows hiring managers to share new job opportunities with people and then down the social landscape, in a word-of-mouth style that will hopefully connect good candidates with great jobs.

MatchFWD works both ways though, job seekers can leverage the same social media networks to promote themselves to potential hiring managers and jobs. The pinnacle of MatchFWD is when, through social networks, a person that’s seen and shared a job can connect a person that’s looking for a similar job.

While recruiters are sure to frown on the concept behind MatchFWD the power is granted back to the people and the hiring becomes a smoother process. Also, hiring managers benefit by seeing the real time recommendations that are coming through shares.

MatchFWD is using the sharing economy to disrupt the job changing experience and make it a more level playing field. Job seekers will love this platform because they won’t waste their time applying to blind box ads where recruiters are just fattening their talent pool.

The startup launched this sharing platform back in March even before Washington DC based startup “Barrel of Jobs” launched. Barrel of Jobs is also using the social economy to help place candidates but in a different way.

We got a chance to interview MatchFWD co-founder Phil Gauvin about their new approach to the job hunt. Check out the interview below:

What is matchFWD?
matchFWD is a smarter way to connect job creators, job seekers and connectors! matchFWD leverages the power of your LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter social media networks, and provides you with personalized recommendations for career opportunities.
matchFWD is laced with two recommendation engines: one to optimize career opportunity sharing through social connections; a second to match job seekers and jobs to find the best fit based on thousands of data points – including skills, interests, experience, work environment, team fit, social connections, education, social network behaviour – aggregated from multiple online profiles. Our users share our recommended profiles and openings with their friends. Our staff also sends personalized job recommendations to users to add a human touch to the job seeking process.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Céline Charron
Céline Charron previously founded Illico Hodes, an employer marketing agency that has been developing online recruiting solutions for over 10 years. CVManager, their ATS solution is the market leader in Quebec for the education and health industries. Rit@ Services, their job distribution platform is the market leader in the Canada East Coast market. Always looking ahead, Céline assembled a team of startup veterans and industry influencers to brainstorm the next wave of sourcing solution and came up with the matchFWD product vision.
Philippe Gauvin
Software engineer with a physics background, Phil spent the last 10+ years in various roles, from software engineer to product manager, in the video games, CAD, mobile, digital signage and web industry. Competitive cyclist and runner with a few marathons under his belt, he’s also involved as organizer of ProductCamp Montreal and other events bridging the gap between universities and startups in Montreal. His past as the head of a music event production company brings a little freshness to the more traditional tech events he’s involved in. Phil brings extensive experience in product development and team management, as well as solid list of accomplishments in web marketing and analytics.
Where are you based?
Proudly built in Montreal, Quebec.
What’s the startup scene and culture like where you’re based?
The Montreal startup scene has been blooming over the last 5 years. It now has a good mix of early stage and growing startups, solid accelerator programs, a very active hackathon and meetup scene and one of the nicest annual startup events, the International Startup Festival.
How did you come up with the idea for matchFWD?
My co-founder and I had received countless emails over the last 10 years from friends and contacts asking for help to hire for a particular position. You usually forward these emails to the first top-of-mind candidate you can think of, or you forget about it if you don’t have anyone in mind. Success rate is low. With all the info we share on social networks, we thought there had to be a better way. So we started digging.
What problem does matchFWD solve?
For employers, we facilitate the social distribution of a job posting, thereby increasing the number of referred professional profiles that employers receive.
For job seekers, we help them discover what jobs are available in their 1st and 2nd degree social networks, evaluate what are the most interesting ones based on their experience but also their fit with the manager, the company and the team. These criteria are usually absent from search results on job boards or LinkedIn. Finally, we help them identify contacts to spread the job on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
What’s your secret sauce?
Our sauce is in the matching and routing algorithms, in the uniqueness of our user interface, and in how easy and fun we make it for people to connect relevant professional opportunities with relevant profiles.
What’s one dilemma you’ve encountered in the startup process?
Building a product targeted to three different types of users: hirers or employers, job seekers and connectors.
What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?
Building a team from scratch with players who have not worked together before.
What’s next for matchFWD?
We are launching a new UI for reviewing both recommended professional opportunities and potential profiles that will be a trailblazer in terms of usability.
We’re also launching new social scores to help users evaluate opportunities and get a feel of their fit with the team, the manager and the company, respectively. We look at information including education, companies at which they worked, common friends, and content they share online via social media.
Finally, we are launching a few matchFWD Groups, which are white-labelled subdomains for user groups, schools and business associations. We’ll be launching groups for the Montreal Python and Montreal Ruby on Rails developers, a school for video game designers, and a big video game and mobile developer association. These groups will be able to benefit from all the features found on matchFWD, and allow the group owner to push their branding and offer more value to their group members. A group has the option to share professional opportunities with other groups and/or with the entire matchFWD network.
Linkage:
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