In recent weeks, there’s been some local buzz about a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison students that’s getting set to participate in the 2018 Hyperloop Pod Competition, which will take place next week in Hawthorne, CA. This year, the team hopes to run its pod on SpaceX’s hyperloop test track, an opportunity it was denied at the contest last year after not being selected as one of the top three teams.
The Badgerloop team isn’t the only group with UW-Madison ties that’s heading to California to pitch its technology against other bright young innovators. The other group is Moonshot Insights, a startup that plans to pitch to a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in in hopes of landing an early stage investment. Moonshot is developing digital tools to help customers make better hiring decisions, says co-founder and CEO Kyle Treige.
Dorm Room Fund, an arm of the VC firm First Round Capital that focuses on student ventures, recently picked Moonshot as one of about 60 startups that will pitch to investors at Dorm Room in the coming weeks, Treige says. About half of them receive an investment from Dorm Room, and a typical check size is $20,000. Moonshot is the first Wisconsin-based business to be selected to pitch to Dorm Room’s investment committee, Treige says.
There are currently four people on Moonshot’s team, Treige says. Three are recent UW-Madison graduates, and the fourth is currently a student at the school.
Moonshot’s software evaluates job candidates to predict how well they’ll perform in a particular role. The startup has developed a set of assessments for Moonshot’s clients to give to their candidates, which Treige says typically take about 25 minutes to complete. These evaluations include objective, position-based skills tests; questions asking respondents how they’d react in different situations; and a psychometric, or personality type, analysis, he says.
After a candidate has completed the battery of tests, Moonshot’s software algorithms analyze his or her responses, as well as some of the information the applicant has provided about previous work experience and education, Treige says. For now, the startup’s software isn’t designed to boil all that data down to a single thumbs-up or thumbs-down hiring recommendation, he says.
“It’s more painting the picture fully of who they are as a person,” Treige says.
He says most of Moonshot’s early customers are small organizations, many of which are also in the tech industry. However, companies with hundreds or even thousands of employees might also benefit by using Moonshot’s tools to evaluate candidates just after they apply for a job, Treige claims.
On average, a hiring manager spends just six seconds looking at a candidate’s resume at the initial screening stage, according to research by the careers website Ladders. Treige says shifting to a more data-driven hiring process makes an organization less susceptible to a pitfall in the tech world that has come under increased scrutiny: managers in charge of extending job offers tend to hire people who remind them of themselves.
“We found 50 to 67 percent of women and minorities are disadvantaged” by the resume-screening process as it exists today, says Treige, adding that there’s a “massive amount of disparity through that one piece of paper.”
Efforts to reduce bias in hiring decisions have become more sophisticated in recent years, but they’re nothing new. In 1978, the U.S. Department of Labor and other federal agencies introduced new hiring guidelines that included what’s become known as the “four-fifths,” or 80 percent, rule. The rule stipulates that at any given organization, candidates belonging to protected minority groups
