No Resumes, Just Skills: Smarterer Grabs $1.75M From True, Google Ventures; Tony Conrad Joins Board

There’s plenty of noise today in job forums, and resumes have never seemed so ineffective. As more and more people enter the workplace, with a variety of backgrounds and skill sets that may seem misleadingly similar on paper, employers have to find new, smarter ways to find the right candidates.

Boston-based startup Smarterer believes it has the solution. The company’s platform provides job searchers with a simple, gamified way to show employers what they know by taking quizzes in subjects that range from engineering to music. Smarterer then crowdsources its test designs and employs a smart ranking system to give job searchers a score and allows them to broadcast their successes to the world.

After launching in late 2010, the gamified test-taking platform struggled to find growth early, but has turned that story around of late, especially after launching “Skill Sets,” which allows companies to offer Smarterer quizzes as part of their online job applications, enabling hiring managers to then use the startup’s tools to further validate a candidate’s skills.

A complement to gamified job platforms like Gild (which specifically targets developers), Smarterer leveraged Skill Sets into 1,250 percent growth in a single week, as it became clear that Smarterer offered candidates an opportunity to turn their skills into jobs.

Today, the startup offers more than 500 skills, and its community has now answered over 10 million questions — currently averaging 70K questions per day. Its Excel test, for example, has seen more than 1 million answers, with users spending the equivalent of 176 days answering questions about Excel.

To harness this growth, Smarterer is taking on another round of capital, as it officially closed $1.75 million in series A financing today, bringing its total funding to $3 million. True Ventures led the round, with participation from previous investor Google Ventures and a dozen or so angel investors. True Ventures (and About.me) Founder Tony Conrad will be joining the startup’s board as a result of the round.

The other key to the startup’s platform is its ranking system, which is based on Glicko — the same rating system used to qualify chess masters — and allows the platform to learn with each question you answer, enhancing the algorithm’s ability to measure the difficulty of the questions and, in turn, your skills — as it goes.

The startup will also be leveraging partnerships with applicant tracking system The Resumator and social recruiting platform Bullhorn Reach to help make hiring less of a pain in the ass. On top of that, it’s also partnering with About.me so that users can link their Smarterer profiles to their About.me pages to keep their preferred online tools and networks all in one place.

These tools and integrations are giving the average user a great way to set themselves apart during the job search, because the fact of the matter is that not everyone shines on their one-page CVs. Even if one didn’t take a lot of math courses during their academic careers, if they’ve been able to self-educate and become proficient in the meantime, Smarterer gives them an easy way to cut through the BS and show that they’re proficient anyway. Just take a few quick quizzes and prove that you’re a master of algebra.

For more on Smarterer, check them out at home here.