Frank Bardelli knew right away that his recent job hunt was going to be different.
After the software engineer posted on LinkedIn a couple of months ago that he was looking for a role, he didn’t hear from former colleagues with offers to come work with them again, as he had during past searches.
“It was very different, and definitely drier than I’ve seen it be in many years,” Bardelli told Business Insider.
So, when he heard from a recruiter at Fonzi, which matches engineers with startups and tech companies, Bardelli was intrigued.
He completed a profile and applied to what Fonzi calls Match Day, the process through which employers can meet with candidates. Three of the 14 participating companies offered Bardelli interviews. That allowed him to sidestep a protracted job search and many of the headaches that go along with it, he said.
For many in tech, layoffs and sluggish hiring have translated to job searches marked by seemingly endless rounds of applying. Letting an employer come to you likely offers an appealing alternative.
That’s the hope of Yang Mou, Fonzi’s cofounder and CEO. He told Business Insider that the existing traditional recruiting process is inefficient and “broken for both sides.”
Mou said this results in candidates spending a lot of time trying to determine whether a company is a good fit. When candidates do land interviews, he said, they often repeat themselves in similar conversations with multiple employers.
Employers, for their part, are “getting flooded with applicants,” Mou said. “You put up a job post, you get 1,000 applicants in 24 hours.”
To try to make the whole process more palatable, Mou said, Fonzi takes candidates who know what they want in a new role and connects them with employers that have real jobs and “sane hiring processes.”
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“They’re not going to drag it out for three months,” he said, referring to employers.
Committing to a minimum salary
Companies seeking talent through Fonzi are required to commit to minimum salaries upfront so that candidates don’t have to go through rounds of interviews only to learn that the pay won’t cut it.
Mou said engineers must complete a “very selective” application process before being matched with an employer. Part of that involves a brief exchange with Fonzi’s AI interviewer. The agent can handle complex conversations, including understanding the candidate’s technical work.
Talking to an AI agent, Mou said, can be helpful for busy engineers who might want to wait until after the workday to complete that part of an application.
“It has infinite patience,” he said. “You can ramble for 15 minutes and it won’t cut you off.”
Fonzi combines the AI interview with candidates’ résumés, additional details on their work histories, and personal preferences such as where they want to work and for what type of company. A Fonzi recruiter then talks by phone with those who appear to be a good fit. From there, Fonzi invites top candidates to take part in Match Day and assigns each candidate a recruiter to work with during the job search.
The conversations with the recruiter help to identify important attributes, Mou said.
“Are they a capable communicator?” he said. “Would you want to work with this person?”
The discussions also help reveal more than what’s on someone’s résumé, said Bec Bliss, a recruiter who is Fonzi’s head of talent.
“Getting folks to talk about what they love, what they’re good at, what they want to be doing turns them into the full, 3D candidate instead of a sheet of paper,” she told Business Insider.
Each month, Fonzi AI has Match Day for engineers seeking in-person and hybrid roles in the New York area and for remote roles in the US. The company plans to offer in-person and hybrid roles in San Fransicso in October and other cities after that.
Fonzi is free for job seekers and charges a fee of 18% of the base salary if a company makes a hire. Because the business model is only about three months old, the company hasn’t released stats on how many workers employers have hired.
‘Happy to have any matches’
For Bardelli, the lackluster job market meant that after leaving a prior role, he expected to have to brush up on his interviewing and networking skills instead of relying on the network he’d built up over about 20 years in tech.
“I was hitting the market cold,” Bardelli said.
Networking, many recruiters insist, is still one of the best ways to find a job and get past the screening software that so many job seekers hate. Yet, if there’s not much hiring going on, the search can be tough even when you’re plugged in, as Bardelli is.
“A lot of people were like, ‘Yeah, hiring has kind of dried up at our company,'” he said, referring to comments he heard from industry colleagues.
Ultimately, Bardelli settled on an employer he connected with through Fonzi and started his new role this month.
He said that going into the process with Fonzi, he wondered whether employers would like what he had to offer, though he was optimistic.
“I thought my skills were relevant enough that maybe I’d get a match or two,” Bardelli said. “I was very happy to have any matches at all.”
Do you have a story to share about your job search? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.