Your angry reactions to Donald Trump’s Facebook posts might help you get a job

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore.

The internet is a fun place, but most people would hate to have potential employers looking at their online activity. That didn’t stop Vijay Sharma from launching Belong, though.

“We’re the company straight out of your worst nightmare,” he says. Like most nightmares, Belong is only scary until you take a closer look at it. The startup scans online profiles – everything from LinkedIn to Twitter to Facebook – to help companies source candidates for jobs.

It was an idea that came to Vijay while he was working with healthcare firm Practo. “There was this one time where they gave me a few assignments that I didn’t really understand. I was 23. In due time, I realized that the company would fail if I were to do all of these myself. I decided to take a backseat and find some people smarter than me for the job.”

This search is what helped the product that powers Belong take shape.

At first, Vijay tried to take the conventional route and look for candidates on job portal Naukri. “I think 20 million people applied for that job,” says Vijay. “I mean, I had people from the oil and gas industry applying to a healthcare startup. It was so frustrating.” Next, he started using Google to find people. “I typed in specific keywords which would lead me to blogs,” reminisces Vijay. “I found a lot of great people, but the people I liked were hard to get. I was reaching out to the marketing manager of Pepsi and asking him to work for Practo.”

By this point, Vijay had interacted with close to a thousand people. “22 people responded, but the amount of effort I had put into finding the other 980 had taught me a few things,” he says. “I started observing who was responding to my ads and who wasn’t. I also learned about quality – a guy who says ‘hey, I love startups’ but only follows TechCrunch on Twitter actually just likes funded startups.’”

The idea lay dormant for a bit, until Vijay co-founded Exotel, a cloud-based telephone system that helps businesses manage their phone calls. While at the company, he met a bright young intern named Sudheendra Chilappagari.

When Vijay felt the familiar winds of restlessness stir again, he decided to leave the company – but this time, with Sudheendra. “He was a really smart guy who was automating all of the stuff that I was doing manually. We felt confident enough to move on,” Vijay explains.

Your startup idea is right there, you just have to look

You’re more than just a piece of paper. Photo credit: David Davies.

With that push, Vijay was shunted into the oversaturated world of hiring startups. But, like he explains, the idea was something that he’d been working on all along.

“Our first version was just that email I sent Practo with ten candidates who made sense,” says Vijay. “Of course, at that point, it was just an Excel sheet. For the first few months that we launched Belong, we were still entering stuff manually. If you want to understand how our algorithm was built out, here’s a basic idea: 24 people have applied for the job and 19 of them also follow Paul Graham on Twitter. What does that say about the type of people that are interested in these positions?”

Then, last June, a bunch of investors took interest in Belong. It raised US$5 million in a round led by Matrix Partners and included Blume Ventures, co-founders of Snapdeal Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, and co-founder of redBus Phanindra Sama.

Lots of competition, but lots of candidates