This startup will let you know if a techie bullshits on his resume

The CloudSwyft team.

“There’s a ton of bullshit in people’s CVs, especially about IT skills,” says Dann Angelo De Guzman, founder of Philippine startup CloudSwyft. This is a major problem for employers that CloudSwyft wants to solve.

Dann says IT guys often oversell themselves or lie about their abilities. Unsuspecting employers who rely on paper resumes and in-person interviews discover this only when the candidates have been hired and are in action. The result: time and money wasted.

CloudSwyft upends the traditional hiring system for enterprises. Instead of asking applicants to talk about their skills, it will have them perform tasks.

“Most tech recruiters don’t have any tech background so they don’t really know the right questions to ask or how to verify IT skill sets. The best way to assess IT candidates is by giving them hands-on practical exercises. This is where ‘prove it by doing it’ comes in,” Dann explains.

How it works is pretty straightforward. Using CloudSwyft, recruiters can choose a lab environment (Windows Server, Linux, Java, C#, etc.), drag and drop checkpoints or practical exercises, set scoring, save and publish, then assign to a job candidate. When completed, the employer can view the results right away.

So if, for example, an interviewee claims to be an expert in Palo Alto networks, an employer on CloudSwyft may ask them to configure a firewall and connect to a client server successfully.

Not just for recruitment

CloudSwyft also deals with the whole IT employment life cycle, including training.

Enterprises constantly struggle to keep up with the latest technologies and the skills required, so an infrastructure to support staff development is equally important.

CloudSwyft offers customizable learning management systems (LMS), with hands-on lab activities. If a third-party LMS is already in use, it could also easily integrate with CloudSwyft. This means aside from watching videos and reading lectures, users can learn a new technology or software product by playing with it, on demand.

“Companies can train their staff by letting them do it, from configuring complex server setups, firewalls, developing code, databases all the way up to basic software product navigation. In fact, companies can also use CloudSwyft to train customers who require and need technical hands-on use cases,” Dann points out.

Essentially, he says CloudSwyft acts as an “IT playground” for enterprises. Because of this, he brands it as “labs-as-a-service” instead of software-as-a-service (SaaS), putting it in a league of its own.

CloudSwyft, according to him, has no direct competitor locally, but there are a few “indirect” competitors globally like Pluralsight (for IT training) and TruaAbility (for recruitment).