Can Identifii Match You and Your Dream Job?

Stuck in a job you hate? Still don’t know what you want to do with your life despite the fact that you’re about to graduate from university soon? If this sounds like you, perhaps you should head on over to Identifii.

A site that offers, in the words of founder Usman Sheikh, “career discovery for the 18-35 set”, it works on the premise that companies have long neglected the role that personality plays in determining how well someone is suited for a particular job. Just think about it. Why are so many people unhappy with their jobs? Could it be that they aren’t suited to them? You have to admit that it makes quite a lot of sense. According to Usman, Identifii’s goal is to solve this problem by helping people become aware of their personal strengths and weaknesses. And how are people supposed to do this? By completing psychometric tests on the site (which are free, by the way.) We caught up with him to find out more about what Identifii has to offer.

You describe yourself as a serial entrepreneur. Have you ever worked for anyone before?

I had a boss for two weeks but it didn’t work out. I thought back then that I wanted to be an investment banker but turns out it wasn’t the job for me.

How did the idea for Identifii come about?

When you ask someone who’s graduating from college what they want to do, you get blur faces or stock answers like ‘I want to be a banker.’ One of the reasons this happens is because they don’t have enough information to make an informed decision so we’re going to equip them with enough information so they can make better decisions instead of a biased one.

In 2010, We launched Reevolo at Echelon. Reevolo was a web-based career guidance service that had students answer the question: What do you want to be when you grow up? We received lots of queries and were trying to figure how to create a business model around it. In October I joined the Founders Institute programme in Singapore and out of that, we refined Revolo to become Identifii.

Usman pitching.

The vision for the company is to empower people to lead fulfilled, meaningful and successful lives. When you put people in the right jobs, their lives become better, the lives of everyone around them become better and the world becomes better.

Tell us more about Identifii.

Identifii is career discovery for the 18-35 age set. We help people become aware of their strengths and weaknesses, identify their work preferences and match them with companies that would suit their personalities. This means not just matching you with the Googles of the world but also SMEs and start-ups. A lot of the times, people don’t know what sort of companies are out there and this helps provide exposure to options that they wouldn’t have considered at first but may be a better fit. People have pre-conceived notions that they want to work at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs but they may not have the killer instinct that you need to survive in such an organization. I know really smart people who went into investment banking and they’re like, “I want to commit suicide.”

What stage is Identifii at right now?