As the job market continues to get more competitive, it’s taking months for new grads to land employment, with many settling for roles that don’t align with their goals. To address this problem, Drafted, a new startup emerging from stealth, has built a jobs platform for students and early-career professionals, a subset of people who Drafted thinks is ignored by services like LinkedIn, Handshake, and Indeed.
Drafted uses AI and video resumes to match candidates with jobs, going beyond the typical keyword-based approach used by most recruiters and job platforms. Drafted has partnered with over 3,500 companies looking to hire new talent. These companies range from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including numerous Y Combinator startups, as well as Google, Amazon, and DoorDash.
The startup has partnered with top schools including UCLA, University of Miami, University of Chicago, Georgetown University, and others to onboard students and young professionals looking to land internships and jobs.
The platform was created by two-time founder Andrew Kozlovski and former Amazon software engineer Rodrigo Pecchio, who met during their time studying at USC.
Kozlovski founded Brainz Power, a company that sells a supplement formulated with natural ingredients designed to support brain health, in his freshman year to pay his way through university. While the business was able to bring in between $10,000 and $30,000 in revenue per month, Kozlovski wanted to move beyond the supplement space and do something that affected people’s lives in other ways.
“I started consulting for a few different startups, including Y Combinator startups on the growth side, and I was able to get in behind the scenes of how businesses are built in tech, which was really interesting for me personally,” Kozlovski told TechCrunch. “But that’s where I eventually came to the idea of how broken the job market is for startups that are hiring and also for entry-level talent that is looking for either internships or entry-level roles.”
After seeing the struggle on both sides, Kozlovski came up with the idea for Drafted and brought on Pecchio as the company’s CTO and co-founder. The pair then set out to fulfill their mission of helping students get jobs faster and helping startups discover the talent needed to drive their visions forward.
Drafted works by first getting customers to enter their name, university, and degree. They are then prompted to create a video resume where they are asked to answer questions that are typically asked by recruiters, such as “tell us what sets you apart from other candidates” and “tell us about a time when you overcame a challenge.” Job seekers can then send their profile directly to startups and companies on the platform that are hiring.
On the employer side, companies can filter through video resumes to find the right candidates for their open roles. They can look for candidates from a specific top school or with specific skills. After that, they will see a bunch of video resumes displayed alongside percentages based on how much their expertise aligns with their company’s culture and requirements for the position.
“There’s no other platform that is relying on video resumes,” Kozlovski said. “It’s completely novel, and then also AI matching, that’s something some places might do, but it would just be on a PDF resume. It wouldn’t be taking into account the way someone communicates what they say in a video, etc. So it’s much more efficient for employers, because you can just go in and conduct all these different phone screens and in one hour, what would previously take you, potentially a month to do.”
Kozlovski says that Drafted works differently than other job platforms, as it doesn’t rely on keywords when matching candidates to roles, a practice that he thinks can sometimes overlook people who would be perfect for a job. Plus, while a traditional resume may get looked at for a few seconds, a video version is more likely to capture attention and be viewed for a longer period of time.
Drafted plans to keep the platform free for job-seekers forever. The platform is free for employers for now, but the startup plans to eventually charge a subscription model based on usage. Kozlovski says the subscription service will cost a fraction of what a recruiter would charge.
In terms of the future, Kozlovski says Drafted aims to be “the number one job site that college students think of when they graduate from university.”
For now, the company is focused on growth and onboarding as many students as possible.
