PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - September 09, 2015) - Piazza, the social learning and recruiting platform used by a million college students each year, has released new technology to help companies replicate hiring successes. Using Piazza Careers' new "Reverse Engineer Your Top Hire" technology, recruiting and hiring managers can input the names of their most successful collegiate hires and quickly receive detailed profile data on those hires. Using the detailed profile data, the manager can deconstruct and recreate (i.e. "reverse engineer") specific elements of an employee's background that contribute to the employee's fit within the company. Those elements will be saved as unique searches, and profiles of students meeting those criteria will be sent to managers through automatic weekly digests.
Part of the challenge in identifying superstar collegiate candidates is that class performance and side projects are more indicative of success than limited work experience. Piazza's reverse engineering technology enables companies to identify indicators that aren't available on resumes, including behavioral markers, so that companies can apply a data-driven approach to discover the relevant success indicators possessed by their successful hires and then find other candidates who possess those same attributes.
Piazza's Q&A platform is widely used in STEM classes, including every top 50 computer science program, with engagement levels averaging three hours per user per day. This gives Piazza access to rich data far beyond what is available on a resume, such as classes taken and level of engagement in those classes, awards, scholarships and competitions won, technical skills and interests, previous work experience and previous teaching assistance experience, and years of coding experience.
According to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the US will face a labor shortage of 1 million STEM graduates over the next decade. The talent shortage is fueling competition in particular for computer science students, resulting in the most lucrative job offers in the country. Technology companies are investing heavily to find and attract these students, but while some new hires add tremendous value to companies, others are expensive mistakes. Piazza's technology is aimed at helping companies quickly and easily identify the superstar candidates.
"It's hard to recognize great talent. Recruiters typically have to make educated guesses about the skills and experiences that will lead them to top candidates. A company looking for a front-end developer may look for experience with CSS and Javascript, but it may turn out that the ideal front-end developer for the company's needs has a strong background in design or human-computer interaction. Or, it may turn out that their top hires have experience as teaching assistants or hackathon winners. Whatever the firm's unique, magic formula is for superstar hires, Piazza's reverse engineering technology will decode and enable companies to replicate it," explained Piazza Chief Operating Officer Jessica Gilmartin.
"Piazza Careers has incredibly rich profile data and powerful search technology that enables us to find the superstar candidates from top schools as well as from long-tail schools. This new technology will enable AppFolio to identify candidates from Piazza's vast candidate database who we never would have found otherwise," states Bryan Black, Human Resources Director from AppFolio Inc. "Sometimes you manage to find new hires who add transformative, breakaway value to your firm. Piazza's innovative technology will help AppFolio identify even more of those breakaway employees."
About Piazza
Piazza democratizes access to learning and career opportunities. Piazza Q&A empowers a million students from 1000 universities worldwide -- including every top program -- to learn collaboratively with classmates and instructors to find the answers they need when they need them -- for free. Students engage deeply, spending on average 3 hours per day on Piazza. Piazza Careers connects these students with desirable employers, expanding the breadth of career opportunities available to them, while also expanding access to a broader, more diverse range of students to potential employers. Customers include many of the most desired employers in technology, including Airbnb, Palantir, Pinterest, SpaceX, Spotify, Microsoft, Cisco and many more.
For more information, please go to https://recruiting.piazza.com.