It’s the ‘end of life’ for the résumé and job description, Monster.com founder says

Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor is returning to the world of work, announcing the launch of a new AI-native talent marketplace that leverages AI technology to help connect the right applicants to open roles using vibrant “dossiers,” rather than outdated résumés and job descriptions.

Taylor’s new entry into the hiring tech landscape, Boomband, is set to launch in March and this month closed a $4 million seed financing round led by Boston Seed, with participation from Slater Technology Fund, Rogue Venture Partners, and Service Provider Capital.

Taylor said Boomband will look to address current headaches on both sides of the hiring process by using AI to rethink the way applicants and employers connect and talk about roles.

“The early AI examples [in TA] aren’t very good. They’re not helping. I think they’re actually hurting the problem,” he told HR Brew. “The reality still is that AI is not deployed in a way that’s deeply impactful, but I’m of the school that that’s coming.”

The platform’s aim is to help recruiters winnow massive volumes of low-fit applications in their queues through AI embedding (AI fancyspeak for turning text into the ones and zeros that AI tools rely on), and aid applicants in painting the fullest picture of themselves to connect with right-fit opportunities.

Ahh, Real Monsters! Taylor told HR Brew that, in many ways, the labor market of the early 1990s, when he founded Monster.com, mirrors what’s happening today. The dawn of the internet, access to free email accounts, and even the birth of the H-1B visa program dramatically reshaped how and where companies looked for talent, and how and where applicants looked for opportunities, he said.

“The distribution [of Monster.com] was so unique—bringing a ‘help wanted’ section onto the internet—that Monster was the first buyer-seller marketplace. I put the first job posting on the web. I put the first résumé on the World Wide Web, and so I left both those right about the same place in their evolution. I didn’t change the résumé very much, or the job posting very much, because the distribution was so innovative.”

But then 20 years went by, and when Taylor returned to the HR and hiring tech space, he said job descriptions and résumés looked pretty similar to those documents first uploaded to Monster.

“I don’t know how they stayed the same,” he told HR Brew. “I think résumé and job posting are at end of life.”

Okay, Boomband. Boomband, Taylor’s new entry into the hiring tech landscape, looks to meet the unique set of circumstances facing today’s employers and job seekers.

“The difference now is the companies have a thousand people in their queue if they’re growing, but the quality is very bad,” he said. “I didn’t have the tools in 1994 to refine the quality. We now have the quality tools today.”

Early uses of AI in the TA space aren’t helping to address the specific hiring needs of the contemporary marketplace, he suggested. Taylor told HR Brew that AI tools are uniquely apt at focusing the search for the right talent and skills based on actual business needs. That’s also not how AI is widely being used today in the job market.

He said applicants often take both a job description and their résumé and leverage AI tools by “rounding the edges” of their résumé to better fit their application to the role. The ATS wasn’t designed for the influx of applicants who appear to meet the company’s needs, so more recruiter time and effort is required to suss out if a candidate is actually a good fit for the role.

“Our idea of our dossier is to have a chance to basically give your whole-self story instead of just your commercial experience…Being able to tell that story and also give samples of your work, all of a sudden, you actually have permission and are encouraged to show the different breadth of who you are,” Taylor said, noting that a résumé is a “pile of keywords and performance statements” that are “almost unrecognizable now.”

Résumés boil entire careers down into bullet points on a single page, and then ATS organize those documents into key words. But in the process the richness of applicants’ stories are lost. Boomband is using AI to rethink the entire process. Applicants, known as “players” by the company, can share a fuller picture to best showcase themselves in the job market. The platform translates those stories into “embeddings” to help connect them to job postings on the platform.

Résumé, “it’s French; it means summary,” Taylor said. “AI, with the depth of what it can process, doesn’t want a summary. It actually wants a dump truck of information...Bring all of those stories, because all those stories create that rich alignment…and then you start to match that up with a job posting, which is also a summary.” (Though, it’s not of French origin.)

Boomband allows applicants to build their professional history and skills, as well as their experiences, interests, and skills in their personal life into a “dossier” that better showcases their entire self to the marketplace.

The Boomband platform works better with that “dump truck” of information from both employers and “players” on the platform, he said. Employers also benefit from bringing more content to Boomband: feed it the requisition intake form, feed it notes from your meeting with the hiring manager, include previous job descriptions; flag the “dossiers” of two high-performing teammates already on the job, because all of that information helps develop a rich job signal, an entire set of embeddings based on the documents and content.

As more companies look to hire and employ the full person, Taylor wants “players” to bring their life experiences and interests to their applications, using as much detail as needed to send the right signals to the marketplace, and to respond to matches with all their experiences and skills.

“I want that picture of your commercial experience and your life work to come together,” he said.

Boomband in its early stages is working with nearly two dozen customers as “early development partners,” Taylor said, mostly in the New England region across tech, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing.