Our investment in Otta

My LinkedIn homepage suggests this is the job for me:

“Undoubtedly one of the most exciting financial planning opportunities in the market right now, so if you are looking to enhance your career, we encourage you to apply immediately”

No disrespect to the financial planning company looking to fill the role, but given I had to google what “IHT” is, I’m not sure I’m the ideal candidate. Oh, and the job is in Lincolnshire which is a 2.5-hour commute.

Curious to see which other opportunities lay in wait, the next role I saw was a “senior veterinary surgeon” at Vetfinders in the Midlands.

Blimey, with all the progress in machine learning and the wealth of information LinkedIn holds about me, does someone need to tune their algorithms?

Or, maybe LinkedIn knows more about me than I’m giving them credit for. Maybe it is time to up sticks and at the ripe old age of 46, re-train to be a vet and move the family up to Rutland?

Call me a cynic but could it be that LinkedIn is prioritising the roles it shows to me based on how much they are being paid by the employer or the recruiter?

Surely there is a better way.

Thankfully, at least for those candidates looking to get a role in one the most exciting, high growth companies, Otta has arrived.

Otta does things differently.

For Otta, job seekers come first. First, Otta asks you a short set of questions such as when are you looking to start your new role, what size of company would you like to work for and what are your preferred industries.

Then, from a curated list of the most exciting companies, based on factors like their funding position and how innovative their business model is (e.g. Babylon, GoCardless and Monzo), Otta suggests the most relevant roles. It also helps candidates understand attributes like the company’s mission, how employees have recently progressed and what the working from home policy is like.

The more you like or dislike roles, the more it learns about you and the more relevant the search becomes. Otta doesn’t let recruiters post jobs — only hiring teams at the companies it has curated. Neither does it let companies pay to influence search results.

To get started, Otta is scraping and tagging vacancies (currently 2,600 live roles) but the longer-term objective is to build a true candidate/employer marketplace with Otta’s recommendation engine learning from the two-way exchange of information to provide better and better matches.

Longer-term, Otta will help candidates decide when they should look to move, to which roles and which companies. By becoming the destination of choice for talent, and unable to pay to influence their standings, companies will be forced to compete on what they should be competing on — their talent propositions and hiring experience.

Intelligent matching of job seekers to their ideal next role feels like a big problem to fix. In the UK alone, 1.64 million people work in digital tech jobs and growth rates in the sector is double the rest of the market (Tech Nation).

We don’t believe this problem is limited to the UK and neither does Otta whose mission is “to be the only place you need to go to find and secure roles at the world’s most innovative companies”.

We’re very excited to work with an incredibly talented co-founding team in Sam, Xav and Theo and to co-invest with a who’s who of UK angels including Shakil Khan (thank you again for the introduction) and Paul Forster (Co-founder of Indeed).