Interview with PeerChecked Founder & CEO Ousmane Sall (FI Silicon Valley)

My name is Dustin Betts. I'm the Community and Content Manager at the Founder Institute, and I'm here with Usman Sal. He's the co-founder and CEO of PeerCheck. It's an FI Silicon Valley startup that's aiming to change the paradigm in college talent acquisition. Recently, PeerCheck had the official launch of their, their new feature that we're going to talk about today. And Usman, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Dustin. My name is Usman Saleh, and I'm an FYI alum from the cohort Spring 2019. Prior to joining the Founders Institute, I was a data analyst for a private equity firm in Ballot-Kennewitt in Philadelphia. I did that for about a year and a half where I was responsible of analyzing client portfolios automating processes, and also improving a lot of steps that we took to obtain and analyze data.

Nice, cool. Yeah, well, I was going to ask you kind of about your, your background and your personal, you know, founder story. So what was it that actually led you to founding this company, you know, focused on a new way of improving this resume data metrics?

That's a great question. So I actually started thinking about PeerCheck as a college student When I was entering my junior year in college, I realized that writing a resume was a little bit similar to what every other student does. It's very basic where you look at the job description and take your experiences to match whatever job description the company is posting. And due to applicant tracking systems, a lot of resumes were thrown away. HR managers spent less time in reviewing resumes. So I wanted to look into a better way and more efficient way to assess the student's ability. And I had to start from the ground up where I worked as an intern for a nonprofit to recruit for them. I interviewed HR managers and recruiters and also interviewed students. I did some research in Europe where I took live surveys in France and Belgium. Where the markets are really similar. So I realized that this is a problem and the solutions that I was proposing were intriguing to many of the HR managers and students were also really happy with something that could help them represent their ability a lot better. So that's when I decided to go on.

Awesome. Yeah, well, so let's kind of dive right into it. I mean, I know because I've read online, I mean, I've read about your company a bit, but you know, PeerCheck, it's a smart resume that captures you know, a 360 representation of the college student to help them differentiate themselves and help the hiring managers and recruiters, you know, make a better decision. But let's hear it straight from you, the founder. Please give us kind of your short elevator pitch, you know, what is PeerCheck? Right.

Our company PeerCheck is a free collaboration platform for college students that auto-generates a smart resume. HR managers and recruiters find very helpful and also comprehensive. It has a robust representation from the student day-to-day activities with their peers to projects they worked on and other things like the NIST competencies.

Perfect. Yeah, so let's kind of dive into some of these different problems that your solution solves. So I know there's a number of different problems, you know, for HR managers and as well as for the students themselves. So can you outline for us just like the, the different scope of the, the problem problems that you're solving for?

Yes, like you mentioned, there are too many problems to like dive into all of them. We will spend a lot of time here, but I'll give you some. Just to start with the HR manager, right? So currently HR managers rely heavily on the GPA where 80% of them have a minimum GPA cutoff where if you don't pass this threshold, you're not going to get invited for an interview. But that same number Also, 80% say that college students are not ready to enter the workforce. So the problem is not really whether students are ready to enter the workforce. It's the method they go about determining the student's potential. There are a lot of important valuable data that's left out when a student is forced to write a single-page resume because that is the standard recommendation for a college grad. So there are activities students do where you help your friends, your tutor, your professor assigns you certain tasks. Students are more involved than it is currently portrayed on the conventional resume. Also, a recent study by Harvard Business Review just this month, they revealed that when a student is hired from higher, the 1,000 spot higher in the university rankings from one of the elite schools, the average performance is just 1.9% better than the one that's the below the 1,000 rank. So it's, it's not a great— like the university you went to doesn't make much difference, and the GPA is also not a good metric because when you take a student with a 4.0 and a student with a 3.0, you hire them to do the same exact job, the difference is just 2.4% in variance. So these are not significant differences that people should rely on to determine whether or not someone should get the job.

Yeah.

And on the student side, I touched base on some of the things earlier where applicant tracking systems make it very hard for students to have their resume in front of a decision maker because 70% of them are automatically thrown away. Applicant tracking system, they use, it's, they use machine learning to determine certain keywords on the resume. So if the students don't have those, the resume will not pass through. If the student has some kind of editing like images, it will come up as an error that's also thrown away. Students have a lot of uncertainty when it comes to applying for jobs because they don't know whether they're ready for the job or not, because most of the recruiters or HR managers don't even respond to their applications, right? They don't even hear whether they got the job or not. So that's the gap we're closing. We're bringing more certainty to HR managers and also to students.

Yeah, yeah. I really like how you outlined that. I mean, just thinking about some of these arbitrary cutoffs as well as like the keyword problems that you've identified. Yeah, these are obviously, I guess, tools that are deployed by these companies to try to sort through all these applications, but obviously, yeah, they're missing a lot of potential great talent by having arbitrary cutoffs or, you know, only looking for certain keywords. So yeah, awesome. Now let's kind of dive into some of PureCheck's, you know, unique solutions. So I know it— tell us a bit about, I guess, you know, about your product and how it showcases student performance and skills and things like that.

Right. So when PeerCheck, we took a ground-up approach where we use raw data that's generated by students based on their performance and engagement on the platform. When they use the platform to do their day-to-day activities, we have data that represent the college students' participation frequency, how often the professor endorses their work, their clever post, creative post, and also helpful post. We also track the NACE competencies. These are skills that were developed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. These are things like communication skills, leadership skills, teamwork. So currently when HR managers are looking to look at those skills where some— they're also addressed as soft skills. They have certain tests like the Myers-Briggs test. These are personality tests that are reflective to whatever the students want to put in there. If you're asked a question, depending— if you're asked a question on the weekend, would you rather stay at home, read a book, or would you rather go out and socialize with people? If you're applying for a sales job, you will say, okay, I would like to go and socialize, maybe. But if it's an— so these are whatever you want to portray yourself as. Where on our platform, we have a 1 to 5 scale rating from your peers. And these, from your freshman year to college to your graduation, we have such robust data to represent your niche competencies that— because your soft skills and personality is something you portray. Other people see it better than you do. You're not— we're not better at judging ourselves. When it comes to personality.

Yeah, yeah. I love how you did that comparison basically between these NACE competencies and talking about, you know, all this really robust data set basically, this truer picture that you can build of these students based on 4 years that they spent in school and compare that exactly like you said to a Myers-Briggs test that like somebody can easily game their answers based on, yeah, the job description that they're, you know, applying for. I think that's, um, a really, really interesting contrast and one that anybody who's ever been hired or has taken a personality test as part of a hiring can probably relate to. So that's really interesting. Tell us a bit more about, I guess, just some of the other features or what the experience is like kind of on the student side as well as like what the, you know, the final product in terms of the resume that's generated, how that works in using the product.

Right. So On the student side, I would like to share the video of a demo while I'm talking to you at the same time.

Cool.

That would play in the background. So for college students, when they use the platform, they also work on group projects. So instead of just sending a resume with a highlight on your proficiency in Excel or Microsoft Word or any other software you use, there are actual projects with links that an employer can click at and see the student's work. That's a better way to represent your potential than the current methods. So some of our really fun features are when you are on the platform and looking to either ask a question or give a tip or just summarize what your professor covered in class. There are interactive tools that your peers go through to basically give a grade on your work, whatever you put up there. We also have a tutor search bar where it's free. One of the things that's very common in universities is that they don't have enough rooms for tutors that are assigned by the university to meet with every student. So on this platform, you can go to search and find volunteer tutors by date and time period to book a time to chat and get your work done. The other really fun thing we have is that students— there are some students that are not comfortable talking to there, yeah, it seems like this is almost done here, but yeah, so there are some students that are not really confident in communicating openly with their classmates and professors. You can post whatever discussion or summary you want to put out there, you can send it anonymously. Although the data will be, will come back to you, but no one will know it's you. And also we have the option to just share it with your peers without the professor. So there are a lot of fun features that enable students to do work together.

Awesome, awesome. And so for the end product, I guess, you know, after I've graduated, I'm out there in the world, I want to generate my resume. I mean, how does that— I guess, how does it work, the smart resume being generated? It can be like a PDF or a Word document, or how does that kind of— how's that work?

Yeah, so the resume is generated and stored in our database. So when employers are looking for a college student, they simply go to our website, which is also live. I'm not sure if you got the chance to see it, but an employer can go on our website and see students that apply to their jobs and students that also made their resume public. They can go through the list and send them an offer to interview. They can review the resume. The resume is interactive where you can click on every tab to see each section, whether it's technical skill, classroom performance, NACE competencies. And we even have the option for students to handwrite their experiences, whether they joined the club or worked somewhere. And we also have an option to upload their ordinary PDF resumes, just if that makes the employer more comfortable. So we have the The resume is a lot more interactive and also in numeric format to help you quantify and compare two students versus now on the current resumes where the only quantifiable metric you would find is the GPA.

Yeah, yeah, love that. That's awesome. Just so much more robust. Yeah, so much more that the, you know, HR person, the potential employer can check out. That's awesome. You know, you've obviously like worked really hard to build this company to where it is today. Congrats on the recent launch. I mean, tell us about some of the biggest challenges that you faced as a founder and how you kind of went about tackling those challenges.

Yes. So as you say, like some of the biggest, but let's just give one because it would— every day is a new challenge and you have to be optimistic and then go and solve it. But one of the things about starting a company That's really hard is, you know, at the early stage, they used to talk about when you start a company, bring something with one feature, bring an MVP to market and launch. But we are in a generation where kids are tech savvy. They have been on the internet, most people, like their whole life. Kids that were born from the 2000s till now, they have known the internet. So what was considered MVP back in 2008 is not the same now. Now you need a finished product. An MVP is not enough to get attraction. So now, as a founder, you have to have a complete product to get the traction you need and then get to that next stage of funding, right? One feature is a great advice that every founder should follow. Have that really one nice feature that everyone likes and stick with that. But it doesn't always go that way. As you can see, our problem had to be generated from the ground up because the data we needed, we can't use APIs. We tried to collaborate with a well-established company that operates within universities to use their API to obtain some of the data we're tracking. But not only that, they were looking for monetary compensation on a yearly basis, but they also want ownership of any data that we were gathering. So that wasn't an option for us. So as a founder starting a big project, I went through difficulty in developing the platform where we did our best to launch before the, before the end of 2019, where in December we launched a platform to get validation. From January, got good feedback, got some users from multiple universities. But the problem is that it still wasn't enough. We had too many clicks to get to get some work, to get to a specific feature. The design wasn't great. We had some restrictions in the backend that slowed our traction. So it's very difficult now to start with just a basic MVP. You need a finished product. And that was really hard because, you know, in a team of 3 with no funding, it was Good stuff.

Yeah, well, that kind of leads well, I guess, into my next question, which is kind of just like, you know, other advice that you might have for, especially for early-stage entrepreneurs who are just kind of getting started on their journey. Obviously, like, you know, planning for a long road ahead, it sounds like, you know, you guys had to do a lot of work kind of to get to the launch, to the product, to where you want it to be, to really work for your users. But what other, you know, generic advice do you have for an early-stage entrepreneur who's just, in the very beginning of getting started?

Yeah, so the one thing I would definitely tell someone who's starting a company is don't be shy to ask questions. As a founder, you have a lot of things on your plate. You have to understand legal documents, you have to understand marketing, you have to understand the tech part, you have to understand the finances, So no one is an expert at all of these things at once when they start, and I don't think you would ever be an expert at all of it. You would understand them enough to be good at it. So what I would recommend is, I mean, my advice would be don't shy away from asking questions. When you need help with maybe the finance part, go on LinkedIn, look for connections that are in the finance sector, reach out to them. A lot of people are responsive, especially folks that started companies because they understand the challenges. I cannot tell you how often people will just be enthusiastic about just hearing from you, hearing about your journey, and most people want to know what's the new product, what's the new technology, right? So when you reach out to them, they will answer.

Yeah, I love that advice because it's definitely so true, and I think like the entrepreneurial community is much more eager to help one another possibly than others. And so if you're coming in from another industry or something like that, it's your first time entrepreneur, like that might not be super obvious to people just how much they're willing to help. So final question is just kind of, you know, tell us where is PeerCheck headed next? Any kind of Obviously, you just had the recent launch, but any updates or asks to share with the FI community here in closing?

Yes, so we will be having new— we will have a new update October 2nd on the website. This will also make it really easy for HR managers to navigate the platform, mainly design. It's really a lot of design work. So it would be something nice to look forward to, and we're looking to generate some traction by the summer of 2021, because we are looking to fundraise. Before the pandemic, we were really close. Back in February, we had a lead investor who was really— familiar with the market and had their own HR technology company. So it was a huge, you know, but again, we are on the track to start fundraising again in June of 2021.

Okay, cool. And I mean, and you know, these new features coming with designs improving, but you know, the product is live so people can check it out. The website is peerchecked.com. The link is here if you're watching the live video. You can click the link and go over and check it out. This has been a really enlightening conversation, and we're definitely, you know, looking forward to keeping up with PeerChecked and where you're headed next. Ousmane Sall, thanks so much again for joining us.

Thank you, Justin. It was a great pleasure speaking with you.