Prowess Project Helps Employers Find Expert Talent

Hi everyone, I'm Ashley Connell, CEO and founder of Prowess. A year and a half ago, we set out to make work work for everyone, and we've done it. We all know hiring is hard. COVID-19 made it even harder. Pre-COVID, a bad hire cost companies up to $240,000, which is a $1 trillion cost to US companies annually. Post-COVID brought even additional hiring barriers to assess culture and values fit. Mandated remote work, countless applications, a focus on diverse talent, and Prowess is uniquely positioned to penetrate 4.7 billion of that. Prowess helps employers find diverse remote talent. Our emotional intelligence-based job matching ensures a better fit for all. So how do we do it? Here's a traditional hiring funnel. They look at education and your skills, and they're just starting to look at tech expertise, but it stops there. Until now. Our solution, Prowess, further qualifies talent by behavior style, EQ skills, and values to ensure alignment, building a candidate shortlist for you, saving employers time, money, and headaches. For talent pool, we're starting with women returning to the workforce. 43% of women leave work to raise their children. So we went out and asked hundreds what were their barriers to reentry. What we heard was they need confidence, a network, upskilling, and a job pool all in one place, and that didn't exist. With Prowess, it does. From one free Facebook post, we received 60 applicants in 2 days, and interest has quadrupled since COVID-19. We're developing tools to automate the matching process. Our talent masters training is matched with roles and is hired, all while Prowess is conducting a 52-point EQ evaluation. Employers, they input their needs, their role needs, and instantly get a shortlist of ideal candidates. They interview and make the hire. Today we are profitable and growing with recurring revenue and have happy customers lamenting ever going back to LinkedIn to source candidates, but now they don't have to. Prowess makes money by charging a percentage of the placement. It's working so well that customers are begging to pay us a subscription for our candidate shortlist technology to use for all their roles. In late Q3, we're piloting a subscription offering to help us expand within these accounts. And we are the team to scale it. I'm a second-time entrepreneur and a gender equality activist. Our COO has 20+ years in psychology and operations, and our advisors have 25 years of experience in operations, finance, and technology. So our ask for you today is to send us employers, talent, and early-stage investors, because with Prowess, work works for everyone. Thank you.

All right, that was awesome. Thank you, Ashley. And for everybody in the chat— and this is what usually happens during these, these online demo days, people are a little bit shy in the beginning, so So don't be shy, throw your questions into the chat. We're gonna go through a couple minutes now of Q&A, and I'll start with some of my own questions here. So I guess the first question that I'll say, and this is kind of related to what you were talking about, the team, right? So this is a common question that any investor will ask. It's, you know, why are you and your team like the right people to build this kind of company?

You know, I love this question. So most entrepreneurs, founders, they start their company because of a problem that they have. And what's interesting about Prowess is I say I'm solving my future problem. So I don't have kids yet, but I have been in tech marketing for startups and my own tech marketing company for 15 years now. And I was taking a step back and just thinking about my career, and I realized I had this ongoing anxiety about what having children would do to all the progress I made. So the nerd in me went out and started looking at statistics, and according to Harvard Business Review, if a woman is out of the workforce for just 3 years, she loses 37% of her total compensation power for the rest of her life. She cannot get it back. And that absolutely shocked me. And so I'm there, and this is a stat that is, I'm just becoming obsessed with. And I realized that I was working with one of our partners. His wife was helping us with operations at our marketing consultancy. So I started talking to her, and she told me the same story. So she— foreshadowing, this is our COO— she has experience in psychology, she has experience in operations, took 3 years off and was in her second year of trying to get back in and could only get unpaid internships. And so from there we teamed up. I saw the data behind it and a real-life story and we decided we're going to be the people who change this. And because hiring has been frustrating from the top of, um, from the beginning of my career with the right people.

Yeah, and I think it's a unique problem definitely for women re-entering the workforce, but if anything, also with the changes of COVID a lot of people are going to need reskilling. A lot of people are going to, uh, yeah, it's just going to change the entire kind of look and flow of the, uh, of the applicant pools for companies. So Going on to the side of, you know, kind of having the psychology background on your team and that kind of stuff. So Dan has a question. How do you ensure that bias is not built into the EQ that you guys are doing?

I love this. So we are actively working on that. And one thing, the way that we do this is when we are assessing, we're looking at two, well, many different things. It's a 52-point EQ evaluation. But we're looking at a mix between existing personality indicator tests as well as objective and subjective evaluations. And so what that allows us to do is we're not just getting information on how people say that they work, but we're actually watching it too and then cross-reference it with several other people's opinion. So we're working really hard on that. We have about 3 partners that we're talking to who will be reviewing all of our data to ensure that we're doing the absolute best we can there. Nice.

And as you get more data, you could do a better job, right? Absolutely. Sort of how that works. So Max had a question on the employer side. So can you tell me— and this is what Max's words— could you tell me more about the types of employers that you're working with? Are they based in specific industries, specific headcounts? You know, who are sort of— who are the employers that are— that love your product the most? Like, who have been your sort of super users on the employer side in these early stages?

Great question. So we have been around for a year and a half, and so we've seen an organic growth in 3 different segments. First, it would be consulting companies or marketing slash development agencies. They always need remote and flexible talent as they get more or less projects. Also, we're seeing an increase in tech startups about Series B, Series C. Reason being is they are in high scale growth and want to make sure that they have the correct expertise to grow. And then lastly, what's been really interesting is we've— because more and more companies are giving 4, 6, 12 months of parental leave, we're having them come to us saying, hey, can you help us fill that bandwidth gap while someone is out? And because of our shortlist ability, we're able to hire someone quickly with them to ensure a best fit And we're proven that our talent ramps up in half the time as a typical hire.

Right. And yeah, again, like this is a compounding problem, right? Cultural hiring is hard enough in person and, and these things are, are going to become even harder. So just related to what you were just saying and sort of filling like some of these gaps, which is certainly a problem. For a lot of different reasons. Boris asks, you know, do you, do you prefer long or short-term contracts for your customers? It sounds like you're offering a lot of different options, right?

Yes, we are. And really, when you take a step back, our mission is to remove barriers for women in the workforce. That's, that's at the heart of the business. And so when we went out and we're asking women what they want, 97% of them said they would return to the workforce if they had flexible roles. So of course, from the business standpoint, I want long contracts, right? However, some of these women want short project-based. And so we've made it super easy for them to decide what works for them and what works for the employer. And our technology is making that even more seamless.

Makes sense. Okay. So I'm just going to do a last question here, and then we're going to move on. To the next presenter. So for everybody in the chat, Virginia, if you want to throw in— well, actually, it's on the screen here. So you can reach Ashley at ashley@prouseproject.com. We'll be sending out these videos in exactly 48 hours. But a last question to Ashley is just, where is this available? Are you doing— is this purely US-based right now? Is it international? Like, where are you in the space? State of the business, you know, geography-wise?

Great question. So today we are US-based. However, we hope to expand as soon as possible. The way to help us do that is send us more interest. The more interest we have, the more people we can get signed up, the more likely we'll expand even quicker. Awesome.