Mystery Applicant is the winner of ERE’s first-ever competition between startups, one that began with almost 50 applicants and ended up with the candidate-experience technology firm pocketing $10,000.
You may have read about the company as it launched quietly and later said it had signed on an 80,000-candidate-a-year customer. It was picked among six finalists, including Goood Job; Lab of Apps; Ongig; Traitperception, and Venturocket. They came from as far as the UK and Israel, and as close as San Francisco to take the stage in Mountain View today at the Recruiting Innovation Summit to show off their products and fight for the grand prize.
Nick Price, director of Mystery Applicant, said after the award was announced that he’ll use the money to invest in product development. “The money is brilliant,” he said, “but the recognition of what we’re doing is really good too.”
Tweets flew fairly frequently during the competition, and the startups were grilled from judges Jason Warner, Steve Boese, and Ethel Chen, including being asked:
- How will you make money?
- How will it work with an iPad?
- What’s your go-to-market strategy?
- Does your product do so many different things that the message gets muddled up?
- How do you solve the problem that some people in our networks are people we don’t really know?
Judges were asked to choose a winner based on such things as whether the companies actually solved a business problem; how well they focused on a target market; and how well they positioned their product in the marketplace.
Videos from the demos are below, broken up into two parts and followed by the announcement of the winner, which included comments by the judges.