ROIKOI
Discover great people.
01_Research & Interviews
We began by meeting with recruiting companies, as well as HR staff (recruiters) at various tech companies in Austin to get a real understanding of their challenges and their current tools and methodology in hiring.
A lot of them operated in the same way, combing sites such as LinkedIn, making connections, inputting data into a rolodex in case one candidate didn’t make at Company X but could possibly one day make it at Company Y.
02_Plan
We began initially by not wanting to create just another massive searchable rolodex of prospects. ROIKOI actually started with the idea of generating leaderboards through a simple game of your network connections. The more people you actually wanted to work with, the higher on the leaderboard they’d climb.
This got a lot of great feedback from individuals because it allowed potential users to really search out not only great performers, but those that would make good cultural fits.
03_Exploration
The more ideas the better.
I believe in exploring with whatever tools make sense. Personally, in this stage, it’s about generating as many ideas that help solve your key issues for each user and as a whole. Whiteboarding, sketches, low fidelity mockups, etc. whatever you need to use to express your ideas clearly.
You never know what idea or avenue you might explore that might connect with someone else. Don’t throw away any idea you may think may be too stupid or difficult. I often joke it’s nice to get the bad ones out of the way too.
Process
Early ideas for ROIKOI centered around leaderboards that were generated from a simple game built of your network connections.
In the months after launch, the product was continually iterated on, and eventually morphed from being professional leaderboards, to a more robust recruiting platform driven by AI.
The result was software that could pull in open jobs, map top network connections, and use AI to match candidates to open reqs. The system can take into account the right times to reach out and what content to use to maximize reply rates.
*ROIKOI was acquired by Terminal on April 23, 2020.