Startup Spotlight #203: Simplify
Simplify helps you discover and autofill job and internship applications on millions of sites in 1-click.
I got the chance to speak with Michael Yan, co-founder and CEO of Simplify, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Michael, Ethan, and Rushil met in college when applying to jobs and internships, with each of them applying to over 50 positions. After using dozens of job boards to find relevant positions, manually refilling out the same information for every job, and tracking applications with an excel sheet – they realized how inefficient and painful the current candidate experience is. The team dropped out from Stanford & Berkeley to found Simplify, in hopes of changing the way college students & new-grads land their first internship or job.
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Startup Spotlight: Simplify
Problem: Traditional recruiting practices can’t keep up with today’s dynamic industry hiring cadences. With students & new grads often submitting 100+ applications in hope of securing a single offer, the process is not only inefficient and time-consuming but also leaves students feeling lost, overwhelmed, and disorganized.
Market: Assuming that ~60% of college students recruit for internships & new-grad roles, this means that over 12 million students face the same inefficient recruiting processes every year.
Industry hiring cadences are dynamic, but the methods firms use to recruit are plagued by inefficiency—candidates and corporations alike can benefit from a solution that offsets this misalignment.
Solution: By pairing best-in-class job discovery and seamless application autofill features, Simplify is building a better way to apply to jobs and internships.
Team: We’re a team of Stanford and Berkeley dropouts that experienced the pains of early career recruiting first-hand.
Recent Success:
Yan: With the help of a robust recommendation engine and the extension autofill, we've been able to help over 25,000 users from over 1,000 colleges discover and apply to jobs that fit their backgrounds. The reception has been great so far—we've seen more than 500,000 applications submitted and hundreds of hires through Simplify in the last four months. Many users have reported that Simplify has reduced the time it takes to find and apply to jobs from hours to minutes. We’ve also seen users get offers from companies they say they would have “never found or considered applying to” if not for Simplify. Most of our growth has been through word of mouth – and we’re pumped to continue supporting and growing our community.
Recent Struggle:
Yan: One of the hardest things in our space is getting applicants, jaded by the many bad experiences they’ve had with numerous existing solutions, to try a new recruiting platform. I remember the resistance I felt when I was applying for jobs – it seemed like every site claimed to be a “revolutionary platform for job candidates” but none would deliver on that promise.
We’re working from the ground up to build candidate trust and show them that there is a true “candidate-first recruiting platform”. We’re focused on helping candidates discover roles that uniquely fit them and apply to them seamlessly.
Founder Advice:
Yan: Don’t over-index (too much) on domain knowledge. Focus on solving a problem for users. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t do any research before building your product, but if you can solve a real problem for users and continue iterating with them, you can create something big without having “expert insight” at the start. Some of the most successful founders broke into spaces they had no idea about, and simply sought to solve a problem they had personally faced.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Yan: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Sarah Chieng, cofounder of Thrifthouse: Thrifthouse creates private and hyperlocal resale marketplaces.
Alexander Suh, cofounder of Parsagon: Parsagon helps you write optimized code to transform data automatically.
Krishna Gorrepati, cofounder of Quadrant Health: Quadrant Health provides real-time analysis of EHR and patient messaging data to predict patient harm before it occurs.
Who should I profile next? Leave your suggestion in the comments:
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