SPECTRAL LINES

that with the HR team at Lyft.

We also look at publicly available spread-
sheets or lists. These are sometimes set up
by coworkers, or someone in HR; the for-
mats vary a lot. We only use these when the
information is available publicly. And we
remove anybody on those lists who con-
tacts us. We try to do that within an hour
of being notified. Finally, you can sign up
directly on Parachutelist.com.
Then we standardize the data, which
is challenging. Even something like ‘Bay
Area,’ people will say ‘San Francisco,’
‘SF,’ ‘Peninsula.’ We also try to standard-
ize job functions and titles. Our AI tools
take a first pass. They will, for example,
ingest what someone does based on a
description given, then give [the job]
a standardized title, calculate years of
experience, and label the region. AI gets

Rocket Recruiting Is Using AI about 80 to 90 percent of the cases right,

but we still have a human review every

to Get You a Job. For Free profile, to look for edge cases.
We started building Parachute right
about when lockdown started. Right
Its candidate pool is attracting recruiters now, we have 13,500 on the list from all
from small and large companies over the world—we had people signing

R
ocket, a startup that builds AI-based tools for recruit-
ers and offers recruitment services of its own, had been on the
verge of profitability when the coronavirus pandemic hit. It
quickly saw corporate recruitment dry up as the pandemic took
•
hold. With the halt in hiring affecting its main business, and
mounting layoffs at tech companies, Rocket turned its efforts
toward matching laid-off engineers with new jobs pro bono.
It gathered data on layoffs, had its AI software and recruiters
clean up the data and make it easier to navigate, and launched a new
•
job portal, dubbed Parachute. Here’s what Rocket cofounder and CEO
­Abhinav Agrawal had to say when IEEE Spectrum talked to him about the
pandemic’s effect on tech jobs and creating Parachute.
Abhinav Agrawal: When COVID hit, we saw companies scale back hiring
almost immediately. As soon as companies started working from home—
in early to mid-February—they became cautious in hiring....
Right now, we are in purgatory. We are seeing about a third of compa-
nies going straight ahead with hiring, a third just tiptoeing back in, and
about a third sitting in survival mode [and not hiring at all].
We saw layoffs starting to happen, even before the lockdowns…. Pretty
early on we started thinking about how to help the community [of laid-off
tech professionals] and recruiters. We thought it would be great if there were
up in India, Dubai, Chile, New ­Zealand,
­Australia, Europe, and Nigeria. We now have a
­Spanish language version live in Chile, and we have
Israeli and French versions in the works.
We have candidates from just about every tech
layoff that happened. We have several thousand
recruiters using it, from every major company, like
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Twitter on the big
side, to Coinbase, Shift, and Doximity on the small
side. We’ve had verified recruiters reach out to can-
didates from our platform 25,000 times; generally,
midlevel professionals are getting the most interest.
We don’t know how many have been hired. Because
we aren’t charging anybody for this service, we don’t
have a good way of tracking them.
My hope is that the need for this product goes
away. It’s a weird thing, you build a product, but
you actually aren’t hoping that it gets more use.
—Tekla S. Perry
A version of this article appears in our View from the
Valley blog.
1PHOTOCCREDIT

a centralized place where recruiters could access data and reach out directly. CORRECTION: In “RF MEMS Deliver the ‘Ideal Switch,’ ” the name of Menlo Micro’s
We get the data from several sources. Sometimes, we work directly cofounder was misspelled. The correct spelling is Chris Giovanniello.

with companies doing a layoff to offer an opt-in [to our service]. We did POST YOUR COMMENTS at spectrum.ieee.org/rocket-sep2020

04  | SEP 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Greg Mably

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