Many people are more than a little curious about where the name “Rumarocket” originally came from. Every time we pitch the company to outsiders, people always seem to remark about the name and what it means. Here in the Philippines, our company is often associated with a slang term, “rumaraket,” which people often use when they talk about cool side jobs. So when we first started Rumarocket, we envisioned it as something of a freelance site where users would come in, take jobs and get rated on their skills.
But thinking about it more carefully, we realized that it didn’t make any sense to call it a “freelance” site when we were trying to address a completely different problem. The market for freelancing is definitely growing, and it’s something that shows a lot of promise. In fact, we know of several companies who are already thriving in the industry, and several individuals who have found more fulfilling callings as freelancers. But that’s not specifically what we were after.
Rumarocket wasn’t about freelancers, it was about giving young people the chance to have fulfilling careers.
We’d noticed a big problem with many young people (like us) who were coming into the workforce. Many of them didn’t seem to have the right skills to get hired for jobs. In fact, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) estimates that nearly 20% of the Philippines’ total unemployment rate is made up of these new graduates.
What we wanted to do was to help these guys “kickstart their careers” so to speak and give them the opportunity to show off their skills to the right companies. The question was, how would we go about it?
After a rigorous brainstorming process, we settled for using an assessment format to help companies rate these candidates. By then, we’d decided to focus on IT specific skills first before expanding later. Through our assessment process, we wanted to provide valuable analytics to these companies that would eventually help them predict which of the candidates that they brought in would be most likely to succeed in the company.
We’re still working on the product right now, but we’re sure to have something up by May of next year.
When we look back at our journey so far, there’s always that question of, “What exactly is Rumarocket all about?” It’s not a difficult question, really, but it’s something we’ve been continuously revising from the first. Why would we need to do this, you might ask? Well, I will admit that there have been moments of confusion for the team, points where we would try to assess what we’ve been doing and ask ourselves, “Is this correct?” “Are we really helping people if we do something like this?”
It’s a work in progress, something that’s likely to keep going even as we move forward as a team and as a company. We’ll always be looking for better ways to address the problem, and we won’t stop until we actually do.