From the very beginning, Rumarocket was really all about changing the state of education and hiring here in the Philippines. The term “Rumarocket” is a play on the Filipino word “rumaraket,” which is a cool, slang term we have for “work on the side.” We wanted to change this notion with the younger workforce that working was all about “jobs” and “paychecks” and “getting hired at multinational companies.” We wanted them to realize that working was about doing something that they were good at, and it helped if they were pretty good at it too. We realized early on that many of the young graduates weren’t getting the right skills in schools, and a whole lot of them ended up disillusioned once they entered the workforce.
The statistics weren’t very promising: nearly 20% of the country’s total unemployment rate was made up of fresh graduates. In the IT industry, this translated to about 90% of new graduates being under-qualified for industry jobs. Not only did this add up to a lot of unemployment, there were also a lot of cases of underemployment (part-time jobs, not enough hours), and job mismatching (graduates getting into low-paying, low-skill industries).
This was clearly a problem that needed to be addressed.
At the same time, we also wanted to make hiring a lot more scientific for companies. Hiring practices here in the Philippines mostly constituted getting the best students from the top universities, skimming through the resumes of the rest, and ignoring the ones at the bottom. It wasn’t a completely fair practice, since there definitely were a lot of very talented people getting skipped over just because they didn’t come from prominent schools. We felt that it was really unfair. We wanted these young graduates to be rated on the quality of their skills, not on where they were coming from.
From these two problems we formulated the first iteration of Rumarocket, a platform that would help companies hire the best IT talents available (we chose IT as an initial starting point because of the huge demand, but plan to expand to other skills in the future), on the sole consideration of their skill quality.
I never expected Rumarocket to make it into the Startup Generations Program so I was really excited when we got the e-mail that we’d been accepted. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t wait to tell the rest of the team. We applied a month ago on the off-chance that we’d be able to get some great mentorship if we were accepted, but I don’t think any of the team seriously thought we’d get in. So it was definitely a pleasant surprise when we did.
As an analytics company, we’ve been around for the last seven months. We actually started out during a Startup Weekend event. We didn’t win, but the team decided to keep going with it. A week later, we got $60,000 in funding from an angel investor and we’ve been doing pretty great ever since. We were able to release a prototype version in July, and have since gone back to the drawing board with what we’ve learnt to fix up version 2 of our platform—which we plan to release by May next year.
We’re primarily focused on providing comprehensive talent analytics to help companies with their IT recruitment. We believe that growing talent is a continuous process and shouldn’t stop after an employee’s been hired. What we want to do is provide end to end solutions for helping both companies and employees in terms of identifying and growing talent. We think we can achieve this by providing companies with predictive analytics data on their employees’ performance and enabling them to track progress on how these individuals perform. On the other hand, we also want to help employees by giving them the opportunities to get trained and further improve on their existing skill sets.
We’re really excited to be part of the Startup Generations Program and we’re looking forward to be able to get the mentorship that we need to grow this company successfully. Right now, we’re really just focused on preparing version 2 of our platform which would be a big improvement over our initial platform. At the same time, we’re also especially interested in any input that we might be able to get from both instructors and mentors in the fellowship that can help us further improve on our current process.
We want to do some initial validation on our product to be able to line up some companies prior to our launch. We really want to assess what the needs of our current market segments are in terms of IT talent, and if our current service offerings would fit that demand. We want to conduct this study because there is a group of investors who are interested in bringing in a $120,000 investment into the company by next year (for our second round) and we want to have something solid to show them before they put their money into the company.
Finally, we look forward to being a part of this program in the weeks to come. We’re definitely interested in meeting fellows from around the world and exchanging ideas with them, as well as getting mentored by some really talented and amazing people.
Here’s to a successful and awesome fellowship experience!
Best,
Kathleen Yu + the Rumarocket team