Aversafe: Meet the Team
In 2016, Andrew Duck and Tu Pham had been working together for nearly eight years. As the CTO and Regional HR Director for Zinio, the world’s largest digital media distributor, the duo knew just about everything there was to know about managing HR for hypergrowth companies. Motivated by a shared passion for tackling industry pain-points, Andrew and Tu decided to pool their 30 plus years of experience scaling up international businesses to found an HR software company for employee lifecycle management.
To provide a world class user experience the duo turned to their former coworker Kevin An. With his history in creative management for household brands like National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times, Kevin is a true design-wizard. He brings a trained eye and an uncanny ability to casually whip up digital masterpieces to the table. Reassured by the addition of a trusted and familiar face, the team plunged into their HR project.
From day one, the challenges of managing the hiring process put our team’s skills to test. A flurry of 60 hires and thousands of interviews in the company’s first three months left us mired in fraud-ridden resumes and costly background checks. The hiring process wasn’t just expensive and time-consuming, it was fundamentally marred by mistrust. Worse yet, we found nothing that could solve the issue on a global scale.
Taking stock, we found that the mistrust at the core of the hiring process touched on too many actors in too many countries to be solved by any traditional HR solution. The way we saw it, by storing users’ valuable personal information in centralized databases, legacy HR companies exposed users to unjustifiable risks. Meanwhile, by relying on self-compiled CVs, professional networks like LinkedIn did little to circumvent the hassles of traditional background checks.
After months of puzzling over the problem, we finally pinned down a solution — put it on the blockchain! The distributed ledger at the technology’s core provided the perfect combination of security and transparency to assuage the mistrust and hassles of the traditional hiring process. And just like that, Aversafe was born.
Backed by a Cebu based development team of industry veterans with experience across the HR, media technology and blockchain landscape, Aversafe leverages a blockchain-backed network to record and verify users’ work histories and credentials.
While providing a blockchain based HR solution might seem like niche goal, our disruptive vision is anything but. Our initial focus is on providing an optimized and market-ready solution to credential fraud, but streamlining the hiring process is just the tip of the iceberg for what we plan to accomplish in the long-term. After all, Aversafe’s endgame is about much more than just making life easier for HR departments.
By bringing secure credential verification services to the blockchain, Aversafe levels the playing field for college grads and job-seekers stuck competing against candidates with flashy fake degrees and trumped up resumes. Meanwhile, on a much larger scale, Aversafe will save employers, educational institutions and everyday individuals millions of dollars a year in costly background checks and bad hires!
While the Aversafe network will deliver some major financial benefits to its users, for Andrew, Tu, and the rest of us on the team, Aversafe is about much more than just cutting costs.
As Andrew puts it, “In the past, I would have loved to spend 5 hours over coffee with each potential hire, to learn about their passions and motivations and goals, but I simply couldn’t. Aversafe changes all that. It lets employers shift the focus of an interview from ‘who is this person,’ to ‘how can they really help my company, and how can I help them build their career? How can we help one another?’”
In short, Aversafe is about building trust.
