ICO Review — 5 reasons why SpringRole should be the new LinkedIn

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Crypto ICO Review - US/FR

6 min readJul 25, 2018

SpringRole is a blockchain-based professional network, like LinkedIn or viadeo, which set up a system of verification and reliable certification of experiences and skills

1. A sector that needs to evolve

For several years, online professional social networks like LinkedIn, Viadeo or UpWork have become essential tools for recruiters and job seekers.

Below, some figures about LinkedIn (the most important of these networks) that show the preponderance taken by these professional networks in the daily life of recruiters / employees:

560 million profiles. In spring 2017, LinkedIn exceeded the symbolic mark of 500 million profiles on its network to reach the end of 2017 the 560 million (including 16 million in France).
20 million companies are present on the network. LinkedIn also claims 15 million job offers.
3.6 billion dollars is the turnover generated by LinkedIn in 2017 (including 28 million in France).
37% of recruiters say they use LinkedIn as the main tool for recruiting.

However, today’s professional networks have a number of major problems:

False information: According to studies, it is estimated that 53% of online CVs contain a certain amount of factual inaccuracy
Complexity in Evaluating Profiles: It is difficult to distinguish between the candidate’s actual skills and experiences on the one hand that he or she has potentially “embellished”, not to say transformed. Conducting a full evaluation of a profile takes time and costs money.
The data does not belong to the users: like on Facebook or Twitter, the personal data that the users have entered on these professional networks do not belong to them. Worse, they are monetized by these giants of the web without any compensation is intended for the user.

SpringRole is positioning itself as the new “game player” of the professional networks sector, providing a solution to the main current problems and placing the user at the heart of its network.

2. A complete solution

SpringRole is a California-based company that builds a new generation professional network building on the Blockchain.

The special feature of the Springole network is its protocol of attestations and decentralized verifications that validates and verifies the years of study, skills and professional experience of the different profiles. The objective is to obtain a professional network containing only “verified” profiles which will simplify the life of the recruiters and restore confidence in this type of network.

The added value of SpringRole is its attestation and verification protocol that provides verified profiles.

The first “layer” of this verification is the KYC (Know Your Customer) process required when creating an account. This process makes it possible to ensure the uniqueness of the profiles on the platform but also to fight against fictitious profiles that could harm the credibility of the platform.

The profile of the user on the platform is fairly standard and is broken down into three parts: education and diplomas, work experience and skills. This information is verified through the platform’s attestation and verification protocol. These attestations and verifications are based on the collaboration of different entities of the ecosystem:

Educational institutions and training organizations (high schools, universities, training centers, websites offering MOOCs) check the years of study, the courses taken and the diplomas obtained.
Companies and organizations check professional experiences.
A committed user community that verifies and approves skills listed by platform users (rather than a test system like what Upwork does for example)

Whenever a certificate and verification is performed, the “auditor” is rewarded with a number of SPRING tokens.

More concretely, take the example of the hiring of Martin by SeaRole. The HR of SeaRole, hoping to hire Martin as project manager, can simply rely on the SpringRole network to check the credentials and skills Martin has indicated on his resume. For this, he will have to pay a certain sum which will be converted into SPRING tokens.

The HR of SeaRole will thus obtain the verification of the information of the resume of Martin in a few minutes when it would have taken several days usually.

Regarding the amount paid by SeaRole that has been converted to a SPRING token, part of it is held by the SpringRole network; the other part is shared between the candidate (Martin) and the different entities that have certified and validated the various information of Martin’s CV.

SpringRole will also provide an APi that will allow developers to build new bricks over the network. To access these APi, the developer will have to perform a number of SPRING tokens.

3. A solid team

The SpringRole team consists of 18 people and 12 advisors.

Kartik Mandaville, the CEO and founder of the project, is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) with a master’s degree from the Language Technologies Institute, a computer science school specializing in Big Data, machine learning and biotechnology. Kartik is also an entrepreneur since he has created several projects including AutoBudder, service that automatically wishes the birthday of his relatives, which has reached 4 million users.

David Lewis (Biz Dev & Strategy) has more than 15 years in business development, syndication, ecommerce, research, digital advertising and affiliate marketing for major companies such as Overture, Shopzilla, Edmunds, Ebates and Union Bank. David also has the fiber of entrepreneurship since he founded a coupon and cash back company that eventually sold it to Ebates.

Shivhari Shankar (Product Manager) is a computer science graduate from MIT, Manipal, India. He was a software engineer at Cisco and Product Architect at Guru-G Learning Labs, a startup based in Bangalore. He also founded JobsChacha.com, a job search aggregator. On LinkedIn, it is defined as: “I think and live Products. Fascinated by Blockchain and its applications “.

Vinay Agarwal (CTO) graduated in technology (BTech) in chemical engineering from the National Institute of Technology Rourkela. He has been CTO and lead developer in several companies and startups.

Other members of the team are developers, Blockchain specialists, recruiters, marketing specialists, UX / UIs.

Among the 12 advisors, a good half have profiles rather technical oriented. The others are specialists in business, strategy, research or the legal field.

4. A live beta

A beta version is already available. Even if it is only a minimalist version, it allows to create account / profile. It is available here: https://beta.springrole.com/. For any account created, you will get 100 SPRING tokens as gifts.

Some examples of existing profiles on the network: