We built SEAcosystem.com and discovered the problem of talent ‘freshness’

Talent freshness is the issue of candidate relevance to the job market — i.e. not just that a candidate had been looking for a role, but how ‘fresh’ is their desire to find a new role.

This is about our experiences building the SEAcosystem.com talent database platform, and what we learnt about talent-freshness in the HR/recruitment process.

A side project, SEAcosystem.com, started during COVID in April 2020, is a talent database that laid-off talent could use to list themselves and their backgrounds, with an option for companies to also post jobs. We started this initiative to help friends of ours who were looking for new jobs in the middle of COVID.

Started by Harry Schiff, Liu Simin, Rachael De Foe, and myself over a weekend, we managed to get 27 VC funds on board supporting the initiative, list 1,500 individual awesome people, list 500 jobs from startups still hiring, and although we couldn’t track who ultimately got a job through the database, received great feedback from some of those who did — with some receiving interviews in 24 hours.

We were featured by various regional and international media — somehow also making it all the way to Japanese media.