Applying for jobs feels like uploading your resume into a black hole. But a new player is here to let you show your stuff.
The startup Merit launched this weekend with an ambitious pitch: Make VC hiring more equitable by using a points system.
Merit is a cross between a job application and a training program. For the newbies, it serves up videos and blog posts explaining how to approach basic tasks like examining the business model of a startup. Then, you enter the competition.
Advancing in Merit’s tourney depends only on how many points you lock down. There are no resumes. No connections. Everyone is anonymous.
Once a week, for about 3 hours, you look at a new company on the up and up — the kind of work that a junior VC employee would do — and write an analysis.
Then you score the research of 2 other people in the Merit system.
The process repeats for 6 weeks — and by the end, the top 20 high scorers win.
The startup Blendoor arrived on the scene a few years ago with a similar goal — to level the playing field in hiring. To prevent racial bias, it hides the name, age, and photo of job applicants.
A few caveats with Merit: Applicants don’t get paid for their work, which the company already acknowledged is a “problem” that it hopes to fix.
And the top 20 Merit finishers aren’t shoo-ins for a job, founder Jacob Claerhout told The Hustle.
They’ll get some high-profile meetings — 12+ VCs have already told Claerhout they want to meet the winners — but that’s all Merit can guarantee.