"Turning Hiring Market Unfairness into a Business Item..." Yoon Kyungwook, CEO of Specter
Digitalization of Talent Verification... Average 7 Minutes to Write Reviews, 10 Seconds to View
Over 2,000 Companies Adopt Specter
Raised 6.5 Billion KRW Series A Investment in August This Year
[Asia Economy Reporter Kwak Minjae] “When I was closing the first company I founded after graduating from university, I felt the unfairness of the hiring market by observing my former colleagues. A colleague whom I thought had great ideas and abilities ended up working at a poor company due to a humble personality, while a friend with just good showmanship received a high salary at a good company. I decided to start a new business because I wanted to help talented friends promote themselves through reputation.”
On the 11th, at the office in Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Yoon Kyungwook, CEO of Specter, introduced the company as “a talent verification platform that provides reputations of job seekers to help organizations select candidates who fit well and offers job seekers the opportunity to choose companies that suit them.” Specter has improved the traditional headhunter talent verification method and is gaining positive responses from both job seekers and companies. A key difference is that applicants can actively manage their own reputations. CEO Yoon said, “Applicants confident in their skills and careers can manage who to request reputations from, the number of reputations, and whether to disclose them, turning these into their weapons to increase their chances of hiring.” As a result, Specter currently has 35,000 individual members, increasing by an average of 20% monthly. The reputation database (DB) held by Specter has accumulated 130,000 entries.
Another feature of Specter is digitizing the talent verification system to drastically reduce costs and time. Until now, the manual process relying on individual headhunters incurred high costs and was only used in some high-salary sectors such as consulting and finance. However, at Specter, the average time to write a reputation for one person does not exceed 7 minutes. When a company HR manager inputs the applicant’s name and phone number into Specter, with the applicant’s consent, 65 subjective and objective questions about the applicant’s reputation are sent to HR managers, team leaders, and colleagues from previous companies. Once reputation information is recorded for an applicant, companies can view it in just 10 seconds.
CEO Yoon explained, “It usually costs about 920,000 KRW to write a reputation for one person in the talent verification market, but Specter has automated the system to reduce this to an average of 30,000 KRW. This is why over 2,000 companies including Shinsegae, LG Electronics, and Kia Motors use Specter.”
Can company members trust the reputations managed by applicants? Regarding this, CEO Yoon said, “I don’t think reputations necessarily show only the applicant’s weaknesses. By faithfully conveying what kind of work the job seeker has done and what abilities and traits they have, recruiters can hire talent that fits their organization.” In fact, Specter has a strict process to ensure the fairness of reputation data. For example, they verify qualifications of reputation providers by checking employment certificates and employee IDs. Since reputation providers write reputations under their real names, responsibility is guaranteed, he explained.
He added, “Most companies that switched from other talent verification services to Specter agree that the reputation information Specter holds contains much higher quality data. Despite a strict policy that companies are considered inactive if they do not check reputations for 60 days, the churn rate is only 2.8%, showing high satisfaction with the service.”
Amid a slowdown in venture investment, Specter raised 6.5 billion KRW in Series A funding last August, securing a total of 8.3 billion KRW in cumulative investments. CEO Yoon plans to accelerate service advancement and overseas expansion with this. Recently, they also launched ‘MySpecter,’ a career branding platform exclusively for job seekers. This service allows colleagues who worked together to verify items that are difficult to prove concretely on resumes, such as awards and projects.
They plan to officially enter overseas markets such as Singapore and Vietnam by mid-next year. CEO Yoon said, “We will focus on overseas market expansion based on Singapore, where it is easy to grasp global trends due to the high mobility of multinational talent, and Vietnam, where Korean companies have the largest presence.” He added, “We aim to increase our membership from the current 35,000 to 250,000 by next year and build over 1 million reputation data entries within two years so that more companies can obtain the information they want in real time.”
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