How Osterus Started: Creating A Solution for a Friend.
What is the first hurdle towards creating a startup? Before funding, strategy and making sure you’re hiring the right people you need an idea. Some founders try to think of big ideas that can solve the world’s problems (if you haven’t already, check out my good friend’s project to reverse desertification in Africa). Osterus started out quite differently, it started out when I was trying to create a solution for a friend.
I was talking with a friend at N26 and my brother at Lufthansa about the problems they were experiencing with hiring. They had too many applications to dedicate time to understanding every application. CVs with unrecognisable experiences, university or degree names were unfortunately being given less attention than they needed to understand the person behind the CV. This is not the fault of reputable organisations, if you have a company that gets over 500 applications per position, there’s no way any HR department could research every CV they received.
The problem with this was that some CVs were getting classed as “undesirable” just because they couldn’t easily be understood, not because the candidate was unqualified. Then I had what I like to think of as my movie-moment. I realised that this problem could be solved with a sophisticated CV sorting tool. I could see the tool in front of me, and although I was having a movie-moment in my head, I probably looked more like this:
I was shocked that a tool like this didn’t exist, and thought that if N26 and Lufthansa were having this problem, other companies probably were too.
That’s where my movie-moment ended and the real work began. I had the idea to build a CV sorting tool, an information-rich, easy-to-use database on universities with data points such as: where do students study and where do they end up working, career and salary data, cost of living, complete insights into companies hiring preferences and information about the quality of life. Now I needed to figure out how to build it.
