As graduation draws near, the top priority for college seniors is landing a job. This reality can be intimidating, considering the unemployment rate for young college graduates currently sits at 7.2 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Drew Maliniak, chief operating officer at Zyn Careers, helps predict employee satisfaction. (Photo by: Kamera Griffin)
In today’s workforce, finding a job may not be the most challenging issue — however, finding one you enjoy is an even more daunting task. According to a report conducted by the Conference Board, 52.3 percent of Americans are unhappy at work.
Zyn Careers, a new startup business in Oxford that specializes in cultural fit, is attempting to change this statistic.
Alex Ray, co-founder of Zyn, Ole Miss alum and Harvard Business School MBA candidate, said he realized job satisfaction was an issue after interning for a company where he felt he didn’t fit in with the company culture.
“I needed to be able to figure out what would make me happy at work,” Ray said. “So, I started researching job satisfaction and couldn’t really find anything that would give me direction.”
Ray came across the idea of cultural fit, how well an employee will fit in with the culture of a company. After months of research, Ray and co-founder and chief technology officer Caleb Robinson developed an algorithm designed to predict cultural fit and how happy an individual would be working for a certain company.
The system is designed to work through a series of employee surveying and scientific personality tests.
Alex Ray, chief executive officer of Zyn Careers, poses for a photo in The Graduate Hotel. (Photo by: Kamera Griffin)
“We go and talk to companies to get an understanding of what their culture is,” Ray said. “Then, a job seeker goes and takes a five minute personality test, where he rates different aspects of culture either important or not, and then we use that to figure out what types of companies would match him best, based on a company’s profile.”
Once an individual takes the personality test, he or she will receive a “Zyn score” ranging from 1-100, which is how well the individual will match with a particular company.
Ray said the results from the matching system have been extremely favorable so far.
“The people we said would be happy at their jobs or internships were generally pretty happy, and the people we said wouldn’t be happy generally weren’t,” Ray said.
Graduate accounting student Madison Blankenship said she used the Zyn job-seeking system last summer and scored a Zyn score of 92 out of 100 with PwC, PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“I took the survey during my search for an internship and ended up working for the firm Zyn suggested,” Blankenship said. “I absolutely loved it and now I am going to work there full time.”
Zyn Careers is the first system created to help employers optimize their cultural fit and help job seekers find satisfaction within their careers.
“We think you can get the most happiness by enjoying working with people and being in a company you care for,” Ray said.
Zyn Careers intends to increase their company database from 125 companies to 250.
Princeton graduate and UM law student Drew Maliniak, chief officer of operations, said Zyn hopes to reach its goal and be “up and running” for job seekers by May 2016 – preferably, in time for graduation.
Currently, individuals visiting the Zyn website are encouraged to provide their email address in order to register for the job seeker application. UM students, specifically, will gain early access to the website one week before anyone else if they sign up via email before the launch date, Maliniak said.
Zyn Careers also offers resume building and career coaching for $99 for UM students as well. Maliniak said he believes he can use his real world experience to help UM students build their resumes and ultimately land a great job.
“I have probably sent out four to five hundred resumes, and I went through learning how to network, what kind of jobs I was looking for and where I would fit in,” Maliniak said. “I can give people a quick game plan in 30 minutes based on my experience.”
Zyn Careers ultimately aims to increase retention, employee productivity and job satisfaction by building a matching system which includes a vast number of companies, job seekers and new college graduates. “The way it ends up running is essentially like an eHarmony for jobs,” Maliniak said. “We bring common sense to a computer algorithm.”
