EarnBetter was founded in 2022 by former Credit Karma execs who saw that for many people, financial progress is elusive without changing one’s income. EarnBetter was created with the vision to build a free service that helps people advance their careers in order to achieve financial security. According to the company, people using EarnBetter’s beta AI job search assistant have created over 100,000 resumes and cover letters since launch.
I interviewed their CEO Tuck Hauptfuhrer about their recent funding round of $4.5 Million. For the video version of this interview click here.
Q&A
Resume tools, generally speaking, have not gotten a ton of funding from the VC market. I've seen over the years, there's been only a handful, a really small amount.
What makes you guys different? …why is your product so interesting and unique?
Just to start, we're an AI technology company that helps people, as you mentioned, reformat, rewrite their resume, scan through millions of job matches, find job matches for them, and then customize our application pack, a cover letter and resume for each job that they're applying for.
So as we think about our vision, it's much more than just a resume. A resume can be a very tedious but also important part of the job search. It's your first impression to a prospective employer. So we want to help job seekers deliver the greatest possible first impression by helping them customize and tailor that first impression to the kind of needs of employers. But also our vision is to help job seekers, not just with resumes but much beyond resumes. So finding job matches that are relevant, helping with interview preparation and training. And by doing that, helping personalize the support that's provided in their job search. So the resume is an entry point where we get to know a lot about a user and can personalize support to them afterwards.
What's the origin story?
A number of the co-founders of EarnBetter actually came from Credit Karma. Credit Karma's mission is to help people make financial progress. For many people though, we just observe financial progress is hard to achieve without changing your employment situation, getting a better job and advancing your career. So we wanted to provide a totally free solution that helps consumers advance their career and be successful in their job searches.
It’s one hundred percent free. It's something we've always felt strongly about that job seekers need more support, not another bill. So it's really been the core of who we are and the product and the business that we want to build.
Describe the user experience?
Someone will go to earnbetter.com and then they will essentially get started by putting in an email address. From there, then they'll be asked to upload their resume. When they upload their resume, they will then be asked a handful of questions. They'll confirm their work experience and get some preferences to help us customize their resume better as well as help them find personalized job matches.
And then once you have that resume, you can then adjust it, edit it, have different formats if you'd like, and then look at the jobs that are relevant. We find jobs for you, not just based on what you're searching for, but what's in the full background and resume that you have. So we really hope to open the aperture of folks' search, not just to what the keywords are in the box that they're searching for, but what we believe they're qualified for based on the experiences and skills they have in their resume.
From there, once you find a job that you're excited about, we can help you, again, customize a draft cover letter and a resume for each of those jobs. You can edit those as you see fit. We can look through and see if there are any keywords or skills that are missing from your resume that you then have the option to add if they're relevant to your background experience. So really streamlining a lot of the upfront part of a job search process and finding the right personalized job matches, and then putting together a really high quality personalized app for each of those jobs.
Where are the jobs coming from?
We've got roughly 5 million jobs on the site today and we've got a number of partnerships with job boards and agencies and nonprofits to bring in really broad selection of jobs across geographies in the US and industries to support the job inventory on the site.
We work with a number of agencies and others to bring on inventory to the site. Right now, we're not working as much with employers directly, but we're always open to have discussions with employers. Right now we work largely through agencies and things like that.
Tell us a success story…
We had a user, Jordan, who was trying other sites for a while, would be applying to jobs and didn't get interviews for several months. She then discovered EarnBetter and very quickly got together a new resume and found a job. Within days she got an interview that she hadn't gotten previously and she landed her dream job as a residential advisor supporting individuals with disabilities. That really was her dream job. And so by helping her reformat, rewrite her resume, I think it showcases that there are certain barriers in the job search process.
We don't know exactly why Jordan wasn't getting those interviews previously. It could have been formatting issues tripping up and not capturing her resume appropriately in an applicant tracking system. So we really try to level the playing field. Someone like Jordan might not have had access to pay for a resume writer, a career coach, that type of thing. And we want to, with AI, bring those type of capabilities to people like Jordan so that they can be evaluated by the relevancy of their skills and experiences instead of how a resume is formatted, how well it parses through the ATS and some of those nuances that unfortunately occupy too much of the job search process today.
Job seekers don't typically like to pay for stuff, what's the plan to make money here?
As I mentioned, it's always been important to us to provide a completely free service. Again, we believe that levels the playing field for job seekers. So we make money when people find and apply through jobs on our site, and we find that that's a great win-win. When a user finds a job that they're excited about, that's a great fit and they apply, that's obviously a great thing for them.
On the employer side, when they've got candidates that are engaged, that are well qualified and great matches for these opportunities, it's a win on their side. So we monetize through connecting people with employers and we get paid as people find and apply through jobs to the site. So that win-win is ultimately what we're all about, is trying to keep both sides of that marketplace happy.
Where is EarnBetter in 5 years?
We think that supporting in a job search, again, is the first step of the journey. And we're really helping with, as I mentioned, that first introduction to an employer. We want to help you find a great job match. We also want to help you provide a profile that highlights the unique skills and experiences that showcases your candidacy or your qualifications for a role.
But beyond that, as I mentioned, there's so many other elements of the job search, right? There's networking, there's interview preparation. There's just so much more that we can build around to provide support. Generative AI is so, so powerful in what it can do, but it's also intimidating. It can be hard to use. We want to make that accessible to job seekers so that they can spend more time doing what matters, whether it's networking, adding another credential or skill, preparing for interviews, even just taking care of their mental health as a part of a job search as opposed to the tedious aspects of scanning through hundreds of job descriptions or formatting a resume or doing things like that.
So ultimately, we see this AI job search assistant helping, not just at the beginning of the process, but throughout a job search. And longer term, we want to stay with you, not just in your job search, but throughout your career. So as we learn about your profile, there might be up-skilling, other types of opportunities that we can share with you to not only help you in a job search, but help you in your career longer term.