New Start-Ups Tackle "Signaling"

In previous posts, we spoke about the emerging category of higher education & start-ups, and also recruiting & start-ups.

Sitting in between these two are an emerging group: signaling start-ups.

What's the thesis? Two big aspects of college are about:

• Learning
• Signalling how smart you are/how much you've learned.

As we have discussed previously, the "learning part" is being attacked in every which way: through cheap online schools, awesome adaptive learning technologies and other tools and software to mimic (or improve) the college learning experience.

So what about signalling? This is a much harder and bigger beast, given the higher education system is embedded in our psyches on how we rank and rate candidates.

Some start-ups in the news lately that are trying to tackle this through reputation based systems:

1) Smarterer.com just raised $1.25 million to "prove what you know in 60 seconds"

2) One of the Thiel Fellows named Dale Stephans is starting RadMatter to "Help people develop and demonstrate talent."

3) Jon Bischke is starting RG Labs, whose tagline is: "RG Labs was started with a simple premise: The most important decisions we make are decisions about people. And the Web is revolutionizing how we're making those decisions. We're building products that will change how people hire, form teams and start companies."

Obviously, we include ourselves in this category - but through a different approach - a standardized exam vs. an awesome reputation-based system where everyone is ranking each other on different criteria. Should be really interesting to see what emerges from this group and how it plays out in the recruiting world.