After hundreds of conversations with both job seekers and employers, we learned that both groups were struggling to find meaningful ways to connect with each other. Job seekers often felt they had no way to tell employers what they wanted or needed from a job—and without this information, employers had no way of knowing which candidates would be the best fit.

To fulfill our core value of enabling meaningful and human connections between candidates and companies, we came up with Attractors — a curated list of attributes and values that job seekers and employers can add to their Underdog.io profiles to facilitate richer interactions throughout the hiring process. 

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Attractors are designed to help job seekers and recruiters find each other on Underdog.io and spark conversations around the core values that matter most in a workplace. Employers can show job seekers the core values that their organization embodies most by adding relevant Attractors to their company profile, and job seekers can signal the values they are looking for in an employer by adding the most relevant Attractors to their profiles.

Armed with the high-signal information provided by Attractors, candidates can browse for Underdog.io companies that are a match with their values and interests. Attractors also make it easier for recruiters and hiring managers to send highly customized, targeted outreach messages to candidates with similar values.

Here’s what a job seeker’s profile looks like with Attractors added:

Why Attractors?

Our goal with Attractors is to allow employers and candidates to engage in deeper conversations around company philosophy, strategy, culture, operating cadence, tools, problem spaces, and more. Attractors complement existing recruiting artifacts like job posts, which are great at surfacing the extrinsic attributes of a job and a company (e.g. skills needed, years of experience required) but less useful at giving job seekers a genuine sense for what it’s like to work somewhere.

We’re starting with a structured dataset of 19 Attractors that can be searched, filtered, and, in the case of company users, added to new or existing saved searches in the Underdog.io dashboard. Here’s the list of Attractors, which we whittled down from a much larger pool after conducting user research to understand what really matters most to our companies and job seeking community.

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We’re treating Attractors as a work-in-progress, a dataset that we’ll continue to refine as we gather more insights and feedback from job seekers and employers. The next step will be adding more granular Attractors and offering actionable data on the effects of Attractors on hiring. If you have any ideas for additional Attractors that could help better represent different employer attributes, shoot us a quick email at community@underdog.io. 

Head to your candidate dashboard and add your Attractors to signal your must-have values and attributes to potential employers. Let us know if you have any questions.