Anywhere from one quarter to one half of all résumés contain inaccuracies and outright lies, according to recent studies. What that means for a massive job site like Monster.com is that it is potentially sitting on millions of résumés that are more padded than a prom date.
What that means for ResTrust, which tied for third place in the Business Plan Challenge last year, is that it might have a new source of revenue.
Jared Fletcher, 34, is the founder of ResTrust, which plans to make it big by keeping job seekers straight.
Once www.restrust.net launches, visitors can submit résumés online and have them certified as fib-free. The checking will be done by an outside contractor, and the cost for verifying each piece of information will be $16 -- so certifying your education and last two jobs would run $48 (but anything beyond three items gets a 10 percent discount).
In his original plan, that's where the revenue stream ended. But in the months following the Business Plan Challenge, Fletcher said it occurred to him there may be value for employers as well.
Many job sites, such as Monster.com and Careerbuild er.com, sell employers a subscription to surf databases of résumés. ResTrust could do the same, he said.
By pre-screening applicants, ResTrust could help lower companies' hiring costs.
"We are going to save you time and money, " Fletcher said. "And you will never have to face many of the stories I hear."
Among those tales: The Florida International University "grad" who never really graduated, or the "accountant" who had problems with basic math.
Résumé certification isn't new, and there are other companies out there offering similar products. But what caught the judges' attention was the way ResTrust hopes to market its product. Fletcher has been meeting local companies and nonprofits that regularly face a sea of CVs, trying to persuade their HR departments that they could simplify their lives by posting this note: "We suggest all candidates submit a certified résumé from ResTrust."
So far, he said, he has "verbal commitments" from "some very large employers."
He's also getting some marketing help from a group of University of Miami business students who have taken on ResTrust as a consulting project. Their task: develop a guerrilla marketing strategy that will fuel interest in the site.
Fletcher won't talk about how much money he has poured into the venture, but over the past eight months he has been cutting back his hours as a management consultant to spend more time on the project. He hopes to launch the site "within weeks."
"I feel like we're on the 10-yard line, " he said, "and we are just trying to push through."
And that's no lie.
