Digital Science, a technology company serving stakeholders across the research ecosystem, welcomes Boston-based Scismic to the Digital Science family of companies.
Scismic builds technology platforms focused on enhancing career outcomes in the life science workforce. Scismic Job Seeker is their diversity-promoting, automated recruiting platform for the biopharmaceutical industry. The platform matches scientists to jobs based on expertise and removes sources of bias with its gender and race-blind matching algorithms, helping increase diversity in scientific hiring.
Scismic was founded by three Boston-based scientists looking to address the $1B annual loss from inefficiencies in scientific recruiting in the US, with plans to further expand into the $8.5B STEM recruiting industry. Their motivations came from observing many talented colleagues, initially enthused with scientific drive, grow disengaged and unproductive in their jobs, and feeling stuck in their careers.
“Our goal is to help all scientists, no matter their background, find workplaces that empower them to propel ground-breaking science,” said co-founder Elizabeth Wu. “One major barrier to scientific innovation is workforce development. We wanted to build a way for fellow researchers to find workplaces in academia and industry that would empower them to do their best science, and drive more research into the market.”
“We went through career changes and personally experienced the challenges of transitioning from academia to industry,” said co-founder Danika Khong. They decided to build a platform, with support from entrepreneur Danny Gnaniah and his team that could address career challenges and recruiting inefficiencies.
The co-founders highlight that current recruiting processes take over 2.5 months to fill vacancies and often results in poor fitting roles, lowering productivity and delaying scientific innovation. With Scismic Job Seeker, the recruiting process is shortened to one month or less. Current recruiting processes include sources of biases in candidate evaluation, like candidate name, which have been shown to exclude underrepresented scientists. Scismic Job Seeker removes these biases and solely matches candidates based on their skills.
“Scismic is very excited to be part of Digital Science’s portfolio of companies and contribute to the scientific ecosystem in ways that will foster impactful, ethical, and groundbreaking science. Digital Science’s passion and commitment for making an impact in the greater scientific world deeply connects with us and our community of users.”
The beta platform was awarded Digital Science’s Catalyst Grant last April and has so far attracted attention from biotech companies and pharma, as well as close to 2,300 scientists so far.
Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science said: “Compared to existing job boards, Scismic’s automated talent-matching offers a unique way to help recruiters and researchers find each other in a highly competitive job market. Improving on a slow and expensive hiring process alone would have made their service attractive, but offering built-in ways to create fairer hiring processes really does set them apart. It was clear from our first engagement through the Catalyst Grant that this was a sharp, conscientious founding team and we look forward to helping them build on their initial success.”
