ApplyApp.ly CEO Mona Abdel-Halim

Finding a job is hard. You grabbed a sales job after college, but you’re terrified of phone calls and your eyes glaze over while looking at sales figures. It’s all because you’re truly an introvert, an abstract thinker, and better suited to be a writer. If only you’d known these traits and looked for a job based on your own quirky psychology, maybe then you wouldn’t have to cry every time you had to make a sales call.

Careerimp figured out that job hunting is hard, too, and launched ApplyApp.ly, a job search tool that matches you with job postings based on your Myers-Briggs personality type and your LinkedIn profile.

You probably remember the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from freshman psych in college. The assessment was designed to pinpoint your attitudes, functions, and lifestyle. Let’s say out of the sixteen possibilities, I test as ESTJ (Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judgment). I’d be well suited for an outgoing, consistent job in which I can make concrete, logical decisions. Officially, you must take the test from a certified practitioner such as a psychologist or career counselor, although there are online versions that can give you a pretty good estimate of your personality profile, too.

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ApplyApp.ly hopes that by using a psychological metric to find job matches, people will weed out irrelevant jobs from their hunt.

When you land the company’s website, it asks for your location and your four letter Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

ApplyApp.ly also performs semantic analysis on your LinkedIn profile to help find jobs (on other internet job search sites) that match your experience. That’s a better approach than keyword searches, the company claims.

The company is betting on its semantic search to create a more rewarding job search. You can upload a resume and the service will search listings that match the skills you claim to have. Each job posting will have a percentage score next to it, from zero to 100, that shows how close of a match the job is for your aptitudes.

ApplyApp.ly job listing

“The list of available jobs generated by job search engines is primitive,” said Careerimp co-founder Mona Abdel-Halim in a statement. “Job seekers can put in the position and location they are interested in, but it doesn’t really provide them with a list of the most relevant jobs.”

An investor panel after ApplyApp.ly’s presentation raised questions about the underlying technology. “How do they build their relevancy engine?” asked David Friedberg of The Climate Corp., noting that it has to be better than what LinkedIn is already doing in terms of matching job seekers with opportunities.

Frank Chen, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, liked its look: “They really nailed the design and made me want to try the thing,” he said.

Competitors include CareerBliss, which evaluates what you like and don’t like about your current job to help you find something better.

ApplyApp.ly is both helped and hindered by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Not everyone knows their score and it can be costly and time consuming to take the test. For people who already know their score, the service will likely be beneficial, but it may take others some convincing to take the test.

Careerimp has raised funding from Innovation Works and private angel investors. The company has developed several other career-based products. Founded in 2010, Careerimp has seven employees and is based in Pittsburgh, Penn.

Careerimp is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

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