Why Swishlinks is bringing personality into professional networking

by Andreas Rekdal
October 26, 2016

Networking is part of Ali Shahanaghi’s DNA. Growing up around his mother’s in-house hair salon, he watched her talk with clients about their interests day in and day out, facilitating introductions between people she thought could benefit from meeting each other.

It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that when Shahanaghi decided to start a company in 2014, his idea was to build it around a professional networking tool.

Looking at the networking applications already out there in the marketplace, Shahanaghi was struck by their narrow focus on education and work experience. His startup, Swishlinks, strives to present a broader view of what a young professional can bring to a project or an organization.

“The trend that we have seen in working with Millennials is that they are very creative, and they have many different skills, talents and passions,” said Shahanaghi. “Most of those skills and passions are not well-communicated.”

In his view, that is a missed opportunity both for prospective employers and for job candidates. Applicants can end up selling themselves short, while employers lose out on workers who can bring in new and interesting perspectives.

The solution Shahanaghi and co-founder Charbel Seif came up with was an app that lets users create a customizable professional page that serves as a stand-in for a resume, portfolio, business card or personal website.

In addition to the information you’d expect from a traditional resume, Swishlinks gives the user a visually driven ‘journey’ tab that lets them tell the story of how they ended up where they are today. The feature interweaves text with links and multimedia elements — whether that’s a travel photo, a YouTube video of a panel discussion or an Instagram post that drew massive engagement.

Swishlinks also has functionalities for building and maintaining professional networks. If a user wants two of their acquaintances to meet each other, they can make an introduction directly through the app. If both users accept the introduction, they can see each other’s profiles and contact information.

Users can share their profiles with anyone, regardless of whether or not the recipient has a profile of their own. This versatility highlights a key aspect of the company’s user acquisition strategy: emphasizing quality over quantity. Rather than making recipients sign up for the site to access another user’s information, the founders hope to attract users who get the product and will serve as brand ambassadors along the way.

After chipping away at the project since 2014, Shahanaghi and Seif decided to take on Swishlinks as a full-time endeavor in 2016, scaling their team to 11 people. The bootstrapped company is still hiring for a number of positions.

While Swishlinks is open to any professional, Shahanaghi believes a lot of the platform’s potential will be utilized in creative fields, for whom resumes and traditional networking sites can be particularly stifling.

“There are industries that lack professional applications, and that’s somewhere where we can bring a lot,” he said.

Image via Swishlinks.

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