HR Entrepreneur Found The Perfect Co-Founder Through OkCupid

On a mission to create a new way to match employees and employers, it was fitting that Kelsey Conophy used an unusual method for recruiting her co-founder.

The 2012 Parsons School of Design Graduate was looking for someone with both technical chops and a psychology background to complement her own design and business background.

She spent some four months searching in the usual ways: networking, going to Meetups, and reaching out on various professional sites, all to no avail.

After that, Conophy took the more unusual step of posting that she was looking for a potential co-founder with that particular experience on a profile on OkCupid, the popular dating site. Shortly after, she heard from Julian Diaz, who had studied both subjects at Penn and had similar frustrations with the recruiting world.

"Within a week of posting, I did have a few responses, some kind of sketchy. Luckily Julian Diaz responded ... we met up for dinner and hit it off," Conophy told us.

Together they created workZeit, a HR tech startup that uses data to analyze company culture. The company offers a "cultural fingerprint analysis" that companies can run on applicants and their own workers through in order to create better matches, based on preferences and practices related to how the company measures performance, how they motivate people, the pace of work, and the social culture.

"Most people think companies know what their culture is, but a lot them don't. We've found that a lot of companies have a really hard time discussing what [their culture is] and finding out what they actually have," Conophy said.

About a year and a half into the Brooklyn startup's existence, clients include New York area companies like Annalect and Compstak.

workZeit Is part of a growing group of companies attempting to bring more data to the HR process, which has been about unscientific interviews and gut feelings for too long.