This is the second blog post (read the first "You Are More than Your Resume" here) in a series where I'll be sharing more about why we're building Entelo. We'll be launching soon and we thought it was time to share a little bit more about our motivations. We feel that the world of employment and hiring is changing and many tools of the past are not adequate for the future.
In the second post in this series I'd love to cover something that drives the Entelo team to put in the long hours required when building a company. It's pretty simple: We want to help other companies grow.
The early days of Entelo's formation went something like this.
- Have coffee or lunch with entrepreneur growing his or her company.
- Ask question "How can I be helpful to you right now?"
- Hear answer like "Well, we're trying to find a really good Ruby on Rails engineer/UI designer/data scientist/Head of product."
- Decide to build software to be helpful to all of these companies.
There wasn't really a lightbulb moment but dozens of meetings like the one above convinced us that there was a meaningful problem to solve. Some of the most innovative companies on the planet were literally starving for talent. And the old ways of recruiting weren't working very well for them.
We believe strongly that the recruiting engine that powers a company is the key to a company's growth. We're not alone in that belief. Ron Conway, Vinod Khosla and many others who've seen first-hand the growth of some of the world's top companies agree. There's a growing dichotomy between the companies that are putting recruiting at the top of their priority list and those who are simply paying lip service to the importance of finding the best people.
Furthermore, many of the fast-growth companies that are Entelo customers now are the same types of companies that are fueling the growth of the overall economy. Companies less than five years old provide all net new job growth in the United States.I've written about this at length in the past. Here's a passage from an article entitled "The Connection between Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship" that I wrote back when Entelo was just getting going:
But there’s a governor on the growth for many of these startups. Want to guess what it is? They can’t hire enough people with the technical skills to help them grow. And here’s where we enter either a vicious cycle or a virtuous one. More startups, more jobs. Fewer startups, fewer jobs. Startups throwing up their hands because they can’t find the engineers, designers and product people to achieve their goals? Fewer startups. Fewer jobs.
Feed the fast-growth companies and you feed the overall economy.
I'll admit to sometimes getting a little annoyed at the disinterested reaction that people sometimes show when you tell them you're doing something in the recruiting space. But it's understandable. For many years, many people ranging from CEOs all the way through individual contributors being recruited have a feeling about recruiting that ranges from mild tolerance to outright disgust. Turnover among recruiters is high. Candidates are dissatisfied with the non-relevant job opportunities they are being sent (see my co-founder John McGrath's excellent post "How to Win Engineers and Influence People" for more on that front).
Recruiting is broken and while no one company will fix recruiting, it's great to see so many companies trying. From HireVue to Work4 Labs to Talentbin to Gild, there's a wave of companies building tools to help companies remove their primary growth: Discovering the talent they need to thrive. These companies are raising money, building innovative products and trying to convince their early adopters that there's a better way.
It's what we do every day at Entelo and we're looking forward to sharing more with you about what we're building very soon. It's our opinion that it's some of the most meaningful work on the planet. Every time we hear a story about an Entelo customer who has filled a difficult job req using the Entelo platform, it's confirmation that we're making a difference, both for the companies using the product and the people who've found new employment because of Entelo.
