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The job recruitment industry is plagued by a fundamental problem — or so says Benoit Vatere.
“Job boards either drive no candidates or way too many unqualified ones,” said Vatere. “Hiring a recruiter, on the other hand, [is] way too expensive.”
Vatere recently served as an entrepreneur in residence at Science Inc., a hybridized incubator-accelerator for Los Angeles startups that’s guided such rising companies as DogVacay and Dollar Shave Club. Placed at the helm of its hiring initiatives, Vatere noticed a pattern.
“I kept finding that the best hires came from referrals, the network expanding from the people in our own building — candidates we could trust,” he said. “So I started to wonder, what if I could scale that? What if I could do all my hiring through referrals?”
These thoughts begat the founding of SpringRole, a hiring marketplace that targets potential employees through referrals. Now presiding as CEO and (to borrow company terminology) “Resident Visionary,” Vatere believes referrals are a conduit to robust pools of qualified candidates.
SpringRole’s operational model is relatively simple. First, a registered company posts a job. SpringRole then finds referrals, both organically and, more commonly, through an algorithm that matches positions and referrals within its network of three million candidates. When a candidate’s qualifications meet or exceed the job requirements, SpringRole contacts his or her connections, asking if they’d like to refer the match. Once the referrals have been received, SpringRole contacts the corresponding candidate to gauge his or her interest level. From there, SpringRole parses the candidates, relaying only those it deems most qualified to the company hiring.
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“This model is essential because passive candidates are almost always the best. The people who already have good jobs are generally the most talented, hardest working people,” he explained. “And they’d love to consider new opportunities, even better ones, if only they had the time. That’s what SpringRole does, reaches out to them with great opportunities.”
“Referrals are also key because they prove the candidate to be much more trustworthy,” he continued. “If someone is willing to vouch for them, they probably don’t just look good on paper."
Of course, the model sounds easy to exploit. Theoretically, a referral could inflate a candidate’s perceived competency with a fraudulent recommendation. Vatere, however, has taken preventative action. “SpringRole’s referral engine defends against bad referrers through employer ratings of the referrals,” he said. “Employers rate their referrals, so anyone making bad referrals will be pushed out of consideration, while good referrers will take precedence...People who give unsatisfactory referrals will be quickly removed from the system.”
Despite its modest age and size (launched in September, SpringRole consists of Vatere, CTO Kartik Mandaville, and three co-founding engineers), SpringRole’s services are open to companies of any size. “We’re actually in talks with companies that have over 5,000 employees right now,” Vatere said. “The startups have come first because they tend to be the early adopters, not already set in a recruiting routine, but looking for new ways to do things, better ways.”
Vatere estimates that SpringRole has selected several thousand candidates and states that over 50% opt in for the position offered.
Describing the company’s goals for the near and distant future, Vatere led eagerly with the word “growth.” He continued, “We just want to keep introducing more companies to what we believe is the job market of the future, what we hope will become the standard first step of recruiting. We’re not just building a company; we’re shifting the paradigm and building a better way to hire, for everyone.”
