Why We’re Building This
Here’s the story of how a real-world problem led me and my co-founder to create a new kind of recruiting platform. While working as a Director on the Channel team at Yelp, my business segment was having a monumental year of growth. At this point we built the business from $0 to $20M in annual recurring revenue. We were all very excited about what this team could become and how it could impact the company. With rapid growth comes hiring and scaling. My task: hire 30 people in 90 days.
Doubling the headcount of a segment within 90 days turned out to be one of the most challenging tasks of my professional career. We had employees seeking the support of their leadership team, but the leaders were bogged down with endless phone screens and interviews every weekday. It was the perfect storm of scaling a team with limited time and resources while trying to keep our existing teams happy and engaged.
This type of situation actually has a name. It’s called “Blitzscaling” (what you do when you need to grow really, really fast), and it can strain a business and be taxing on existing employees, managers and recruiters who are working overtime to support the business. Additionally, this strain on the team may also be evident to the job seekers who are interviewing for the open roles.
Employees are a company’s most valuable asset, and yet the way we acquire talent is fundamentally broken.
As a hiring manager, I regularly experienced the pain of dealing with “quantity over quality” while balancing the urgency to get more people hired quickly. The current hiring strategy in the job market today is similar to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. From staffing firms to job boards, the pitch is all about quantity. Quality is getting left by the wayside.
The battle for talent in a boom or a bust cycle is always fierce. Speed is critical, and yet we see companies with so many hiring rounds that with every additional conversation, the chance of winning that candidate goes down because a more nimble company has made an offer more quickly.
Leap’s focus is to increase both quality AND speed, allowing you to hire the quantity of people you need without sacrificing the quality you expect.
Leap contracts industry leaders to provide hiring managers with their impartial feedback about candidates.
Many entrepreneurs and leaders in Silicon Valley are familiar with the “gut check screen,” where an entrepreneur reaches out to ask another entrepreneur, business leader, angel investor or outside resource to talk to a candidate and give their unbiased perspective on whether they are a good fit. I’ve done this gut check screen over a dozen times myself. What Leap is doing is operationalizing and scaling this thought process.
These 3rd party industry leaders are called Advisors on the Leap platform and we pay them for their time and judgement on a pay-per-screen basis. Leap does the sourcing and screening of candidates and then takes on the financial risk of paying Advisors to assess the candidate to confirm the quality of that candidate before we submit them to our clients.
In addition to serving as an outside opinion, the Advisor screen replaces interview rounds from our client’s hiring process. This allows our clients to save time and move on a candidate more quickly.
Leap is on a mission to change the way companies hire.
Today, we’re focused on hiring for sales roles and finding the right Advisors to match with our clients.
If you’re a sales leader interested in becoming an Advisor on our platform and earning extra money to screen candidates, 👉 reach out to us 👈. We’d love to connect with you!
In the future, we’ll be expanding our operations to include other verticals and roles, allowing Leap to support all hiring needs across a variety of industries, sectors and job titles.
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