Vitru allows employers to confirm that prospective hires will be a good fit for their company’s culture.
Hiring the right people is critical to growing a great startup. And while great references and seven years of Java experience are a solid start, that resume padding tells you nothing about how this potential hire will fit in with your 10-person team.
April Kelly, Ryan Mead and Jason Mullenhoff want to make finding that just-right professional fit easier. “Think about the small company that might have 25 employees,” Mead said. “If you hire the wrong person, it can be catastrophic for that business and the individual.”
Out of that measure twice, cut once mindset, Vitru was born. To achieve its goal, the innovative job seeking startup combines professional profiles, a reliable pipeline for talent and scientific assessments that measure cultural fit to help build the framework for meaningful professional connections.
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Omaha-based Vitru shines by serving both the hiring and the for-hire. Optimistic job seekers get a free portfolio to showcase their achievements and businesses get access to the channel of talent for a monthly fee—$100 for businesses with up to 15 employees, $299 for up to 75. Companies can also create their own pages to showcase their workplace values.
But the secret sauce is Vitru’s patent-pending assessment, which indicates if a company and their prospective hire will shine together based on work values and skill set matches. It’s not just dartboard matchmaking, either: Vitru’s evaluations were developed by reputable doctors in the field and use hundreds of thousands of data points as reference.
Businesses can apply those assessments to current employees too. “Most companies have mission statements or value statements, but it can be very revealing to an organization to find out what their employees say,” Kelly (right) said. “It can really help you understand why certain people in the organization really flourish and others struggle.”
Vitru—which is currently in beta mode—has been in the works since November of 2011, when ex-job recruiter Mead realized that an employee’s fit with the company culture was just as important as the skills they brought with them.
And after polishing the idea with Kelly and Mullenhoff, the group realized they could bring workplace-fit strategies to a broader audience. “We thought, we need to build a platform that takes people and businesses from all around the world and allows them to communicate and connect with the same techniques that we would use one-on-one” Mead (left) said.
Almost two years later, they’ve built a team of six employees (plus interns), a clean user interface, and a steady talent pipeline using only private funding. Of course, there’s still work to be done: the co-founders are trying to get Omaha college students on the platform and they plan to tweak the experience based on user feedback. The Vitru team believes that mixing professional profiles with research-based compatibility algorithms will help them compete with both the LinkedIns of the world and job boards like Monster.com.
At the very least, Vitru is already a more personal experience. “I believe it will help businesses and people find work that they love in an environment that they will flourish in,” Kelly said. “That’s a tough commodity to find right now.”
Credits: Product screenshot, and April Kelly and Ryan Mead photos courtesy of Vitru.
