Staffing firm seeks growth in Orlando.
A digital platform for staffing and recruitment, Talentify, is growing and seeking venture capital from a new Orlando base.
Talentify founder Othamar Gama Filho says he moved to Orlando to capitalize on the U.S. market for staffing and to take advantage of direct flights between Brazil and Orlando.
“We are now a U.S. entity, but most of our software development is still done in Brazil with six people there,” he said. “One of our founders is there, our chief tech officer.”
Talentify says it provides automated talent recruitment, especially for operations such as retail outlets where a store manager can get overwhelmed by posting job notices and interviewing people. Talentify says it has contracts with Saks Fifth Avenue and Sears, for example.
“It’s sort of a bot for recruitment, although we’re not selling software, or the service, but the end results,” Gama Filho said.
The platform gathers information in stages on each candidate, qualifying them and ranking them. For final qualified candidates, the software directs the candidate to schedule an interview. The company charges for each qualified candidate, from $13 in a non-skilled job to $100 for highly skilled rare positions such as a master electrician with specific skills.
Talentify has only a few people in an Orlando coworking office, but Gama Filho says he will be hiring up to a dozen in the next year or so.
According to Talentify’s Crunchbase profile, the company has reported $500,000 in the first rounds of funding so far. Gama Filho said he hopes for more good news about funding soon. The company is revamping its websites, Talentify.io and TalentFlux.com.
Talentify has been chosen as one of five participants in a Shark Tank-style pitch session at the annual convention for the digital staffing and work solutions industries, called Collaboration on the Gig Economy, starting Sept. 13 in Dallas.
Other startups in the session are Bonsai, Bunker, Gustav and Koru. The Koru firm also bills itself as providing a predictive hiring tool.
Gama Filho said some people advised him to move to a bigger city than Orlando, but he has grown to appreciate its cost of living and talent base. He graduated from the University of Miami in 2004 and wanted to move back to Florida.
Westgate sues
The Westgate Resorts timeshare company has accused Swiss website Amoma.com of selling Westgate rooms for unauthorized wholesale rates.
Orlando-based Westgate sued Amoma in federal court recently over the wholesale
rates. Westgate said it has informed Amoma that it may no longer honor any rooms it books.
The lawsuit accuses Amoma of “offering the wholesale rates for single hotel room bookings and not as a packaged deal, as intended.”
Amoma, based in Geneva,
Switzerland, could not be reached for comment.
Westgate says in its lawsuit that Amoma advertises its rates on third-party websites such as TripAdvisor, Kayak and Trivago.
SimPlus hiring
A new company is providing training for Salesforce cloudcomputing tools in Orlando, after acquiring a local company.
SimPlus, which is based in Salt Lake City, acquired Orlando-based Basati, which has offices near the Orlando Executive Airport. It is looking for bigger space now.
Basati had nine people in Orlando. Tim Smith, formerly CEO of Basati and now a senior account executive, said the company expects to add about 40 or 50 people locally — including consultants, project managers and developers.
He said the jobs will be highwage positions for Orlando, starting around $80,000 for experienced staff.
“We’re in a very competitive field,” Smith said. “There are so many firms in Orlando that use Salesforce, and we expect to be hiring from some of the local companies, and from UCF.”
SimPlus says it will be hiring locally and increasing its staff in Orlando. The company has made three acquisitions in its
brief history.
Salesforce provides customer relationship management software that helps companies manage information about prospects and customers, such as contact info, accounts, leads and sales opportunities, in one central location.