Local ‘Silicon Prairie’ firm creates high-tech employment solution

Alex Golimbievsky and Ntuna Ekuri, founders of Hire360 first met when they were both recruiters for a large headhunting company.

“We did ‘smile and dial’ together for a few years,” Golimbievsky said, “and then we were laid off together when they cut the office in half in the recession of 2009.”

The associates went their separate ways. Ekuri moved to engineering recruiting then eventually into business analysis and Golimbievsky moved into business project management. In 2013, as serendipity would have it, Golimbievsky was assigned to manage a project that Ekuri was working on.

They reconnected with a conversation centered around the challenges of hiring. As Golimbievsky put it, they wondered how it is that a person can go online, find a significant other and get married, but it is so hard to find the right talent for your business team, and that’s how Hire360 was conceived.

“We have taken everything we used to do as recruiters,” Golimbievsky said, “and built it into our platform. It used to be that a recruiter would look at the requirements of a job and search across hundreds of resumes. They would find a person, reach out, set up an interview, and charge 25 percent of a first-year salary. Our system does all that in seconds for an economical subscription fee.”

In many ways, Hire360 is a mini-case study of what two passionate entrepreneurs with a good idea can accomplish in Oklahoma today.

From their own firsthand experience, Golimbievsky and Ekuri identified a big problem that companies will pay to solve. They imagined a solution. They are located in Oklahoma, where Silicon Prairie versus Silicon Valley costs of living and operating businesses are favorable. They find affordable development talent online thanks to trends in the share-economy, a reminder that geography and proprietary technology are playing a smaller role for startups than ever before.

Hire360 launched in May and now has nearly 40 client companies, ranging in size from five to 1,500 employees. But it wasn’t that way at first. “We started out with a plan to ‘burn’ the resume,” Golimbievsky said. “That was woefully ignorant. The whole hiring process today is built around the resume. As a startup, you can’t change the world on a dime.”

So instead, Hire360 adopted another tack, used what they learned from the early adopters and evolved into a system that equips operating executives to do their own hiring, thus helping relieve the bottleneck that can occur when human resource departments are overwhelmed. It’s like having a virtual recruiter, with Kayak-like access to a network of 100,000,000 plus resumes.

Passion, pivoting and pursuing a solution that solves real problems for real markets and customers. It’s happening across our state.