INNOVATORS

Job hunters get $2,000 and Dom Pérignon if they get hired through a recruitment marketplace co-founded by Canadian Matt Mickiewicz

Hired co-founder Matt Mickiewicz creates companies and hands the management reins over.

Just about every employee wants to know what their value would be on the open market, but few will do anything about it. A Gallup survey suggests 70% of employees are actively unengaged, but only 20% of them were willing to change positions. Part of the reason is that finding a great job at an employer you can stand is a pain. It’s also a hassle from the employer’s side, as Matt Mickiewicz has found out in developing several companies. It was a process he didn’t want to repeat, so the Vancouver resident co-founded Hired Inc., a recruitment service initially targeted at the tech sector, with Douglas Feirstein and Allan Grant in 2012.

“The initial genesis for the company was our past frustrations in using other options as we scaled our previous companies,” Mickiewicz says. “We used job boards, we used executive recruiters, we used LinkedIn, and none of them worked for us. I found all of them to be very frustrating and made it very difficult to get the talent in the door that we needed.”

What makes Hired different? How about $2,000? That’s what each job seeker gets as a bonus if he or she accepts a job through Hired. And a bottle of Dom Pérignon. Those perks are part of what Mickiewicz says make San Francisco-based Hired different since it focuses on the talent side of the equation. Every single job offer made through Hired comes with a salary number attached to it so tech workers can see their market worth, perhaps enticing them to get that new job. Hired also assigns a “personal talent advocate,” essentially an agent, to shepherd a prospect throughout the process. The agent gets paid based on the hiring company’s satisfaction instead of a commission, eliminating a potential conflict of interest.

Mickiewicz boasts that Hired speeds up the process of finding and signing people by 25-30%, cutting the average time to hire in Toronto, where the company officially launched an office in November, to 14 days as opposed to about 20. Every Monday, what he calls a “two-sided curative marketplace” is refreshed, which shows who is interested in finding a new job and who is hiring. The company now works with 2,500 companies from 13 offices on two continents. Each office acts as a regional hub, meaning Toronto serves the entire Ontario marketplace, which, Mickiewicz says, is expected to have 50,000 unfulfilled tech jobs by 2019. There are plans to open offices in Vancouver and Montreal, and eventually the marketplace could be open to all knowledge workers, not just those in technology.

Although Hired has three co-founders who are still involved in the business, not one of them is CEO. That position in July was handed to Mehul Patel, an experienced marketplace executive who had been chief operating officer for the previous two and a half years. Mickiewicz, who had been CEO, says the decision was made early on to have a succession plan in place — thus eliminating another HR-related mistake companies are prone to. Handing over the reins is something Mickiewicz, 32, is used to. Born in Kraków, Poland, he created his first website called Webmaster-Resources.com at the age of 14. That company became SitePoint, a publisher and marketplace for web professionals. He later spun out 99designs, a graphic design crowdsource service in 2008 that was created with US$35 million in venture finance, and a year later co-founded Flippa.com, a marketplace for buying and selling small websites via auction.

Hired has raised a total of US$32.7 million during three rounds of financing from nine investors, including Google Venture seed funding in early 2013. Mickiewicz says the beta launch of Hired in Toronto was the most successful yet, with more than 250 companies and nearly 12,000 job seekers joining the marketplace — that’s double the number of candidates and nearly double the number of companies as during the company’s previous two U.S. market launches.

One of the side benefits of having millions of job offers flowing through the system is that Hired publishes salary data based on experience, skill set and location, which is available for both companies and job candidates for free. That might give companies pause if they’re low-balling their employees. “As an employer, you have to be really proactive in making sure your employees are well compensated, have a clear career path and an effective manager who’s able to understand and coach people,” Mickiewicz says.