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‘Recruitment Marketing’ Category

Garrett Langley, who is the person known for bringing Flock Safety to fruition as their CEO back in 2017, has made strides for his organization.

All that Flock Safety has done to this point has landed them in the number seven slot for Deloitte’s North America 2022 Technology Fast 500 Rankings.

Flock Safety focuses on making startup cameras for law enforcement and local neighborhoods to analyze license plates for investigations and cars.

The organization was able to raise approximately $150 million to reduce crime in the United States back in the Summer of 2021.

A news release the organization put out around the same time provided a goal on how they wanted to help reduce crime across the country by about 25 percent within the next three years.

How Deloitte is able to determine who makes this list by comprising the list of companies that have been able to attain the highest percentages of fiscal year growth that span over a three-year period from both private and public technology companies.

With Flock Safety starting to make itself a renowned name across the country, this is a trying time for any startup with many investors being laser-focused on bringing in profits and having valuations declining that has caused some organizations to lay off employees and cut costs.

Besides Flock Safety making it on Deloitte’s list, some other organizations in Georgia did as well; specifically, 18 others that are lower than 2021 that had 22 companies on the list.

Some of those organizations include but are not limited to Calendly, CENTIGIX, Wahoo, Fitness, and LendingPoint.

Flock Safety has managed to skyrocket with their growth rate at about 13,117% over a span of three years tops out any other Georgia company that was on Deloitte’s list this year.

Around Atlanta, Virgil Fludd is well known for his time in office and over two decades of experience in areas from sales and marketing to consulting.

It goes without saying that Fludd is well renowned in Georgia, specifically the Atlanta area and he is taking his talents to another organization.

Caldwell Partners International has brought Fludd on as a partner to enhance their recruiting capabilities in their Academic, Non-Profit, Social Enterprise & Culture (ANSEC), Financial Services, and Technology capabilities out of the firm’s Atlanta office.

Fludd’s experience includes previously serving in the 64th House District that included south metro Atlanta with parts of the Fayette and Fulton counties where he focused on small business development, regulated industries, ethics, and more according to a recent biography.

Fludd joined Caldwell from the Carvir Group which is an Atlanta-based recruiting firm that he founded back in 1992 to help Fortune 1000 to find the best and most qualified candidates for mid to upper-level positions.

“With an unmatched legacy of experience in executive search, management consulting, public policy, government relations, and corporate sales and marketing, Virgil has exceptional insight into the tactical and strategic challenges that our sector faces today,” said Heather Ring, leader of Caldwell’s ANSEC Practice. “His demonstrated expertise in recruiting senior executives for a range of clients in the government, healthcare, technology, and financial services industries will be invaluable to our team and our clients.”

Fludd is a graduate of Leadership Atlanta, the Georgia Legislative Institute, and Leadership Fayette.

Caldwell is known to be a leading retained executive search firm that bridges the gap between clients and talent.

Ordering food delivery at the touch of your phone is practical, however, one renowned company has been laying off employees nationwide including in the Atlanta area.

Food delivery giant DoorDash has been laying off workers according to a company spokesperson.

The CEO of DoorDash Tony Xu announced at the end of November that 6% of its global workforce of approximately 20,000 people were being laid off.

The employees that were let go included those based in the United States and non-U.S.-based staff according to Bloomberg.

DoorDash would not specify how many Atlanta-based workers were let go as well as the exact amount of people laid off in total.

A website that tracked the layoffs at different technology organizations during the pandemic, layoffs.fyi posted a spreadsheet of DoorDash workers that were affected by the layoffs. The spreadsheet indicates a total of four Atlanta workers that were impacted by the job cuts.

With employees impacted all around, the DoorDash CEO did not manage the team’s growth.

“We too are not immune to the external challenges and growth has tapered vs our pandemic growth rates,” Xu said in a statement. “While our business continues to grow fast, given how quickly we hired, our operating expenses – if left unabated – would continue to outgrow our revenue.”

Roles that were impacted in Atlanta included a senior associate of partnerships, director of grocery partnerships, senior manager of enterprise restaurant partnerships, and more according to the posted spreadsheet.

One employee whose LinkedIn profile said they worked at DoorDash was grateful for the opportunity to work at the company.

“I am grateful to have spent 4 incredible years at DD surrounded by brilliant teammates and working with some of the most innovative partners in the restaurant industry.”

For organizations looking to hire diverse talent, there are different ways to go about appealing to that talent and eventually bringing them on as employees.

For one startup in Atlanta, Stratos focuses on a networking and hiring platform for both Black and Latinx candidates looking for new positions in technology and other fields.

Jonathan Cornelius is the founder of Stratos and a recent graduate of Georgia State University who launched the organization to help a diverse talent network, share authentic questions and advice, and allow users to connect with interest-specific areas with the goal of growing a digital community.

Having a different approach than traditional job search platforms is important according to Cornelius. “A lot of our competitors lack scale factor. But they don’t ask the question, what happens after someone gets the job?”

Stratos caters its focus on both the employer and employee aspects during the hiring process. There is an opportunity for other companies that are committed to diversifying their hiring process from a talent standpoint can access Stratos’ database.

With over 20 startups that have already worked with Stratos, a lot of these roles are focused on technology which is good news for technology recruiting firms in the Atlanta-area.

“The number one thing that we prioritize is giving Black and Latinx professionals a place to not only network and find community, but also to just really see that representation matters,” Cornelius said. 

Forbes recently posted an article on how technology companies can improve their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the tech industry.

According to a recent Wiley report, approximately 68% of business leaders state there is a lack of diversity within the tech workforce.

This included 68% of employees in the 18 to 28 age category who felt uncomfortable in a job due to ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic background as different examples.

The are many arguable benefits to working remotely from saving gas to being at home with family among other pull factors.

One organization that is out of New England had been planning for the transition to remote work before the Coronavirus crippled the world.

Interactions LLC based in Boston had a plan in place before the pandemic started and was planning on doubling their office space in conjunction with moving their headquarters which would have cost more than $5 million.

The Coronavirus throwing a wrench in many organizational plans and structures including how human resources departments would handle working in the office and implementing the transition to fully remote work for sections, departments, and entire organizations.

“Like many other companies, we faced the COVID reality of being remote,” said Mary Clermont, Interactions’ chief people officer. “The first question we asked was, how is this working, and how are people doing?”

When it comes to how much employees can save by working remotely, Global Workplace Analytics found that employees that work remotely in either a part-time or full-time capacity can end up saving between $2,000 and $7,000 annually when work-related and transportation costs are taken into consideration.

With the money that is saved for employees, time is also saved in the sense that employees working fully remotely can save between two to three weeks when it comes to extricating the time it took to commute to the office.

Interactions LLC is different from other organizations in the sense that prior to the pandemic, approximately 30 percent of its workforce was already working remotely according to Clermont.

Working remotely is what candidates look for in the job market today and value the opportunity to potentially save on different costs and be productive at the same time.

Earlier this year, Yelp’s CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppleman stated that his organization intended to “embrace a fully remote workplace” and focus on shutting down underutilized offices in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C.

For certain patients that are eligible, there is an opportunity for hospices in using technology to help retain staff amidst the uncertainty of shortages across the workforce.

Hospices have been relying on artificial intelligence, machine learning, as well as predictive analytics which are of added value to eligible patients that could be getting the necessary help as they combat their disease.

To show how challenging the environment is, labor shortages have a limited clinical capacity for hospice and health which leads to a decline in the patient census to include how long they stay. Rejection rates pertaining to referrals peaked in 2021 the spilled into 2022 according to data derived from CarePort which is a WellSky organization.

“The lack of increase in payment to keep pace with overall inflation and competitive marketplace dynamics is going to, in certain markets — if not across many markets — continue to constrain the capacity of home health providers to take on all of the referrals that are being sent their way,” WellSky’s Chief Clinical Officer Timothy Ashe said.

When it comes to hospices leveraging technology, Silverado Hospice intends on using an AI tracking system when it comes to hiring new talent in the future.

The reason being is to identify potential candidates early on in their careers as the labor market continues to be competitive according to Silverado’s vice president of hospice operations, April Wilson.

Silverado hopes this new applicant tracking system will be effective and efficient in the applicant hiring process and increase staffing.

“Recruitment and retention really come down to the ways we offer value to staff. As a company we are embracing technology across the board – not just in human resources – and the new capabilities it can bring. We feel it is important to use resources that enable automation and predictive analytics,” Wilson said.

Silverado hospice has been around for over 25 years and was founded in 1996.

When people think about Calendly, they either think of an efficient calendar or scheduling platform to help different parties meet up without the burden of copious email traffic.

Calendly has recently acquired a San Francisco-based company known for scheduling interviews known as Prelude according to an Atlanta Inno article.

Calendly, which is a cloud-based scheduling platform has helped people and organizations alike show available times for scheduling meetings that eliminate the need to send emails back and forth to find a suitable time.

The benefit to Calendly for acquiring Prelude will enhance Calendly’s customer’s ability to have an automated way to schedule job interviews with prospective candidates. The organization has more than 10 million users in 116 countries that rely on the platform according to a recent news release.

“This acquisition is a testament to how Calendly’s profitable business model affords us the ability to pursue initiatives that will meet the growing demand of our customers,” said Tope Awotona, founder and CEO of Calendly.

Awotana went on to state the importance of Calendly continuing to simplify the scheduling process with a pragmatic goal of increasing customer retention and acquiring more candidates as part of the press release.

Prelude allows recruiting teams to adequately tackle recruiting challenges by bridging the gap between simplifying the scheduling process between candidates and employers so the best decision can be made the first time.

“This acquisition presents a tremendous market opportunity with the number of interactions and experiences modern companies have with their potential hires,“ says Will Laufer, founder, and CEO of Prelude. 

Calendly was founded back in 2013 and Prelude was founded in 2017.

The inspiration behind a mucker date back to Thomas Edison and his vision of bringing hackers and entrepreneurs together on strengthening products that affected industries or brought new markets to fruition.

Mucker Lab is a top-rated accelerator that is run by Mucker Capital according to Brittain Skinner from Mucker Capital.

Mucker focuses its efforts on investing in high-growth startups outside of Silicon Valley that include offices in Los Angeles, Austin, Toronto, and Taiwan from the organizational website.

Mucker Lab prides itself on being a different kind of accelerator with a focus on not having demo days or three-month boot camps and instead taking a company-building approach for each organization.

Mucker was founded in 2011 and there were very few programs at the time around the Los Angeles area to be a foundation for tech entrepreneurs to refine their products and increase seed funding with a pragmatic goal of strengthening and growing their businesses.

The founding partners of Mucker Lab William Hsu and Erik Rannala acted early on the organization when Los Angeles was not as developed as it is today.

“We believed that L.A. lacked at the time someone who was willing to go and take the founding risk with the entrepreneurs,” Hsu said.

Mucker Lab is an equity-based accelerator program that looks to invest between $100-200k with follow-on capital available over the life of the investment.

To apply for Mucker Lab, the next set of applications is due on Tuesday, November 15th.

With labor markets in Atlanta and beyond being tough, a startup in Atlanta, Grayscale Labs Inc. may have found a breakthrough method in order to boost recruiting.

Using a more innovative and swift method, Grayscale focuses on leveraging technology to help recruiters go through candidates in high volumes that could be a good fit for a company.

Grayscale was founded back in 2018 by Ty Abernathy and Hubert Liu, who came up with devising and sending automated texts to help companies screen candidates. According to an Atlanta Business Chronicle article, over 200 customers in the organization include Amazon, Peloton, and Wayfair.

The recent funding of $7.5 million will be used towards doubling the 32-person staff in the next 18 months with a focus on hiring in sales, engineers, marketing, and customer support.

A partner at Atlanta Ventures, Jon Birdsong said that Grayscale has a massive market opportunity.

Grayscale’s vision is to simplify the recruiting process, particularly from a technological perspective so that organizations can communicate more efficiently with candidates and vice versa.

In 2021, Grayscale raised $3.3 million by Atlanta Ventures to double its team.

Why this is important and can help other organizations adopt a similar method for hiring is that one of Grayscale’s specialties is geared towards business-to-business software that could simplify the recruiting process down the road.

Abernathy wants it to be known that Grayscale is assisting both candidates and organizations alike finding the best fit for different roles.

“We make it easy to engage candidates via SMS,” Abernethy said. “The power of Grayscale is being able to automate the touchpoints of the candidate journey.”

More recently in the third quarter of this year, Georgia startups did experience a 28% decrease from venture funding in the third quarter that sparked organizations to lay off more employees.

“I think we’ve got a cold winter ahead of us from a venture funding point of view,” said David Cummings, founder of Atlanta Tech Village and CEO of Atlanta Ventures said in an Atlanta Inno article.