The journey started in 2006 trying to understand why there isn’t a better way for candidates to directly engage with enterprises for contract roles. Many of my friends and peers might say, “please not again 2006” 🙂
Looking back it is funny how it took 15 years, 7 product pivots which include, [Gigumes – Gigs + resumes – Democratizing candidate information with SEO and metasearch engine, Unecloud – winning a VMS deal with the state of texas without even writing a single line of code and later ending up raising money from people I met on Craiglist, Launching Jobhuk (acquired) at SXSW with a 3-day prototype as consumer-focused recruitment marketplace, a realtime value resume marketplace, trying to Saasifying to upsell to largest staffing provider, pivoting to the talent community with an ML-driven reactive referral]. I made so many amazing friends, mentors through this journey whom I am so honored to know personally.
WillHire is not just an idea or a market opportunity for me, rather a mission for the last 15 years chasing the same goal.
In the last 15 months, building a team through pandemic was super crazy, but I got lucky! Through my industry peers who helped me bring in some really amazing people into WillHire which got us to where we are today.
Each and everyone on WillHire’s team is not just good but is the best at what they do in their own function. Most importantly, Good People. The energy within the team is so outstanding and it barely lets me sleep. We have been in a constant uphill battle at every account, every stage but kept pushing and winning most of the time. The losses were even great new lessons to learn on how to win our next battle.
I was so fortunate to have been surrounded by so many mentors from within and outside CWS / Talent acquisition industry who have helped me and guided me through this journey.
I am so lucky to have our industry peers as part of our partner ecosystem believing in us and supporting us through our journey. I cannot thank them enough for all the love and support they provided us every day.
I feel like I am the most fortunate person in the world with some key people in WillHire who has so many sleepless nights. Kevin Poll who has been a pillar and I get to complain/share everything – I am so fortunate to have found a friend of my lifetime. Kevin has always taken our vision for the partnership to the best place in the world. With our handicapped marketing function, it has been essential to wear multiple hats to build out an outstanding marketing function which the industry has proven back to ourselves that not just worked but kicked ass.
Pradyumna Doddala – Without Prady, WillHire cannot live even a single minute. He is more than a colleague and a friend. He is my brother who not only understands my cryptic business strategy but easily transforms that into a technology solution overnight. As a developer myself, I have had this self-centric attitude that I can build things faster and best, but Prady proves me wrong every time where have to take a solution to 10x and makes it feel like nothing. He has taught me humility at its best.
Eric Koppin our sales wizard and with his best-looking hair 🙂 has made my job so easy, while enabling us to run much faster. Seeing him in action at CWS recently was awesome with his charm and best sense of humor ever! It was so good to meet both Eric & Kevin for the first time after we started this journey.
Through this journey, I am honored to work with some absolutely amazing people – , Vivek – Product Magician who constantly is overburdened by my laziness, Sumanth – Pushing product out faster, Sunil, Hemanth, Sebin – coding all the way through sleepless nights, Rishi, Piyush, Syed – opening all the doors, and several more.. I so much want to hug each and everyone on my team, but looks like the hugs have to be virtual for some more days.
There are so many lessons learned that I am so privileged to go through this journey to understand product, market, customers, and several aspects of how to build a product that is purpose-driven.
The new journey ahead – Acquisition of WillHire into PRO Unlimited gives us such an outstanding opportunity to address the problem at a really high scale in the fastest way possible.
Pro’ is such an outstanding organization and is a software powerhouse. Kevin Akeroyd’s, vision of our industry so much aligns with WillHire vision and mission to drive our industry forward by delivering the best candidate and customer experience is going to change the future of the contingent workforce and talent acquisition industry from the ground up.
Our journey got simply more interesting and still chasing the same goal.
“Connecting Candidates and Enterprises in the best way possible while delivering an outstanding experience”.
Looking forward to the next 15 years of journey.
You can connect with me to have a chat about direct sourcing or anything else. Book a time slot here!
Be Good. Do Good and lots of hugs.
