Attracting and retaining the best talent is a challenging task for all businesses. In an organization, having the right person for the job is necessary for the business. However, recruiting the right person could be a challenge even when conditions are ideal. Identifying the competent candidates from the sea of applications is work of preciseness and needs to be done right from the beginning of the process.
Allie Knull is an inspiring entrepreneur and recruitment professional with 20 years of extensive experience, working to advance the recruiting process and to ensure that recruiters don’t end up losing vital organizational resources. Allie is the Founder and CEO of ResumeFree, an innovative technology which helps employers and candidates find the right fit, all without resumes. The idea was to align technology in a way that provides secure, job specific predictive analytics which simplify the recruiting process, taking the guesswork out of whether or not the candidate and employer “fit”.
Every Challenge Brings New Learning
Before starting ResumeFree, Allie was running a consulting firm. After she saw the possibilities with aligning technology and businesses together, she thought “What if we could do things a little bit better? What if we could hire without using resumes? What if we could have a tool that could do that?” This integration of technology and recruitment process led to the inception of ResumeFree.
Being a non-tech tech founder, Allie had faced a lot of challenges to transform her vision into reality. From merging with the people that created the tool and licensing it, seeking global approval from all of the partners, to developing the tool as economically as possible, Allie had to overcome a lot of hurdles. She believes that there was a big learning curve on how much work needs to go in behind the scenes, and how to make a tool really, truly accessible for people as well.
A Comprehensive Screening Tool
According to Allie, in today’s recruitment process the resume only shows the candidate’s achievements, academia, and previous work experience. There could be marginalization from people in specific areas; those who couldn’t get into elite colleges, those who didn’t have an internship, or people who chose to do all of their schooling rather than work. These types of people could be turned down for roles because of their lack of experience, education credentials, or of voluntary roles.
At ResumeFree™, we understand that it is challenging to assign values to “intangible” characteristics on a resume, such as honesty or approachability. We screen candidates based on 175 behavioural qualities. The questions we ask reveal a candidate’s interpersonal and soft skills – all of the things that are impossible to measure in a resume. This data takes the guesswork out of hiring and gives employers more clarity and oversight throughout the recruitment process.
Empowering Others While Leading
Being a leader very early on in her career, Allie has been managing people for 20 plus years now. Through her journey she has experienced different personalities and different styles of management all the way through. In her opinion, impactful leadership is all about empowering people to make decisions. At ResumeFree™, Allie has a very small team of five people. Even with this size of team, she allows her team to make their own decisions without feeling like they aren’t allowed to fail. She believes that as a leader it is essential to make sure that people are empowered.
A Continual in Growth
After graduating from t h e Wo m e n i n C l o u d M i c r o s o ft Accelerator program, ResumeFree™ has since gone from one or two sales every month to growing monthly recurring revenue including returning clients that see it as being part of their recruitment process. Year over year thus far is 400% growth, and the company still has five months to go. Allie states “We’ve increased our client base five times what it was last year. We’re now listed on Microsoft Appsource and Women in Cloud Marketplace. We’ve gone from servicing one country to four and soon to be six.”
For Allie, the biggest hurdle was to navigate how to sell her product well as there are many different markets she can service. Women In Cloud Accelerator helped her in refining the message and more importantly change it to what resonates with the buyers/clients.
Allie mentions that 2020 was an impactful year, and for her team to share that it can reduce human bias in the screening process to zero was the key for the organization to gaining new contracts.
Allie asserts “As a female founder faced with a wildly unknown year, the support and encouragement of my cohort was absolutely phenomenal. We celebrate each other’s successes and support each other’s businesses.”
Opportunities for Women Entrepreneurs
Allie opines that Fortune 1000 companies will provide opportunities and connections for female founded vendors to have their solutions enter the enterprise marketplace with greater success and traction than before. These companies are striving for the UN Sustainable Development Goals and are
actively putting into practice processes and programs to ensure equitable procurement for all vendors. These companies also have the unique ability to help companies do proof of concept and help define early-stage technology to not only advance their digital transformation within their organization, but also provide the access for these founders who may not have the funding to wholly build out their tech on their own.
Enlightening Emerging Entrepreneurs
In her advice to budding women entrepreneurs, Allie says, “I think there are so many fear-based decisions because we are used to being in our comfort and safety zone. But, I feel you should take that leap of faith and not be afraid to step into something that’s new or foreign or something that you didn’t think that you’d be doing. There are lots of resources out there, just seek and find your community.”
She further adds, “Don’t be afraid that somebody is going to steal that idea. It’s your idea. You bring it to fruition, and then you will get all the accolades for it.”
