From Humble Beginnings to Talent Powerhouse

I’m sure you’re aware you can find just about anything you could possibly imagine on Craigslist, but I doubt Talentcare Founder, Eric Smith, would have ever imagined he would find his co-founder on the site. In 2013, Eric had the idea for a new company in the talent and recruiting space. His first order of business was to hire a recruiter to help him get the company started, and thanks to Craigslist, he connected with his future co-founder, Jeremy James. Their first coffee shop chat revealed a variety of shortcomings in the recruiting industry and together they decided they were going to tackle the industries’ biggest issues and challenge all of the norms. The rest is history.

What’s Most Obvious is Often Hardest to See

Ask any company and they will tell you that they want to attract and keep the most talented employees (obviously), but if you ask them what steps they are taking to actually achieve this, they might not have an answer for you. Talentcare knew that these companies desperately needed to solve this problem and set themselves up for success.

• Most companies have a great story about what it’s like to work there. Appallingly few tell that story in the places candidates look for work.
• Recruiting for frontline positions is ineffective: systems are broken, business models are broken. For example, most nursing homes have given up on reducing turnover (and the high cost of it) and just figure it’s the “cost of doing business.”
• Too many HR Managers are stuck trying to decipher what action to take from a time-to-fill metric. When you don’t know what caused the delay, how do you know what to fix?
• Recruiting companies are easily started but difficult to scale. This is why there are lots of contingency recruiting firms, but few that have staying power. Staying power comes from having value beyond “one more resume.”

A New Vision For Recruiting

For the first three years, Talentcare focused on the healthcare industry. Companies were expanding, transitioning to digital records and needed the best talent and personalities for their open positions. Talentcare tackled these problems differently and became known as the “non-recruiter recruiters.” Later, Talentcare was able to provide branding, data, accountability, a sophisticated applicant tracking system and a trackable and repeatable process. With these problem-solving capabilities, Talentcare expanded their client base well beyond the healthcare industry. The data and analytics tools put critical information directly in the hands of clients. Clients could clearly see ROI for every dollar spent on job ads, not only on candidate volume, but on successful hires. They had access to retention rate information, turnover data and branded client websites. The forward-thinking tools clients needed to optimize every part of the recruiting process were no longer a dream, but were attainable with Talentcare.

We Never Saw This Coming

Since 2013, Talentcare’s employee base has grown to a team of problem solvers that share the same spirit of moving quickly, adapting, and then applying learnings to the benefit of the next customer. We are different and we are proud of that. We continually get referred by our clients into wildly innovative companies. We’ve been invited as keynote speakers and educators at conferences with thousands of attendees. National publications reach out to us for industry insights and lean on us for a better understanding of the state of the job market. And we love it! Who would have thought that a Craigslist ad would have led to this?