We were lucky to catch up with Andrea Guendelman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Andrea, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

Many of the HR tech heavyweights (think LinkedIn) help companies build bigger hiring pipelines. But the pipelines still leak. In fact, bigger pipelines may leak more. In other words, companies lose a high percentage of very talented candidates who just drop out of the process. This costs companies tremendous resources: money, staff time, and, worst of all, the opportunity costs of lost talent that will never contribute to the team.

Speak helps companies build hiring processes where talented candidates “stick.” We do this by making a company’s hiring process more transparent. Candidates understand what companies value, what they are looking for, and what to expect in the hiring process. This transparency reduces the number of candidates who drop out of hiring out of confusion or frustration. Greater transparency both allows a company’s values to shine through – building candidate affinity for a company – and enables candidates to display their true talents without having to navigate the learning the rules to the game.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Speak helps make hiring processes less leaky and helps talented candidates “stick.” This makes a company’s hiring process both more efficient – our product improves applicant to offer to acceptance ratios – and more effective – maximizing the number of talented candidates who accept offers and are ready to contribute to a team on day one.

We do this through making the hiring process more transparent. Transparency helps candidates understand a company, including its values and the value proposition of working there. This builds candidate affinity for a company, which means talent is more likely to persevere through a demanding hiring process. Transparency facilitates better matches between company and talent.

I co-founded Speak out of my personal experience with being mystified by the hiring process in the legal field. I came to the United States from Chile. Despite getting a degree from Harvard Law (followed later by an MBA from MIT), I did not understand the hiring process for major law firms and in-house lawyer positions. Only when a special someone in my life took the time to decode what was happening in the interview game did I enjoy success. That searing experience taught me that talented folks can fall through the cracks in the hiring pipeline when they lack the knowledge and social capital to understand how to find the right employer, what the employer is looking for, and how to display their best qualities.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The hardest lesson to unlearn is that in HR tech a product can’t just work for one stage of the labor market cycle. It has to create value for companies and candidates in all stages of the cycle.

HR tech products must grapple with the fact that hiring platforms are a two-sided market. But this two sided market can swing wildly from a seller’s to a buyer’s market. During hiring booms, candidates can be very choosey and companies become desperate for talent. Roles reverse in hiring downturns, with candidates lining up for interviews but companies becoming less interested.

Speak provides a product that seeks to provide more efficient and effective hiring no matter where we are in a labor market cycle. Rather than scrounge for candidates in a tight labor market or plead for companies to hire during a downturn, Speak simply aims to make hiring processes more transparent and thus more effective and efficient.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

We offer both companies and candidates a product that makes hiring more transparent and thus more effective. This works to attract the best companies and candidates to our platform.

Transparency allows companies to display their values and their value proposition to prospective team members. This transparency resonates with a work force that increasingly values candor and authenticity from companies. At the same time, our product helps companies track engagement with talent and better evaluate candidates.

Many businesses think about hiring as if they were a highly selective college conducting admissions. They emphasize the selectivity, the elite feeling, and
the mystique. Those elements work well, but not in isolation; they lack some of the other critical ingredients that make college recruiting successful.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://speak.careers/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-guendelman-78b32643/
• Twitter: @futureofwomen

Image Credits
Jimena Peck