Even before the Great Resignation, the Great Reshuffle and the current labor shortage, Wizehire was helping people both find jobs and fill jobs. The company was founded in 2014 by Sid Upadhyay (CEO), Nick Carneiro (chief technology officer) and Jay Niblick (chief strategy officer). “Wizehire marries the software with the support in a way not anyone else does” in the industry, said VP of Marketing Carmen Bryant.
“When we first came to the States, we lived in this beautiful small town in the state of Washington and we ran one of our family’s hotels,” Upadhyay said. “It was a tourist town and you would have high season and low season, you would staff up with part-time people in the summer. The ebb and flow was just something you had to manage. The inspiration of Wizehire comes from solving it for one person, stepping back and realizing ‘wow, there are millions of small businesses that need this.’”
According to data compiled by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published in September, leisure and hospitality lost 1 million workers in March, but 1.1 million people were hired into the industry that same month. Companies are hiring and people are job-hunting, but traditional job boards seldom yield the results anyone is looking for. Wizehire is changing that by creating a standard process to take the guesswork out of the search.
On the hiring side, “the platform is designed to be already built and created for you,” Bryant explained. Wizehire offers more than 350 optimized, industry-specific job templates that can easily be customized based on nuances of the role. Coaches advise on the finer details like job title, salary range and screening questions, and once the posting is finalized, Wizehire posts the open role to more than 100 job boards including Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter and Google.
“Coaches are instrumental to the rest of the business. They really understand the pain points and can advocate for the individual customer and the industry overall,” Bryant said, noting that it was critical to the co-founders that humans were kept in the mix, to ensure there’s always someone there to answer questions. Of the 130 total company team members, 20 are coaches.
Bryant noted that the company is very collaborative, and insights that come from sales and product engineering often inform coaches, in addition to providing support and advice from their own earned experience.
Three service levels provide solutions at scale for business owners, who may be hiring one or two employees a year or contending with always-on, complex hiring needs or hard-to-fill roles. Beyond finding the right hire for a business, Wizehire’s back-office functions include document background checks, esign capabilities, onboarding new team members, payroll integration and personality assessment.
Those on both sides of the industry feel the effects of the current labor market, but the Wizehire team sees the company as uniquely equipped to address the challenges of those in a position to hire.
“We experience the labor shortage in the hospitality space as travelers,” Bryant said. “How you manage the customer experience has to happen within the context of a job description; it must be both accurate and aspirational. The power of the job description cannot be underestimated.”
Approaching its 10-year anniversary, Wizehire continues to innovate. The back-office solutions in Onboarding and Beyond were launched in mid-September, and the Wizehire Connect community will launch this quarter. Wizehire Academy, offering on-demand content and learning modules, will also launch in the fourth quarter.
“We can help you become a pro or work with a pro,” Bryant said. “Regardless, you’ll be able to hire with a lot of confidence.”
Clicking with Clients
A people-first approach to business has helped Wizehire’s stats skyrocket. In nine years, the platform has:
- Helped 18,000 businesses.
- Delivered 5.3 million applications.
- Scheduled 330,000 interviews.
In the accommodations sector specifically, Wizehire has:
- Received 350,000 applications to accommodations jobs posted on the platform.
- Attracted applicants to 91 percent of accommodations jobs within 48 hours of posting.
- Scheduled more than 20,000 interviews.
Logic in Logistics
Wizehire currently serves 10 industries: accommodations, automotive, dental, fitness, food services, home services, insurance, legal, mortgage and real estate. The company provides a full suite of evaluation tools, including smart screening to match the right questions with the unique requirements of the role, using the DISC+ personality assessment and interview guides. Wizehire coaches—some are gereralists, while others have experience in specific industries—work with clients to optimize the recruitment approach by: ensuring the quality of the job-post content, sharing local job-market insights, monitoring job-posting performance (keeping it at the top of job-board visibility) and providing personalized support via on-demand via chat, video, phone or email.