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Elevator — Any team can be acquihired
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@mikebronfman Thanks! I'm in awe of what our brand, creative, and marketing folks are able to accomplish.
Really smart idea and concept. Would love to get @mikeyanderson in here to answer some questions on why he decided to tackle this problem.
@blendahtom Hi there, my name's Mike and I'm the CEO at Elevator. I'm happy to answer any questions at all. To give some background Elevator comes out of a conviction that team is everything. We've seen it again and again that the folks who get to do the most interesting and impactful work are those who build and maintain great teams. I'd love to answer any questions you may have.
@mikeyanderson Give us the background of this concept and why this approach is better for recruiting.
@blendahtom certainly. Every company is trying to build high functioning teams, yet the way we hire is one by one. Currently the only way to get a full team is an acquihire—which can cost upwards of $1.5mil per engineer. Additionally, a person's team is the most valuable thing they have—they can tackle tougher problems, round out each other's weaknesses, and push each other to succeed. If you look at any fast growing company this is already happening—its just a manual process in which a recruiting team will spend a ton of time and money to attract key talent and then work over the following years to attract the team. Why not make it simple and let teams nominate themselves? It will save massive amounts of time and money for companies, get high functioning teams moving on projects quickly, and let people build and grow their team over time.
I did some customer development interviews for this concept before. I found that hiring companies loved the idea, however their process is still like hiring a bunch of individuals anyways (eg: individual interviews). The talent side was not really excited by it. While you do have an amazingly inspirational video, the reality is that acquihire is considered a final consolation prize option that they'd like to avoid. Also, quality talent didn't have a problem finding their next role. How is this different from ExitRound where acquihires have been done before? With ExitRound you still have the potential to be acquired for more than just talent.
@mikeyanderson Can teams apply for certain jobs or is it solely up to the company's digression to reach out to the potential team?
@dgreenstein1 Since companies don't yet post team job reqs, it's not as easy as just applying. We have partners that we're working with initially to place the first teams, and we'll continue growing that until there are lots of options.
Really cool idea, definitely going to be a challenge to get the perfect team/company match but hope you pull it off!
hey @mikeyanderson, glad I got to see this pre-release. Love the concept...huge potential for this.
A similar idea has crossed my mind - albeit not for employment - but for freelancing.
I think freelancing is more suitable when grouping as a team, mainly for contractual reason.
the 2 big isssues for me are:
1. For the hiring company - contracts are still individual - or are they paying the whole team and the team decides how to split it? is there even such a thing an employment contract for a team? surely each person needs his own contract.
2. What happens when you hire a team and one of the team members wants to quit? is it all or nothing re. team members?
I think there's a big potential in the 'Team workers' area, but it is uncharted territories.
@danr_4 great questions. We agree that the contracting side is interesting, in the future we may explore it. Contracts are all one by one. This actually happens fairly often, manually—I wrote a detailed blog post about how it works with some examples here: http://blog.goelevator.com/devel...
This is great! Echo the freelancer thoughts, having a collective of awesome people who can work on projects.
I think this is a really great idea. Looking forward to watching @ravigrover and team do amazing things with it!
Here are some examples of this type of hiring happening manually (from: http://blog.goelevator.com/devel...):
Shane Becker, for instance, put his product dream team of 5 on the market. They all made the switch to a new company in roughly one month. (http://veganstraightedge.com/art...)
Ryan Davis did the same with his team. (http://blog.zenspider.com/blog/2...)
When Adel Smee’s employer went belly up, she wasn’t ready to leave the amazing team she built, so they put the whole team on the market. (http://chocolatetin.org/2015/09/...)
Laszlo Block, Google’s CPO, wrote “Sometimes, though, we just hear about extraordinary people and do whatever it takes to get them, even if it means hiring entire teams and opening up offices for them.” pp 85 Work Rules!
@m3tthew It's from beliefagency.com that's the company that I co-founded before Elevator :) I'm sure they'd love to talk.
@mikeyanderson @m3tthew the video animation is absolutely stunning! great product; awesome concept and a superb delivery. 💁
@drjoelpalath I would say a bad fit. We'll help teams negotiate on fit, compensation, and/or any factors the team finds important in their next project.
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