With Altru, Companies Leverage Employee Storytelling To Attract Top Talent

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The war for top talent coming out of colleges or poaching from other companies increases unabatedly. When compensation and perks aren't enough to get a prime prospective candidate to sign the dotted line, culture is the final selling point for any employer. Alykhan Rehmatullah and Vincent Polidoro discovered an opportunity to augment companies’ recruiting tactics and founded Altru. Altru is a talent acquisition startup creating storytelling tools for employees to bolster the firm's recruitment efforts. The New York City-based startup has raised $1.3 million from Birchmere Ventures, Active Capital, and Techstars.

Frederick Daso: Why would companies trust their employees to make user-generated content as job advertisements? Wouldn't companies risk presenting an unpolished image to prospective candidates?

Alykhan Rehmatullah: The space has matured. The professional "TV commercials" that companies once used to promote their employer brand no longer resonate with candidates. A study from LinkedIn found that candidates trust employees three times more than the company to provide credible information. Through Altru's software, companies can tap into authentic stories from their employees, but also edit and approve the content to maintain their brand strategy. It's an advantage that it isn't as polished, candidates resonate more with this content. The risk is producing inauthentic, professional content that doesn't scale and doesn't attract candidates, which limits companies from hitting their hiring goals. 60+ Fortune 500 companies use Altru today.

The consumer advertising industry benefited from user-generated content (UGC) through influencer marketing, talent acquisition (TA) teams are taking a similar approach through Altru and their employees.

Daso: How are marketing departments involved in shaping the image of the company relies on its employees on for producing the content?

Rehmatullah: Part of Altru's Software is our 'Lab', which is effectively a lightweight production studio that allows marketing teams to edit and brand the content. They can add logos, images, text, closed captions, etc. You'll see it midway through the video overview I created.

Daso: What are some of the factors driving growth in the talent acquisition/recruiting space? Have companies marketing budgets become limited, thus encouraging a need for relying on their employees?

Rehmatullah: TA has focused on personalizing the candidate experience. Content for your engineering candidates looks a lot different than content for your sales candidates. The same can be said for global organizations that need localized content. A focus on authentic content that is captured through software allows companies to scale and personalize their delivery to candidates.

Daso: What was the motivation from pivoting from Goldman Sachs to starting Altru? Did you observe something lacking in the bulge bracket banks recruiting that other companies also require in how they attract talent?

Rehmatullah: I was a liberal arts major from a state school, I didn't belong at Goldman. But the way I got into Goldman was through advice from a few people in my network that worked there. They taught me how to prep for the interview, I learned about the company culture, and these insights helped me position myself effectively. When I was at Goldman, I found myself on the other side, advising candidates. But most candidates don't have an organic network. So we initially built Altru as a platform where candidates could seek advice from employees, and it's grown to become a core part of a company's brand strategy.

Daso: How does your cofounder use his prior experience as a founder to grow Altru using the best available practices?

Rehmatullah: Vincent's previous company was also a B2B Enterprise company. He has a unique ability to communicate complex technical components in a simple manner, it's invaluable to our clients. After all, we've been through personally and professionally, I fully trust him, and I know the feeling is mutual. Without that, we wouldn't have achieved what we have thus far, and our ceiling would be much lower.

Vincent is the epitome of having "strong beliefs, loosely held." When we come to the table with differing opinions on a product idea, or even a candidate to hire, we put our conversation on pause, and set up time to meet again and debate the opposing view. It allows us to invest in understanding the other perspective, which leads to a better decision. We're both bought into getting it right instead of being right. These are all qualities he's brought to the team based on his experience.

Daso: What was your process to design Altru for users to create high-quality content without significant effort on their end? How did you codify best practices for filming?

Rehmatullah: Candidly, we looked at a lot of video production processes, and we thought about how to productize them. For example, companies usually send a film crew out so they can instruct employees on simple behaviors like how to sit/position themselves. We created video overlay templates that superimposed on the camera functionality of our mobile app, so the employee could adequately position themselves.

Additionally, in professional video production, these film crews also guide the employee on what to say or potentially use a script. To mimic this behavior, we added coaching features like instructions or a talk track within our application, so employees could benefit from guidance, but also maintain the authenticity of their story.

Daso: How did you figure out the distribution of the user-generated content after it's created? What were the primary factors in also building functionality to host a company's UGC via an interactive video card found on their website?

Rehmatullah: We listened to our clients. After speaking with leaders in our space, we understood that there are four primary distribution channels where our clients need to communicate with candidates: Company Careers Site, Job Descriptions, Email/CRM, and Social Media. The second layer was that it was essential to programmatically map the videos to specific pages, job descriptions, and campaigns, to personalize the experience. For example, we need an Engineering video to show on an Engineering Job Description, not a Sales Job Description. We implemented JavaScript plugins and API calls and integrated our product with third party career sites and CRMs to make programmatic mapping possible.

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