During their Pre-Seed stage, Kinetic Eye had just brought on their CTO and COO. Founder and CEO Josh Butler wanted to take his team of five and grow a robust product design team and engineering team throughout mid-2020.
As the head of a company undergoing rapid growth, he needed to delegate the hiring process instead of having to own everything himself. Josh also recognized the need to go beyond reaching out to personal contacts and having a system to bring in the best talent.
"There’s a time when you have to get past the phase where you’re hiring because you know someone or you get along with them, or you have a relationship. You really just need to have a repeatable process that can scale"
By then, Kinetic Eye already had a lineup of seasoned industry professionals. But because of their background of having worked within organizations with established recruitment processes, they did not have experience hiring people and building teams of their own.
Kinetic Eye needed to invest in people who were going to become future leaders within the organization. They decided to work with Atlas One because of the recruitment expertise and the organizational development support they would bring to the company.
According to Josh,
"The strategy for sequentially bringing people on with different capabilities – it requires a lot of forethought. Frankly, it’s the kind of experience that Mikko, Jessie, and the Atlas One team brings . . . Making sure that you’re hiring the right mix so that you can fill out the organization in a smart way over time."
During the initial intake meeting, the Atlas One talent partners discussed the hiring process and created the ideal candidate profile for Kinetic Eye. Weekly calibration meetings were also established to ensure that all stakeholders were kept up to date with the recruitment efforts and to prioritize continued progress.
As Josh notes,
“I think Atlas One was really effective at setting expectations and unblocking the process when we needed input from Michael (the hiring manager) and other stakeholders."
Employee diversity was also an area that Kinetic Eye recognized they had to focus on:
“It was something we always talked about and wanted to solve, but never really had a great way to until we started working with Atlas One."
So far, Kinetic Eye has hired their first female Computer Vision Engineer and an Interaction Designer through Atlas One. The Interaction Designer was a particularly valuable find for the company because of his technical experience in their target industry.
“It’s made our product development process supercharged!” Josh adds, “We actually found an interaction designer who was already super deep in the domain that they are designing for. I think we found a diamond in the rough here that I never would have expected."
As a founder, he also appreciated how the Atlas One subscription pricing model fit his needs:
““I think the subscription is great. It makes it so that there’s a deeper relationship than just ‘All right, candidate placed. Moving on.’ I felt like it made it pretty easy to pull the trigger as a customer. It’s a pretty founder-friendly or customer-friendly pricing model.”
Now, Josh can focus on making long-term strategic decisions for his company, assured that there’s a standardized hiring process across the board to support their growth.
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