As a former head of marketing and recruiting innovation for Allegis Global Solutions and founder of his own recruiting and marketing firm TalentNet Media, Craig Fisher knows a thing or two about what employers are looking for when hiring tech talent.
Now, he’s taking that expertise to a new position as the new CEO of Knack.io, a Dallas-based personalized job board startup created “by engineers for engineers.” He took over the position earlier this month from Knack.io Co-founder and former CEO Leroy Ware, who is now taking on the role of chief technology officer at the company.
“I’ve been a change agent in the recruiting industry for a long time. I am an advocate for disruption. This industry is ripe for it and the way we’ve done things for a long time with very old and stubborn HR systems and really bad job descriptions… needs to be disrupted,” Fisher told NTX Inno. “That’s what I like to do, that’s what I’m known for and I’m just excited to have a great team like Knack to help me do it.”
Knack.io was founded in 2018 to streamline the hiring process for engineers. Since then, it has added several thousand users to its platform. And that’s before its official launch at the beginning of next year, when Knack.io plans to release its 2.0 version.
Rather than searching through messages on other job boards or via email, where actual recruiting messages can get mixed with spam, Knack.io allows engineers to set up their personalized page, adding search filters that allow them to focus on only jobs they’re interested in. Knack.io’s software then scrapes websites, job boards, social media and other places to match employee and employer.
“It’s almost like a lightweight dating app where the profiles on both sides are really good and really well matched,” Fisher said.
Fisher takes over leadership of Knack.io as its 12-person team works remotely amid the pandemic. However, as tech workers themselves, Fisher said development of its platform has not been affected since they’re used to working collaboratively online. And through it, Fisher said his leadership style has remained focused on listening and guiding, while giving the team the freedom to do what they’re best at.
“For those us who worked from home so often… this is all second nature,” Fisher said. “So I’m not the type of person who feels the need to sit at someone’s desk in order to watch them work.”
While having little impact on Knack.io, the pandemic is reshaping the recruiting industry, Fisher said. With groups of tech talent leaving costal hubs, Fisher said flexibility and safety will be key for companies looking to hire that talent. It’s something a number of local companies like Bottle Rocket and Asset Panda that have been testing that out with work-from-wherever models.
“For the engineers, this is a great blessing,” Fisher said. “I think this will take the place of a lot of the ways a lot of people use LinkedIn and other systems of record for recruiting, because it’s nimble, it’s very mobile, it’s a way that recruiters can keep all of their databases of candidates… in one place and intelligently say real quickly, “Who are my great devops people that might be available right now?”
Knack.io is already profitable, via a subscription model for individual recruiters and hiring managers. As it looks to grow, Fisher said he sees integrations with larger technology players on the horizon. He also said, with the success the company has seen so far, he expects acquisition offers within its first couple years.
“There are lots and lots and lots of pretty good recruitment technology apps and services that are out there that are just completely unknown because they get mired in the startup end of the HR technology conference trade floor, and they’re not doing their brand amplification properly. Knack is not going to have that problem,” Fisher said. “We will absolutely be seen, shown and known broadly. We just have to ensure that we're able to develop and keep the promises that we make to ourselves and our customers in a quickly and efficiently turnaround-able way.”
