Matt Morrison initially had ambitions to work in the sports industry. Still, a decade ago, the only true path to getting a foot in the door was lower-level jobs like selling tickets at Minor League Baseball games. Morrison wasn't interested, so instead, he turned to corporate America.
But after 10 years in that space, he's taking the lessons learned in staffing and workforce services jobs and implementing them in the now much-larger sports hiring world.
"A few years ago, I got back in the sports world on the marketing and branding side, and that's when I realized how much it's changed — who is working for the teams, the leagues, gambling, esports — everything completely had changed," he said. "Even for me, it was hard to get an insight. There's like one job board in the industry, and it doesn't give you a lot beyond the job description. Coming from corporate America, I want to know the culture, job growth potential and work-life balance."
He launched Openly HQ in summer 2020, then as a job review site solely for those in the sports industry. Openly asks former employees about various topics, including the company's diversity and inclusion policy, work-life balance and more.
"We launched with this mission of providing transparency in sports, which is through our review platform," he said. "Glassdoor, which would be traditionally used, isn’t used in sports. It's expensive to use, and someone may be the first person to be the social media manager for the [Tampa Bay Buccaneers], for example, so there was no previous person to look at."
The company is based in Tampa and co-founded by Morrison's brother, Kevin Morrison. They are a member of innovation hub Embarc Collective and entirely bootstrapped right now. More than 2,000 users have signed up to join the talent pool alone on the site.
The company has now launched its job posting component, which only posts the top-tier jobs in the industry. Companies can become members of Openly, allowing them to post their company culture information.
"The reality is sports teams have a bit of a different platform; a team may not tweet out an internal initiative about hiring women — in sports, their audience is their fans," Morrison said. "The teams feel they've done a lot of cool internal things with their workforce, but they haven't been able to tell that story. And as they're looking to hire now, they're looking at where the right value and fit is. It's more important than ever."
The next step for the company is to partner with more sports organizations and continue building its base on both sides.
"Now that we have both offerings, we’re really excited to take this tech platform to the market and attract some of the best talent in the industry and bring the mission of bringing open conversations to life," Morrison said. "In Tampa, with the [Tampa Bay] Lightning winning the Stanley Cup and the Bucs winning the Super Bowl, we felt there could be a sports tech ecosystem here. There are organizations in Miami and Orlando, and we feel we can help put Tampa on the map."
