Theo Margolius is the co-founder and COO of Otta, a job-search platform for tech workers that aims to help candidates and employers find their perfect match. Since its founding in 2019, Otta has raised $23.9 million from a variety of investors, including Tiger Global Management and Founder Collective. We spoke to Margolius about how his platform works, the importance of connecting candidates with employers in a seamless fashion, and the future of HR tech.
What product or service does your company offer?
We’re building a better way to find a job in tech. We are a jobs platform that helps candidates find work at fast-growing, innovative companies, from early-stage startups to large tech companies like Stripe and Spotify…We believe that candidates needed to be put first, and incumbent businesses in the recruitment and career space weren’t doing that. We’ve built a job search that really attracts ambitious job-seekers, and created an even better way for recruiters and hiring managers to find top talent.
What specific issue in HR does your company intend to solve?
We’re trying to raise the bar for how tech companies treat employees in the hiring process and beyond, when they become employees. We promote companies that share salary ranges, we help companies prioritize diversity when they’re hiring, [and] we’re empowering women with knowledge around pay gaps. More immediately, we’re helping tech companies with the struggle to hire great people. Companies currently solve this problem by spending hundreds of thousands of hours sourcing. We believe that that’s an inefficient way of doing it.
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How do you think the HR tech field will evolve over the next five to 10 years?
People are going to be more and more picky about where they want to work. They’ll be prioritizing companies with good values, good benefits, great flexibility, which means that businesses are going to have to work harder and harder to retain and attract the best people. In HR, people are going to have to think about, what is their company’s edge to keep people? Is it having the best compensation? Is it having a really highly diverse team that people want to work around?
How will your company help drive that evolution?
We really help companies to surface important insights and data to help them put their best foot forward. We help companies understand whether their salaries are competitive, and also why salary transparency is important, and why they should lean into that. We can help understand what benefits they need to offer to be best in class, what hybrid setup the best candidates in the market are looking for. All of that stuff just helps companies get smarter on how they hire and retain people, and how they can kind of present themselves to the world.
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