The Tech Connecting Growing Enterprise Teams with Great Job Candidates

Matchmaking isn’t just for dating. It’s also how we buy cars, choose homes, plan vacations, and, ideally, find the right job. For years, platforms like eHarmony have helped people search for that “needle in a haystack.” But until recently, career fairs lacked the technology to offer that same kind of efficient, data-driven matching between jobseekers and employers.

At Web Summit Vancouver — the premier technology conference bringing together founders, investors, media, and policymakers from around the world — Line49 discovered Withe, a hiring event platform to connect qualified candidates with volume-hiring teams. We sat down with CEO + Co-founder, Daniel Shalinsky to learn about this Vancouver startup.

More Frustration Than Opportunity

On February 22, 2024, Toronto Pearson Airport hosted a job fair for 700 positions they needed to fill for the busy spring travel season. The four-hour event featured multiple on-site employers, but dozens of people were turned away before it had ended; some had travelled over two hours to attend.

This lack of efficiency can have a significant impact, particularly on candidates that are navigating growing costs of living.

Daniel Shalinsky

Sadly, the TPA job fair is not a rare occurrence. Poor planning, manual processes, scheduling challenges, lack of up-front information, overloaded recruiters, and long wait times are common issues that frustrate all involved. For candidates who have given up valuable time and leave feeling there’s little chance of a worthwhile outcome, this can even be damaging to the organizer’s reputation.

Recruiters at such free-for-all hiring events can also be challenged by the sheer volume of résumés collected if they are without a clear plan for screening or follow-up. How will organizers know if they have had a successful event without analytics to show who met whom and how many matches were successful?

Career Matchmaking Simplified

When Liam Ross and Daniel Shalinsky saw how volume hiring events were failing, they sought to find a way to tackle the frustrations of both recruiters and candidates. The two Vancouverites launched Withe in 2021 to create a software solution for travel industry companies such as Marriott International, and staffing firms like Trueblue, that hire hundreds of people at the same time.

Withe combines everything into one SaaS platform: registration, ticketing, candidate pre-screening, employer onboarding, and in-event tools like QR-based check-ins and digital résumé capture. Recruiters get an easy-to-use system for talking to candidates during hiring events. Candidates can schedule a call in advance, or join in immediately when the event is live. The system works for virtual, in-person, and hybrid events.

Just over a year ago, Vancouver Startup Week approached Withe to power their job fair. Being a local company, they were encouraged to adapt their platform from its initial single-client setup, to a multi-user system that could accommodate a traditional career expo.

Although their Vancouver Startup Week debut came with a few anxious moments, Shalinsky and Ross received strong feedback from organizer, jobseekers, and employers alike. One of those employers, Northeastern University, was so impressed that they asked Withe to run their campus career fair — an opportunity that helped open the door to the post-secondary and public sector markets.

Proven in Practice

As lost time is never found again, Withe’s holistic approach has provided hiring expo organizers, employers, and candidates with an effective structure to make efficient use of an event’s limited time, whether it is in-person or online.

When employers can pre-screen candidates, capture résumés & notes digitally, and sync everything directly to their applicant tracking system, it frees time to focus on more meaningful interactions with qualified candidates. Ross and Shalinsky have found that Withe can reduce interview times by as much as 82%.

They started to notice using our platform, what students and what programs were getting better results with what companies.

Daniel Shalinsky

Self-service tools for jobseekers improve their chances for employment success by being able to — even before the event — use qualification filters to indicate interest in advance and use Withe’s ticketing system with a virtual queue to minimize idle time. This also helps reduce no-shows.

Corporate, educational, and government organizers are now able to gauge the effectiveness of their event with analytics on candidate sources, show-rate, conversions, and outcome insights. For example, schools that host program-specific career fairs can get a better understanding of which degrees and credentials are translating into job opportunities.

Positioned for a More Agile Hiring Future

With a $1.1 million pre-seed investment led by San Francisco-based Focal, Withe is expanding its technical team and building its roadmap in partnership with their first enterprise customer, U.S. staffing giant, Trueblue.

Their platform’s fast setup and ease-of-use has also demonstrated a capability to respond to sudden shifts in the employment market on short notice. Earlier this year, when Canada was faced with massive tariffs from the United States, the country responded with a Buy Canadian movement.

The resulting surge in demand for Canadian-made goods was anticipated to spur the creation of thousands of jobs that would need to be quickly filled. In response, HireNorth was created on the Withe Career Fair Platform in just days. Their goal is to connect 10,000 Canadian job seekers — through 50 job fairs in partnership with 100 Canadian community organizations — to prioritize local hiring.

Another anticipated boost to Canada’s job market is the federal government’s Build Canada Homes program, which aims to double annual housing construction to nearly 500,000 units. Achieving that target will require a significant increase in construction labour. Withe is exactly the kind of homegrown technology that can help mobilize and match that workforce quickly and efficiently.

Connect to Withe at:
https://withe.co
oc.ehtiwobfsctd-615d08@olleh