This post is part of a series profiling 17 ventures who participated in the first-ever accelerator dedicated to leveraging market forces and public-private partnerships to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
While many qualified professionals desperately want to make an impact with their careers, they don’t know where to begin looking for the companies that sit at the intersection of profit and purpose. Similarly, these companies struggle to find and connect with the candidates they need in order to build teams capable of scaling massive and measurable impact.
Evan Walden and Raul San Narciso co-founded Monday, an impact-driven hiring platform, to bridge this gap between social impact companies and the vast, untapped pool of talented candidates in search of meaningful work. The platform enables companies to showcase their mission to applicants who are looking for work that matters, and then facilitates introductions through a unique internal referral process that leverages the trust intrinsic to relationships contained within each company’s network.
It is a triple win of the too-good-to-be-true genre, an exceedingly simple solution that hints at a new era of hiring in which companies build stronger organizations, faster; candidates find their dream jobs; and the resulting teams are better equipped to impact the great challenges of our time.
Read the full Q&A below:
What inspired you to start Monday?
EW: I spent the last five years running a recruiting business that focused on helping companies hire mission-driven talent. I was shocked to learn how much money and time is spent on recruiting, only to come up with lackluster candidates that don’t fit the company’s needs.
We noticed that the best candidates were always discovered through referrals from people who understood the core mission of the business, but that companies weren’t doing a great job leveraging their networks to help them hire, or with telling their story about why their unique mission was so important.
Every company exists in an ecosystem of brand advocates, investors, team members, and customers who are rooting for their success. We noticed that when a company can effectively leverage this extended network, they spend less money, and hire better people faster.
RSN: We wanted to provide a platform that made it easy for mission-driven companies to showcase why working at their company matters, giving an unfair talent advantage to the companies that our society needs most.
How is Monday different from other hiring services?
EW: The internet is littered with tools promising to help you find better people faster, but most of them turn up unqualified applicants that waste time and don’t convert into hires.
Monday helps companies tap into their extended network by identifying advocates that have a vested interest in the company’s success, like investors, partners, employees, and customers, and making it easy for them to refer exceptional professionals in their network.
Referred candidates from sources like these are 10 times more likely to get hired, and three times more likely to stick around once they get the job.
RSN: The people within a company’s network who make the best referrals also happen to be some of the busiest people in the world. When designing the product, we knew it would be critical to make sure they didn’t have to change their behavior to use it. For example, you don’t have to create an account to make a referral — you just cc Monday on an email, and we take it from there.
For the job seeker, often times it feels like there’s an ocean of possible opportunities, but finding the ones that align with your values is seemingly impossible. To solve for this, we tag every company with the SDG they’re working to solve, and allow job seekers to set alerts for companies they’re interested in, in case future job posts match their profile.
So far, thousands of professionals have been matched to over 2,000 companies and more than 50,000 open jobs that we’ve hand curated with our network of partners.
Why should mission-driven entrepreneurs work with Monday?
EW: Hiring the right team is the biggest investment a company will ever make. Entrepreneurs know how costly it is to make the wrong hire, and they’re under constant pressure to get it right.
Companies with an authentic mission beyond profit have a powerful differentiator when it comes to hiring.
We’re a beacon for job seekers who are looking for more meaning in their work. This means that companies with a clear story about their impact end up finding people on Monday who are far more mission-aligned than candidates who may come through broader channels, like LinkedIn or Indeed.
What do you want the world to look like as a result of your work?
RSN: I want to live in a world where more people get to experience the feeling of doing work that matters to them, and today, there’s no efficient system to help people with that process. There’s a correlation between an individual’s connection to a company’s deeper mission, and an increase in day-to-day engagement at work, which is why we’ve chosen to focus on companies working on global-scale problems, like the SDGs.
More people loving their days, creating wealth for themselves by working at a company with a strong mission; that is what fires me up the most.
EW: A Gallup study recently polled thousands of members of the global workforce and found that 73 percent of people are disengaged every day when they go to work.
We believe it’s possible to flip that statistic by making it easier for the right people and companies to find each other. By building a system that depends on the strength of interpersonal connection, we will eliminate noise in the hiring process for companies, and increase the likelihood that people find the right job at the right time.
People want to feel that their work matters; that they’re involved in building something greater than themselves. If we can help talented people find values-aligned work at companies doing good in the world, then we’ll have succeeded.
