Talking CV-free hiring with Fluttr CEO Amleto Montinari
In this brand new edition of Barna Hub, we sat down with Amleto Montinari, CEO and Co-Founder at Fluttr to chat about a whole new way of hiring that doesn’t involve CVs.
The pivotal idea behind Fluttr is that people are more than just CVs – and this is something that companies need to realise. Since about 85% of CVs lie about the actual skills a candidate possesses, companies often end up hiring the wrong people.
According to the data collected by Fluttr, 45% of the best-looking CVs are submitted by candidates who are not qualified for the role. This means that a large percentage of qualified candidates are rejected at the first screening and candidates that aren’t qualified slip through, resulting in lots of wasted time and unmet expectations.
Fluttr offers companies a way to get rid of bias while testing candidates on their skills with the help of challenges/tests built into their platform. Amleto shared with us exactly how this works and why they’ve had so much success with clients like Badi, Meller and Asics.
140 character pitch:
Fluttr is a digital hiring platform that helps companies identify the right candidates and assess them based on their skills, not on their CVs.
Down to business
How is Fluttr different from other recruitment apps?
Fluttr is essentially an applicant assessment system: it recommends candidates to companies based on their skills and their motivation. It’s a data-based, bias-free approach that can open completely new horizons for companies and for candidates highlighting who are the ones that will do a great job independently of their CVs.
Why do companies and candidates love it?
HR Managers find it very useful because it liberates them from having to rely so heavily on CVs and pre-screening calls. Asking candidates to complete a test/job simulation in the early stages of a recruitment process serves as a great filter to rule out those who are not committed or skilled enough. Fluttr makes testing candidates so simple that we’ve started seeing companies who use Fluttr turn their entire recruitment process upside down: the technical challenge, which used to be one of the last steps in the process, has replaced the CV screening as the first step.
Hiring teams love the platform because it recommends (based on the data collected through our platform) candidates that are right for the position, automates the candidate testing process and makes evaluating responses very easy and collaborative, while removing completely the bias element. And it saves them a lot of time because they don’t have to create a challenge from scratch every time: there are templates for test in Fluttr that they can customize to their needs.
And candidates love it because it gives them the opportunity to show their skills. If they’ve completed a challenge but they didn’t get hired, they can use their scores right away; and, in the future, if they didn’t do well, they will be able to see the (anonymous) results of other candidates, learn from them and improve their skills. So it comes full circle. Moreover, for candidates, Fluttr is always 100% free.
What is your big dream for Fluttr? How will it change recruitment?
We want to empower companies to understand far more easily and quickly who the right candidates are in an objective, more transparent and empathic way, help them look beyond the CV and hire people for what they can do, not for how their CV or how they look like.
As an entrepreneur, what are your favourite online tools or resources that you use on a daily basis?
I guess the usual suspects: Slack, Asana, InVision, Trello, Google Maps and my favourite one is Google Calendar. Other than that, I think for collaboration, Google Docs is a great tool, but Google Sheets cannot compete with Excel. I’d love to find a great tool to facilitate all admin tasks in the company. I tried a few, but nothing has really impressed me so far.
Barcelona insight
What are the advantages of being in Barcelona for a startup? What opportunities has it given you?
Apart from being an amazing place to live, Barcelona offers a great community and a lot of support to startups, through events like 4YFN and organizations like Barcelona Activa. In our case, we’ve been able to hire great talent ( we now have a team of 10 people), and being here has given us many opportunities.
We were one of the finalists at the GSMA Women4Tech Hack_D_Gap Global Challenge at 4YFN 2018, and, in October 2018, we won, together with LaGroc, the d-lab Award for empowering women in technology. There’s an ongoing project we are running right now that will be presented at the Mobile World Capital 2020. Through Fluttr, we will help women applying for tech roles to be mentored by senior tech people for hard skills but also for soft skills, thus facilitating them to find a tech job more easily.
How about some of the drawbacks?
It depends on what kind of business you’re in, but for us, one of the main challenges has been that Fluttr is a freemium service, and we’ve found that investors here are not that familiar with that model and they’re not willing to bet on it, as it seems that revenue is the only thing that matters. As far as I know, the only SaaS startup in Barcelona that works on a real freemium basis is Typeform, so we don’t yet have the precedent that other startup hubs have where it’s more common to offer freemium services.
What are your favourite startup events in Barcelona? Fluttr has the reputation of being a great event host!
On a monthly basis, we run an event to talk about best practices to assess candidates and share common experiences with hiring managers and HR managers. We generally have a famous guest or company coming and talking to them with the idea to have a pretty open debate.
Lately, unfortunately, I have little time for events. When I can, I try to attend for example “Negative churn” by K-Fund, Startup Grind, Drinkepreneurs and MeltinLab (this last one generally happens once or twice a year). The city is full of incredible events, I am sure I am missing some other great ones.
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