Nolan Church knows how hard it is to find good talent.
“I was the first recruiter and first HR hire at DoorDash, and I had no idea what I was doing,” he says. “I had never built a team before, and I reached out to so many [leaders in the space] asking to take them to coffee and pick their brain, and it just never went anywhere.”
Today, Church is hoping to change that dynamic. As the co-founder and CEO of startup Continuum, he’s aiming to help growing companies access the expert advice they need to more efficiently scale. Rather than spending six months searching for the perfect hire, Continuum enables venture-backed companies to hire “fractional” or part-time executives, many of whom have full-time gigs at such notable brands as Netflix, Tesla and Carta.
“Executive recruiting is essentially stuck in 1985,” Church says. “Recruiters use a rolodex — there’s no technology behind what they’re doing. It’s insane that business is done this way.”
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Continuum’s platform allows interested executives to onboard in fewer than five minutes and create a profile that expresses the ways they want to lend support to a company, whether via angel investing, consulting, advising or even full-time gigs. From there, Continuum matches the executive to a company in need of those services and their specific skill set. As the network and platform grows, so will the data-driven insights of the marketplace, which will drive increasingly successful matches. (Already, their success rate is 90% on the first pairing.
“It’s like Airbnb for executives,” Church says. “It’s like, here are a bunch of great houses, but here’s the one you really want to stay at if you’re looking for a weekend getaway with your significant other.”
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As the battle for talent becomes increasingly competitive, Church says that technology can bridge the gap between companies that desperately need advice from seasoned executives and the leaders who are eager to contribute and share that expertise — but have no way of finding these kinds of side-hustle opportunities.
“So many people are interested in this kind of work but feel like they’re not a self-promoter, or they’re not a loud voice on twitter,” Church says. “They don’t know how to break in to this work even though they just want to put their head down and do the work.”
Executives on the platform set their own fee (with Continuum’s feedback), whether hourly or per project. Currently, nearly 100 leaders are available for hire and 30 companies — most of whom are seeking roughly 15 hours of executive support a week — are using Continuum to connect with talent. And while the program may sound suspiciously like traditional consulting work, Church and his team are betting that real-world experience will create a much larger ROI for companies seeking guidance.
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“Nothing against anybody who works at a McKinsey or Bain or BCG, but candidly, you don’t understand what it’s like to build a company if you’ve never built a company,” Church says. “If you’re going to roll out a giant project like compensation and leveling, you want to talk to someone who’s been in those trenches before, and who’s actually made the mistakes themselves.”
