Click here to hear Chris Motley’s interview with KMOX Radio’s Charlie Brennan from Tuesday, April 15
The story is true, and it goes something like this:
A hiring manager at a local firm laments to his company’s leadership team, “We reach out to young potential new hires. We wine and dine them. We talk about the stability of the company. We talk about our great salaries. We show them our medical plan, pension plan and 401k. And at the end of the process, they don’t want to work for us. I just don’t understand.”
What that hiring manager didn’t understand is that to today’s millennials , roughly those people born between 1977 and 1997, culture is key when it comes to employment.
Chris Motley, the founder of founder and CEO of St. Louis startup Better Weekdays, is not only aware of the trend. He’s built his company around it.
Founded in 2011, Better Weekdays helps prospective employees find jobs at companies based on the cultural compatibility of the two.
For now, Motley says Better Weekdays is concentrating on linking millennials, “the fastest growing worker segment” with fast-growing midsized companies – those companies with between 50 million and a billion dollars per year in revenue, “because for those companies, hiring is often a ‘hair-on-fire’ process.”
The Better Weekdays process begins with Motley’s company performing a culture assessment of a firm – an online survey of all company employees – that measures those employees’ strengths, opportunities for growth, leadership potential and other attributes. The online assessment produces a ten-page snapshot of the company’s culture.
The Better Weekdays technology is then used to reveal what prospective employees are seeking in a job, and matches them with companies that are a good fit.
Better Weekdays charges companies a monthly subscription based on the number of employees the company anticipates hiring. Job seekers can add their names to the Better Weekdays prospective employee data base for free, for a basic service, or for up to $99 dollars for a more enhanced service.
“We work very closely with universities to offer our platform at no cost to the school,” says Motley. “The universities market the services to their students and alumni.”
Motley sees Better Weekdays as providing hope to college students entering the workforce without a pre-professional degree. “Typically,” he says “those students who graduate with a degree in English or History would find it difficult to connect with an actual job. It’s hard to translate what you’ve learned into how you would get work done in a job environment. Our process helps you articulate that.”
Motley should know. “I graduated with a history degree and became a trader at Goldman Sachs.”
Better Weekdays was among the five startups accepted into this year’s Capital Innovators accelerator program, receiving a $50,000 investment from Capital Innovators in exchange for an equity stake in the company. Better Weekdays moved it’s operations to St. Louis from Chicago.
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