Marylene Delbourg-Delphis’ Circle of Talent

Hiring new employees can be a daunting task for all parties involved; the company in need, the recruiter, and the job seeker. How to distinguish oneself amongst the throng of identical, faceless resumes is just as monumental a task as sifting through each resume and determining which ones are applicable. But when it comes to filling new job positions, it is important for the human resources department to remember they are hiring people, not resumes.

“Hire People, Not Resumes” is the motto burgeoning start up, TalentCircles, believes in wholeheartedly, and the most efficient and beneficial way to get to know your candidates on a personal, as well as professional, level is to build relationships with them.

“We are now entering a new relationship-based hiring era,” says Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, co-founder and CEO of TalentCircles. “Building relationships is in the DNA of recruiters. The goal of TalentCircles is to allow recruiters to scale their relationship-building ability.”

And by utilizing social networking capabilities, TalentCircles applies the right technology to not only build and maintain professional relationships, but also allow companies the opportunity to supply people-centric engagement services.

TalentCircles taps into this transformational impact social media has had in social sourcing and recruiting and enables recruiters to optimally execute their staffing plans cost effectively as well as provide candidates what they desperately want: networking opportunities.

Marylene founded TalentCircles, a cloud-based platform that allows companies and recruiters to build, brand, own, and manage their own live talent networks, just eighteen months ago after taking a look at a defunct virtual career fair solution start up. Although a good idea, Marylene saw a hole between sourcing and attraction tools on one side, and applicant tracking systems on the other. Filling that hole meant giving recruiters the ability to retain candidates, engage with them, and create live pipelines of active and passive candidates.

Thus, TalentCircles was born, reconciling technology, recruiting and networking by simulating real life interactions in a virtual setting via video exchanges.

Marylene is no amateur when it comes to spotting industry trends and although the adoption of new products in the HR space tends to be slow, she has already identified how companies are currently redirecting their talent acquisition investments.

When asked about the direction in which the recruiting market is growing, Marylene replies, “Companies are now spending less on job boards and more on improving the productivity of their recruiters, sharpening their employer branding strategy, and building up their pools of passive candidates.”

So how does TalentCircles work, exactly?

You add the TalentCircles button to your “Careers Page” allowing job seekers to join your specific talent network at any time, regardless of whether or not you have a current job for them. Candidates can then instantly create profiles by syncing up their professional information from other social networks to their TalentCircles profile.

Now the fun begins because through each talent network you can set up live online video interviews with candidates, view documents, and take private notes simultaneously. Since TalentCircles is cloud-based, you can share interviews with colleagues and hiring managers to get their feedback, a process that used to require endless phone tags in order to accomplish.

And for highly competitive positions, you can screen large numbers of applicants for skill set and personality fit through recorded questionnaires in which you choose the means of response, whether it’s a video submission, short essay response, or a mix of both.

Once you’ve interviewed as many candidates as needed, the last step is to get an analytical view of each candidate’s performance by generating reports that tally their scores, which, of course, can be shared with hiring managers.

But what sets TalentCircles apart from their competitors is their holistic approach to candidate engagement. Most of their competitors compete with only a part of what they do, such as video interviewing and referral management solutions, or traditional Candidate Relationship Management systems. Companies are just now starting to engage with potential candidates on public social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but these budding relationships tend to fizzle because there is no way to track and save these engagements in the company’s internal records.

By syncing seamlessly with your existing applicant tracking system, TalentCircles provides the missing link between sourcing tools and back-end systems by providing a virtual common space for job candidate and recruiter interaction.

And employees of your company won’t feel left out either, because clients of TalentCircles often create “Employee” circles where employees are empowered to participate in the recruiting process by speaking to candidates during online webinars and posting blog entries about their experiences at the company.

Not only recruiters and job seekers benefit from this now streamlined, people-centric means of hiring, but companies benefit from using TalentCircles, too.

“Right now, companies spend a fortune attracting candidates to their career sites. Then, about 9 out of 10 candidates that arrive at your career site leave without submitting an application form,” reveals Marylene. “Instead of constantly marketing open positions to the outside world, recruiters can search and evaluate candidates that have already opted into their talent pipelines, which in turn drastically reduces sourcing costs for businesses.”

Firms can expand their employer branding strategy with targeted webinars and blog posts that create hype and awareness, they can segment their candidate pool into distinct groups and they can also leverage past interviews and assessments for newly open positions.

With a significant number of costumers, mostly large corporations, in such a short amount of time, Marylene has no intention of relenting the pace in which TalentCircles is flourishing. When asked where she envisions TalentCircles in the next year, she replies straightforwardly that she wants to continue expanding the platform and continue attracting customers.

Develop a solid product. Stay the course. And success will follow.

Of course, being an entrepreneur is hard enough as it is. And being a female entrepreneur in a male dominated industry such as high tech can be even harder. Being a female entrepreneur in high tech business during a time when there weren’t really any female entrepreneurs is unimaginable.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis has been in the industry for decades, and reflects back on those days. “I had to pack my daughter in my suit case,” she laughs.

But even as a serial entrepreneur with decades of successful experience under her belt, and even with a team comprised solely of men working with her at TalentCircles, Marylene can attest to the struggles women must overcome in the start up world.

We all know the story. The last forty years have been rife with feminine empowerment in many aspects, especially in the world of business, at least theoretically. Yes, we are now better represented, particularly considering the demographic shift in higher education in which the male/female ratio on campuses today favors females, yet still, “Sadly, women still encounter sexism, especially from the old guard,” Marylene affirms.

This is especially evident when female entrepreneurs look to raise money for their startups. Marylene says, “Venture Capital firms tend to reproduce old patterns, often influenced by their LPs who feel more comfortable investing in “what they know.” However Marylene sheds light on another challenge; the tendency of young women to allow themselves to be intimidated by older generation female struggles. She agrees with and quotes Gloria Feldt’s book, “No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power.”

“The most confounding problem facing women today is not that doors aren’t open, but that women aren’t walking through the open doors in numbers.”

Even more simply put, there needs to be more women starting businesses everywhere in the world, in every industry. It is, at the end of the day, a numbers game. Over 99% of entrepreneurs who look to seek financing will get rejected, just as over 99% of the men do. But because the number of women starting up businesses is low to begin with, the number that gets funded is miniscule.

Now the establishment of a human resources specific start up like TalentCircles, by a woman, probably seems appropriate to many people. After all, HR has been, somewhat stereotypically, one of the very few female dominated sectors of business, and it’s no secret.

Why is this the case? Theories abound. “It may have to do with the fact that women tend to be good at building relationships. It may also be that HR has attracted more women in corporations because other departments were closed to them,” Marylene suggests reasonably.

While the former is a desirable quality one looks for in an employee, especially in a potential HR employee, the latter is a sad, and, unfortunately, very real possibility. In fact, some people see this female dominance and believe there should be more of a gender balance within the HR division.

To this Marylene retorts, “There could certainly be a better gender balance. [But] if we want an HR field that mirrors the population [it serves], corporations will have to ensure that at least 50% of employees be women and stop the under representation of women in senior positions.”

Well, that sounds like an idea!

But let’s not get too caught up in the never-ending gender discussions. In fact, harping on what’s “fair” and how things “should” be isn’t a productive mentality for young female entrepreneurs, or for any entrepreneur for that matter. The cards are always stacked against you, no matter what gender you are. Instead focus on developing a strong product, find customers who want your product, and the rest will sort itself out.

“ ‘A Players’ tend to be gender agnostic, and what matters to them and to me is what we accomplish,” affirms Marylene.

Spoken like a true philosopher and pragmatic businesswoman.