Meet Gaggle Social, Startups of the Year in Winner Frisco, TX

This interview series celebrates all the phenomenal Startups of the Year Winners. Congratulations! Well-Deserved, Champion. The HackerNoon community is excited to learn more about you!

What does it mean for you to win this title?

Winning this title means a lot to the team at Gaggle Social! As a very young startup, to see that so many people believe in our mission and vision is truly incredible, highly motivating, and very validating. A lot of hard work and late nights have been put into Gaggle Social and to see that it’s recognized pushes us to want to do more.

What sets you apart from the competition?

Gaggle Social is a professional social network & hiring platform designed entirely for enterprise tech. Our hyper-segmented, freemium suite of solutions eliminates the major hurdles that HR & IT leaders struggle with when using one-size-fits-all hiring platforms.

We achieve this through functionality like our skills matrix which makes advertising or reviewing tech skills far more transparent and faster, leading to up to 73.2% faster skills evaluation during the hiring process.

This same technology contributes to up to 85% more manageable shortlists by preventing underqualified applicants from applying to openings that don’t match their skills. This saves candidates time applying to roles that are out of their wheelhouse and saves time and money for hiring teams that will now sift through only candidates that are between a 70-100% match for their opening.

Additional differentiators:

• 3rd Party Recruiter free environment
• Free to post jobs
• Anti-bias Talent Management - Designed specifically for EEO compliance
• Reverse auctions - Our unique take on real-time competitive bidding for tech services
• SOW Generation

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Gaggle Social has an awesome and highly motivated team comprised of seasoned professionals and thought leaders who are passionate about making hiring for tech more cost-effective, transparent, and faster.

We’re the ones to solve this problem because we were once the ones experiencing the problem. We’re the courageous few who decided that it’s time to take matters into our own hands.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

More than likely building another start-up that supports the same cause!

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

As an early-stage startup there isn’t any historical data that we can cross reference so we rely on hypothesizing target figures and seeing how close or far we are from the targets. We track things like sign-ups, website traffic, CAC, CLV, bounce rate, and positive/negative user experience reporting, and more.

Tell us how your startup is changing the world.

Let’s face it, every business needs enterprise software. Whether they are growing, downsizing, selling goods, or providing services they all need technology to ensure that they appropriately manage operations while optimizing their time and reducing human error. And, if every company needs enterprise software then every company also needs enterprise software talent to optimize, customize, implement, and project manage.

For years, tech hiring has been far too difficult which is why there are so many recruitment agencies that specialize in tech despite their high price points and often lackluster services.

Our network is designed to democratize tech hiring, encourage professional development, nurture humanity’s social nature, and more. Thus, toppling the recruitment industry and empowering our community members to strive for better.

How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2024?

By building the world’s best tech community!

What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2024?

We’re looking forward to achieving funding (Contact [email protected] if you’re interested in fundraising discussions), drastically improving our solutions, growing by 10 times our current size, planting a ton of trees (gaggle social plants 1 tree for every 4 signups). Just to name a few

Which trend(s) are you most excited about in 2024? Share your reasons.

I’m looking forward to the continued development of AI as it expands to every industry that it can at its current power and hope to pioneer the first industry-shattering AI advancements in Hiring & HR.

2023 had been another crazy year, especially in tech, with layoffs and the Generative AI takeover! Which trend are you most concerned about? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.

I’m concerned that as we continue to go down the path of layoffs and improvements to generative AI, companies will continue to consolidate roles and look to “lighten the load” by providing them with AI tools so they can get two jobs done at once. After that becomes a norm, and work is completed adequately this way, more projects will be shared with these already busy team members and inevitably overwork them worse than before.

Share your biggest success so far and/or your biggest failure so far.

My biggest success is my team and my advisors. Thank you to each and everyone of you for all you do each and every day. Thank you for your effort, hard work, and dedication to moving this mission forward.

We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?

HackerNoon is an awesome publication! 10/10 recommend!

Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?

If any of you tech pros are out there looking for a new role, make sure that you take a moment every single day to be kind to yourself. It’s a tough market, life is hard, people are cruel, but you don’t have to be. Not to yourself.

Wake up every day and set your goals, do something nice for yourself no matter how small, and tackle the day with a smile on your face. There are a million jobs out there but there’s only one you treat yourself well and watch how you grow.