TL;DR
The SpringRole name doesn’t accurately define the scope and ambition of products, tools and services that we are building to simplify recruiting and hiring for the future of work. Springworks as a parent brand accurately reflects our broader vision encompassing our current products and services; SpringRole — the decentralized, verified professional profile platform, SpringHire — a full-stack technology hiring and staffing agency, SpringVerify — the background check services, SpringRecruit — forever-free applicant tracking system, and other future products.
Here’s the longer answer with our origin story and how we are building tools and products for the future of work.
When we started SpringRole in 2014, it was a Peer referral recruiting marketplace. Spring as in fresh, and Role as in a new job role. We were matching jobs with resumes (driven by peer referrals) using LinkedIn’s API, scaled to $50K MRR and then LinkedIn shut us down by cutting off access to their API.
This is when we realized the power of decentralisation. LinkedIn, a central entity, owns all your data and decides how best to monetize it. Decentralization, on the other hand, lets users control their data and decide what to do with it.
More on what this realization led to, later in the sequence of events.
Meanwhile, apart from working on the Peer referral recruiting marketplace, we had also set up a full-stack technology agency that continues to be the major revenue-driver for us.
SpringHire is a full-service technology agency located in Santa Monica, USA and Bangalore, India. With SpringHire, the focus is on helping individuals and teams — whether a single person company or a public listed company — build their dream idea.
A full-stack staffing and hiring agency, SpringHire supports these teams with technology development, design, consulting, and digital marketing. We’ve been building unique digital products, platforms, and experiences for the past 5 years. Several of our clients have been with us since the beginning and expanded their teams over that time. You can check out more about SpringHire at this link.
In 2017, with the blockchain wave at its peak, we got the opportunity to build our own dream idea. This idea had its roots in the realization about the power of decentralization mentioned earlier.
We began with the thesis that users would soon realize the value of their personal data. They’d want full control of their profile data, be able to customize, enrich the profile with different modules, get each aspect of it verified and finally have complete ownership of it.
This led to the launch of SpringRole, the platform — a decentralized, verified professional profile platform. SpringRole has since grown to 49,250+ users in one year since its launch.
However, while building SpringRole, we discovered other aspects of the hiring and recruiting piece that are broken.
To build verified profiles, we started enabling Background Verification with third-party providers and soon realized the legacy service providers were still doing things the old way with lengthy paper forms and drawn out processes that took weeks to execute, often without the certainty of results.
That’s when we decided to fix it with SpringVerify — our product that enables Fast, secure, and easy background checks for employers. SpringVerify is already being used by 60+ startups and enterprise clients alike. In a short span of 10 months, we have earned the trust of high-growth new-age companies like CRED, Simpl and BankOpen as well as bigger billion-dollar market-cap enterprise clients.
By now you can see how the SpringRole+SpringVerify system can make repeated background and reference checks a redundant process.
“Ideally, in a hiring process there should only be one interview. In this interview, the HR manager should evaluate the candidate as an individual to see if there is a cultural fit and a whiff of emotional equity. The rest can, and should be taken care of using technology.”
This is the ideal recruiting and hiring scenario painted by our CEO, Kartik Mandaville.
But we are far from such a scenario. We continue to find the ecosystem lacking either because the product experiences are broken or they are too expensive for young companies and growing startups.
Expensive ATSs (Applicant Tracking Systems) mean that most startups (and from the initial interest shown by over 120+ companies, even well-established firms) end up using Excel/Google sheets for their recruitment tracking. This has lot of inefficiencies. We decided to solve for this next.
Enter SpringRecruit — our forever-free ATS to help these recruiting teams stop swimming in the deluge of Google sheets.
SpringRecruit is in beta currently and open via invite only to a few select companies.
Note: If you are a company that uses Google/Excel sheets for your recruitment tracking, register for an invite to SpringRecruit beta at this link.
It doesn’t stop with just these three products.
We are building the tools and products which would lead us to a recruiting future which we feel should have been ours already.
By now it should be obvious why the name SpringRole doesn’t accurately describe the scope and ambition of what we are trying to do here.
Hence, Springworks!
Springworks as a parent brand encapsulates our vision and ambition for building the tools and products to simplify hiring and recruiting for the recruiting future.
The rebranding is still a work in progress. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing a brand new website that reflects the new identity.
What’s changed?
Only the parent brand name has changed to Springworks. This reflects on our social media platforms — Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. This also means that when you ask our employees where they work, you’ll get Springworks as the answer.
We continue to be registered as SpringRole India Pvt Ltd in India with our HQ in Bengaluru and the US office in Santa Monica where we are registered as SpringRole Inc. (US entity).
What hasn’t changed?
Our singular focus on building and the mission to simplify hiring for the recruiting future that dawns upon us.
That’s it.
We’ll keep updating you all as and when we decide to launch the new website. Till then, help spread the word about this by retweeting the tweet below.
We just renamed our parent brand from SpringRole to Springworks. Here's a post on why we decided to do this: https://t.co/hKjxHVnpuE
Read also for a description of our journey from 2014 to 2019 and Springworks's ambition of simplifying the Future of #Recruitment
— Springworks (@springroleinc) September 9, 2019
