Why I Built TalentCapture

I spent 15 years at the same company, most of it as a hands-on recruiting manager, before spending the next decade as an independent agency recruiter. I've seen hiring from almost every seat at the table — running searches in-house, reviewing candidates, making hiring decisions, evaluating and managing agency recruiter relationships, and then competing for placements on the outside myself. TalentCapture was built directly out of that vantage point.

The privacy problem

It was a privilege to work at Catapult Systems and learn from Sam Goodner, who was well known around Austin for building a genuinely great culture — he'd often give talks about hiring and retaining employees, and why it mattered so much. In those early years we averaged an 85% employee retention rate, which speaks for itself.

Eventually Sam sold the company, and not long after, that ship had run its course for me too. But I found it incredibly difficult to look for a new job. For a company like Catapult Systems, a recruiter had better be fully committed, or your days were numbered — and in that kind of visible, culture-first role, quietly looking elsewhere felt impossible. Not because I didn't know how to job search — I'd spent my career helping other people do exactly that. I froze up because I knew, better than most, how visible a job search can be. I'd seen how much a company can learn about who's quietly looking around. The idea of my own employer finding out before I was ready didn't sit well with me, and there was no good way to search privately.

This isn't unique to recruiters, or even to visible, culture-first companies like Catapult Systems. It's one of the most common fears in the job market — 52% of U.S. job seekers say their current employer finding out is their biggest concern. Executives, salespeople, HR leaders, anyone in a visible role — they all feel it more acutely, but almost everyone feels it.

That's the problem TalentCapture's patented privacy controls solve. You control your job search privacy — when identifying portions of your profile are visible, and to whom. Whether you're chasing a better opportunity or just curious about a side gig, you can market yourself the entire time without tipping off the one employer who shouldn't find out yet — your current one.

The merit problem

The second problem is what happens once a candidate does show up in front of an employer. I watched a lot of well-intentioned hiring initiatives over the years, and too many of them ended up doing the same thing in a different direction: replacing one set of surface-level criteria with another, instead of actually looking at whether someone could do the job. Pedigree, present or past employers, where someone went to school, how a resume was formatted, a personality assessment score that's easy to game and gets far more weight than it deserves — all of it can crowd out the thing that should actually matter, which is whether a person has the skills and experience to succeed in the role.

TalentCapture's evaluation process is built around that idea directly. We use AI to check whether a candidate's claimed skills actually hold up — did the companies they worked for use those technologies, were those technologies even around at the time, and do the duties they listed actually match what that role typically does at that company? (That last check gets harder at small businesses, but it works well almost everywhere else.) When something doesn't add up, we flag it so the employer can dig in and ask the candidate directly, instead of silently scoring them down. Employers see a candidate's skills, experience, and qualifications first — the identifying details come later, once both sides are actually interested. Merit gets a real chance to speak before anything else does.

This isn't just my own experience talking. When we interviewed hundreds of users while building TalentCapture, hiring managers told us the same thing in different words: diversity is important, but it can't come at the expense of merit. Every one of them wanted an approach that protected their job search privacy and removed bias from the candidate review process — that's exactly what we built.

The crowd recruiting problem

The third problem is one I saw from both sides. During those same 15 years in-house, part of my job was evaluating and working directly with agency recruiters — deciding who we trusted with a search and who we didn't. Then in 2016 I became an independent agency recruiter myself, and used several split-fee platforms along the way. Most of them were expensive and a waste of time. The model was crowd recruiting: dozens of recruiters chasing the same role at once, with no coordination and no real stake in doing it well. Most of that effort went nowhere, and the split rarely justified the work. I doubt many of those employers were well served either. A good recruiter is a valuable asset — but only if they feel valued.

TalentCapture's agency network is built differently. Any agency recruiter can join our split-fee network to collaborate with other recruiters. But to work our Recruiter Match program — filling roles for employers who post jobs directly on TalentCapture — you go through an interview and verification process first, the same kind of evaluation I used to run on the corporate side. In exchange, we give you exclusivity on that search for a set period of time. You're not competing against thirty other recruiters for the same placement; we've already confirmed you can do the work well.

Crowd recruiting still has a place on our platform — that's exactly what our TalentGrams referral program is for, open to anyone on any job — but that's very different than a dedicated recruiter spending their time and resources to find you the best talent.

Why one platform, three sides

I didn't go looking for one big idea that ties all of this together — these are just the three problems that kept showing up over 25 years in almost every seat at the hiring table. A candidate should be able to control their own visibility. An employer should be evaluating people on what they can actually do. And an agency recruiter who's good at their job shouldn't have to out-race a crowd to prove it. TalentCapture is my attempt at fixing all three, and I'd genuinely love for you to help build it into something great — as a candidate, an employer, or an agency recruiter.