‘EHarmony meets LinkedIn’: How Siftly is reinventing job hunting for agencies

More succinctly, it’s “eHarmony meets LinkedIn,” joked Siftly founder Frank Stiefler. The idea for the startup, he told Digiday, grew out of the frustration he had as a manager for the past 20 years as an advertising veteran, with stints at 180 LA, dw+h and Innocean USA.

Lamenting that current recruitment system for agencies is broken — contributing to the fact that advertising has the second-highest turnover rate among industries — Stiefler said Siftly’s purpose is to help find companies qualified candidates in “days instead of weeks.”

Siftly is for both job hunters and recruiters.

For the former, candidates type in five criteria for a job they’re searching for, like position title, years of experience, category expertise, location and salary requirements. From there, recruiters from Saatchi and Saatchi, CP+B, DB5 and several others use the same criteria to search for a candidate and the system matches them.

“There’s no spam, no networking, no irrelevant leads,” he said. “There’s only jobs you really want in your inbox.”

Siftly is free for talent and is less expensive for recruiters to use than its competitors.

The service charges a flat $300 fee only if it matches companies with three qualified candidates within the first three days of use. (For example, Dice charges upwards of $400 just to post a job and Indeed charges companies between $.25 to $1.50 per click.)

“It’s risk-free for recruiters,” he said, adding that he’s hoping to attract agency recruiters “who want to streamline their service and get more candidates in front of them faster.” For now, Siftly is matching jobs for strategists before expanding in 2016 for writers and account managers, filling a need for matching talent to companies since ad agency employment is at a 15-year high.

Stiefler is self-funding Siftly, which soft-launched last week, so he didn’t disclose any numbers, but on LinkedIn, he wrote that more than 20 jobs were posted. He did say that he used his LinkedIn network of 14,000 connections of agencies, recruiters and candidates to test it out with early reaction being positive.