TechCrunch, Inc. or Forbes have already targeted the employee advocacy platform Altru as the next big thing in the Human Resources world.
Altru is a powerful tool top leading brands like Dell or Unilever are using within their attraction strategy. And it is also the successful dream of Alykhan Rehmatullah, CEO of the company.
Alykhan remembers his excitement when he got his first job offer with the prestigious financial services firm Goldman Sachs some years ago. Sharing his story in detail on Linkedin, he also recalls how lost and frustrated he felt when he found it hard to get answers to some of his concerns and doubts about how to take the first steps towards a career.
Thanks to his network of contacts at that time, Alykhan found answers to his questions about how to evaluate companies and prepare for interviews, and finally secured the position he wanted. However, he realized not everyone could access this kind of support from an exclusive network and decided to do something to help change the situation.
He joined forces with Vincent Polidoro, now Altru’s CTO, to launch a platform designed to connect a company’s job candidates directly with current employees during the recruitment process.
The Z1 team met Alykhan and Vincent in October 2017 while traveling to visit with some of our partners in New York. They told us about Altru, and the concept captivated us immediately:
Altru's mission is to collect the universe of rich, yet unnoticed, content already being created every day through employee experiences to help candidates’ experience and promote their employer brand.
Solving big problems
At the time of our meeting, the company already had two global brands as clients — L’oreal and Unilever. While Altru knew their business model solved a real problem and tackled a real need, they told us they needed an experience product partner to help their platform work better and do more.
Back in Spain, the Z1 team got to work remotely. We proposed an entirely new multi-platform mobile experience and a refreshed design.
We helped create a mobile-first platform that would make it easy for candidates to ask career-related questions, and for employees to share their perspectives through mobile video.
After three months of coding and technical reorganization, Altru joined Techstars NY. During the 12 intensive weeks of the incubation program, we worked together to overcome every challenge and achieve each milestone, until we built a platform everybody was proud of. We helped create a mobile-first platform that would make it easy for candidates to ask career-related questions, and for employees to share their perspectives through mobile video.
Evolving the product
We built an administration panel from scratch with Angular and TS to handle candidates’ questions. From there, the director of human resources or the head of a department can organize and refer questions directly to the employee who is best placed to answer. They can also efficiently perform quantitative and qualitative analysis.
We designed a recruiting portal for both candidates and companies, easily customizable for each brand, and a user-friendly mobile application that allows employees to record and upload their video responses. The application is built with React Native, as well as Swift and Kotlin to ensure it works perfectly across both iOS and Android.
Altru finished the Techstars program in April 2018, just as Dell became their latest high-profile customer. Since then, we’ve continued our partnership, iterating on the product by developing several widgets, using Vue JS + TypeScript, to improve accessibility, visibility, and the candidate experience.
These tools help employers engage better with their candidates. The great thing is that we built them to seamlessly adapt to the employer’s brand, making implementation a breeze.
Most recently, we’ve redesigned the Altru brand, creating a new professional, modern visual experience that shows the world what Altru stands for. And we continue to develop new functionalities in the experience — such as enabling the platform to work in over 14 languages — to maintain Altru’s position as the most attractive tool for companies that want to humanize a candidate’s job-seeking experience.
The result: Altru keeps growing to realize Alykhan’s dream of making candidates’ lives easier. Leading companies like Deutsche Bank and Holiday Inn recently chose Altru to attract, convert, and retain the best talent, and we’re thrilled to have been a partner in the development of this innovative platform.
