Our Story

Our Purpose

Hirebetter’s purpose is to bring a strategic approach to working with dynamic, growth-minded, lower middle market companies (roughly $10 to $200 million in revenue) across most industries. After years of partnering with hundreds of clients in numerous industries, we remain committed to helping you see around corners and recognize challenges before they become impactful.

Entrepreneurship is in Our DNA

Built by seasoned entrepreneurs who have grown and exited successful businesses, we’ve been in your shoes and bring a deep understanding of how to help businesses grow and scale.

Talent is a Major Success Factor

The importance of talent to growth-minded businesses has repeatedly been proven time and time again. We’ve seen talent as the primary differentiator for our most successful clients.

Not Bodies in Seats. Right People, Right Roles

Hirebetter is anything, but traditional —i.e., recruiters finding bodies to fill chairs for a quick commission. We’re Strategic Talent Partners, committed to helping you build, develop, and optimize an amazing team to achieve your vision.

Our Approach

Since our inception, Hirebetter has been dedicated to ensuring that you make the best hire to take you to the next level. Our recruiting team sources, identifies, and recruits talented candidates with the resume and experience to help you grow your company. We can also find candidates with the soft skills and the “it factor” that allows them to work and thrive in environments that can be dynamic and “fluid” (if not chaotic!).

Connection

Our relationship with your business is valuable and by listening intently to your goals and acting in accordance with them, we partner to navigate your challenges and create opportunities together.

Discovery

Through our powerful discovery process, we'll unearth what your organization truly needs. This may differ from your original inquiry, but it's an impactful part of the journey.

Strategy

Through Strategic Talent Planning we create a long-term talent plan that aligns with your high-level strategic business goals and financial forecast.

HireBetter: The Leading Talent Partner for Dynamic, Growth-Minded Companies.

HireBetter impacts lives by connecting and empowering good people to build great companies. This guiding principle has made us THE leading talent partner for entrepreneurial, growth-minded, middle-market companies. We’ve won numerous awards and accolades and been recognized by entrepreneurs, companies and organizations like Austin Business Journal and Forbes. We are a new kind of talent firm with a refreshing approach. We aren’t recruiters – we’re Strategic Talent Partners.

Forbes’ Best Executive Recruiting Firms in America

#1 Austin-area recruitment firms — retained executive search #1 in our own backyard

The Recruiting Industry is Broken

We’re so passionate about solving the misalignment between growth-minded companies and the “traditional” recruiting industry that we’ve written extensively on the topic, including this acclaimed e-book: The Recruiting Industry is Broken.

Finding a body to fill a chair in order to score a quick commission is what the traditional recruiting industry is built upon, and the reason we’re anything but “traditional.” We’re Strategic Talent Partners, committed to helping you build, develop, and optimize an amazing team to achieve your vision.
 

Beginnings

2011

In 2011, Kurt Wilkin purchased HireBetter and began improving on the topgrading concept. He set out to evolve from the contingent recruiting model that pits recruiters against their clients. HireBetter embraced a retained recruiting model, virtually unheard of for lower middle-market companies. HireBetter’s retained model allowed them to align with their clients to match the best possible candidates for both immediate and long-term needs.

Prior to HireBetter, Kurt was the Founder and CEO of The Controller Group (TCG), a finance and accounting services firm that he and his partners founded and grew to $20 million. After a few short years, Tatum acquired the company, creating a successful exit for Kurt.

During TCG’s rapid growth, Kurt recognized firsthand that talent is THE major differentiator for entrepreneurs who are scaling their businesses. Many of his clients either didn’t have the right talent, the right individuals were in the wrong roles, or the team structure wasn’t working. While trying to meet both TCG’s and their clients’ talent needs, “contingent” recruiters clogged his desk with mismatched resumes and blew up his phone with misaligned sales pitches and a false sense of urgency for their candidates. This brought him to the realization that the recruiting industry is fundamentally broken.

2015

From 2011 to 2015, HireBetter grew 50% each year by building a strong brand and providing topnotch client service, but something was missing. The recruiting process ran like a well-oiled machine and clients were happy, but the company wasn’t profitable. HireBetter was great at helping other entrepreneurs scale their businesses and their own growth was proof of this.

HireBetter recognized the need to deeply understand their clients’ businesses to help determine what they thought they needed, versus what they actually needed in order to scale profitably. Over the years, they had seen that throwing random bodies at a problem rarely works, it is an expensive lesson to learn and may set you back years. So they developed Strategic Talent Planning™, which is their process for building a Talent Roadmap that aligns with your strategic plans and financial forecast. In their Strategic Talent PlanningTM sessions with clients, they helped CEOs identify their best employees and often helped shift them into new roles, so the employee could focus on what they did best to create the greatest impact within the organization.

As HireBetter conducted their own Strategic Talent Planning, the solution was bringing in an Operating Partner (or “Integrator” in EOS parlance) to pair with Kurt’s “Visionary” talents. A new Chief Operating Officer removed inefficiencies and excess costs and reduced the number of employees by streamlining processes.

2020

In 2020, facing unprecedented upheaval and change across the world, Kurt and the HireBetter team recognized the need to restructure some key elements of the company. Over the next few years, HireBetter expanded their service offerings to include Permanent Placement, Project Consulting, and Talent-as-a-Service options to more effectively align with client needs across a wide variety of industries and company sizes.

Today

As HireBetter’s CEO, Velveth Schmitz recognizes the importance of the amazing clients, candidates, team members and partners who make up HireBetter’s community. As a key member of the leadership team for the past two years, she now leads the company as they reshape the landscape of strategic recruitment by connecting and empowering good people to build great companies.