• by Larissa Faw , December 18, 2015

Innocean's Frank Striefler had a problem. The SVP of strategic planning was having a hard time finding qualified candidates so over the past two years he has spent his free time developing his own digital recruitment tool. 

This month, Striefler is introducing Siftly, a blind job matching site that features agencies including Goodby, MAL, 180LA, SID LEE, Eleven, Phenomenon, Mekanism, McCann, Publicis, and FCB Health and more than 1,200 active profiles. There are currently 29 open job postings.

"We sift through talent/jobs so that you don’t need to. We take the work out of it by sifting through the largest talent pool in the industry," says Striefler.  It is frustrating "when actively looking [and] getting spammed with irrelevant job alerts and feeling that ‘who you know matters more than what you know," he says. 

Interested individuals sign up and indicate their interest for a wide range of strategic roles, including SVP of analytics, group strategy partner, Sr. brand strategist account planner, and cultural researcher. They also list their desired locations, including NYC, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami, Costa Mesa, Emeryville and Buffalo.

Then agency executives can "sift" through these profiles to find their desired candidates. The "blind" component of the platform has already proven to be popular, says Striefler. He always assumed active job searchers would jump on this site right away, but he didn't anticipate how many employed people would also sign up in order not to miss out on any future opportunities but not tip of their current employer that they are doing so. 

His background made him perfectly suited for this platform's development. He worked at an agency that raised the profile of eHarmony and this account taught him about the matching algorithm behind the site. He then worked with another lead generator TrueCar that served as a performance based compensation model. Lastly, he says he met the love of his life through Tinder which helped him to realize that the idea of blind matching from dating works in the job arena as well.