Altru leverages employee storytelling for enterprise companies to attract and recruit top talent.
OVERVIEW
Even before the pandemic, the rules of attracting, recruiting and onboarding new hires were changing, requiring organizations to adopt new practices to compete in the war for talent.
In the past, e-recruiting software was a simple mechanism for gathering and storing applicant data. Alykhan Rehmatullah, CEO and Co-founder of Altru, had the vision for a mobile-video platform that would leverage employee-created videos to attract and recruit the best candidates while also engaging internal talent.
As Alykhan explained: “The most effective and compelling way to tell your brand story is through your own employees.”
CHALLENGE
Blood & Treasure was recommended to Altru by the CTO of a NYC company we’d previously worked with. The brief for the MVP included:
A native iOS app to record employee-generated video content
A responsive web app to view employee-generated videos
User login via email, Facebook or LinkedIn
Create/edit profiles by users
Video feed with filters by industry, and search
Likes/upvotes on answers
Share employee-generated videos on social media
A basic Admin panel to edit/approve/disapprove content: subjects/industries, experts, users, questions, answers, and send users custom push notifications on questions asked/answered
DEVELOPMENT & IMPLEMENTATION
After reviewing the wireframes and UI design doc provided by the founders we analyzed tasks and sorted them into sprints using Jira, a useful tool for managing software projects, then set up the servers.
We used AWS Cloudfront and S3 instead of EC2 as S3 is less complex in terms of setup and deployment, thinking that when the proof of concept was completed and scalability became crucial, the servers could be upgraded to EC2.
We ran into deployment issues with the mobile iOS app after the release of Swift 4.0. It seemed some of the pods that were written for Swift 3.2 didn’t fully support Swift 4, particularly Mixpanel and LinkedIn, so we rolled back to Swift 3.2, only to discover that the errors were caused not only by the new version of Swift, but also from a new version of Xcode, Apple’s IDE.
It was easy enough to resolve once we figured out the cause, but since our client was demoing the product to prospective clients as we were building it and setting expectations with them for delivery, there was extra pressure to not miss a beat on an estimate and to complete tasks on time.
Another curious bug was when the phone’s ringer was set to vibrate, the volume of the video could not be adjusted and none of the videos would play the audio.
Although unit tests for the API were included in the scope, unit tests for the iOS app, the web app and the admin panel were not, though the client’s CTO set up Continuous Integration for the iOS frontend which in combination with manual QA helped to optimize deployments.
RESULTS
After the completion of the MVP and closing investor funding, Altru brought the development in-house and went on to attract major clients including Target, PwC, Intuit, L’Oréal, and Box.
In October 2020, Altru was acquired by iCIMS for an undisclosed amount. According to Forbes, the acquisition price was estimated at $60M.
TAKEAWAYS
After estimating tasks and timeframes, we normally bill for hours worked in a series of sprints until a project is complete, which allows for a lot of flexibility to add or make changes to the functionality as the product comes to life, but for Altru’s MVP we had agreed a very tight fixed-price contract which meant that unforeseen changes or additional functionality requested during the development were outside scope and budget.
We learned the importance in a fixed-price contract to try to more accurately estimate time and cost and anticipate changes that might be requested as a development proceeds, and then bake them into our estimates before going into development. But it’s impossible to know unknowns at time of estimating which is why having a good budget helps. There’s more room to maneuver when our dev team is covered for every hour worked.
For more information, please contact:
Noel Guinane
Managing Partner
Blood & Treasure, LLC