When Phil Noelting attends Metabridge this week, he will demonstrate how his startup can help employers find staff members who share their values and therefore suit their organizations.

Noelting is the founder and president of Kitchener-based recruitment company Qwalify, which has been selected to join 14 other leading Canadian tech companies to attend the retreat in Kelowna, B.C., on Thursday and Friday. Organized by Accelerate Okanagan, Metabridge exposes 15 leading Canadian startups to a range of high profile mentors and investors. 

Qwalify is a platform that allows companies to recruit employees by using personalized brand questions rather than simply receiving resumes.  

Noelting said 70 percent of millennials would take a job with an annual salary of $40,000 with a company they love over a job with an annual salary of $100,000 at a company they don’t have strong feelings for.

He started Qwalify when he realized that an experience-based document isn’t the way to hire in a generation that wants to align their own values with the company that employs them.

“When you look at Gen Y and how they do it, they’re curious, they want to get in there, they want to have a voice, they want to be an advocate for the brand they love,” Noelting said. “That’s really what we do: we allow companies to say, ‘Hey, if you ever thought about working with us, just introduce yourself here.’”

Qwalify allows those who already love a brand to stay engaged with it on the platform. Only 2 percent of those who visit a company’s careers webpage will actually apply to a job, he said. Qwalify attempts to engage the remaining 98 percent by having the company send out questions focused around the brand and monitor the responses.

When the company does need a new employee, it can go straight the brand fans on Qwalify rather than put out a job posting and receive a bunch of anonymous resumes.

Noelting believes that United Way is an example of a successful organization that recruits employees based on their values. The charitable organization only hires people who care about changing the world, as that’s the core value of United Way.

“If they can hire only people who want to change the world, and be a catalyst for people who want to actually change the world,” he said, “not only will they have an amazing hire, but they’ll have a striving culture.” He added the company will have the most loyal group of users, customers, and employees that it could imagine.

Noelting also values changing the world, and thus only hires people who want to do that, too. There are six Qwalify employees, each of whom owns a part of the company. For instance, the person in charge of technology owns the technology part of the company.

Noelting said Qwalify won’t take on business from companies that don’t align with its own values.

Qwalify hasn’t spent much money on advertising, as word of mouth has been powerful enough to scale the four-year-old company. Aon-Hewitt, a global human resource consulting firm and a client of Qwalify, now demos Qwalify to other companies.

To get more traction and expand his network, Noelting applied to Metabridge. He said he’s excited to be in an intimate setting with technology leaders to discuss more than the typical business talk.

Learning more from others at Metabridge will help Qwalify, as the company is expecting to triple its client-base in the next 12 to 18 months.

“It’s no easy changing a very legacy-driven process,” Noelting said. “We’re very excited that the large, large brands see that the customers are the people applying, and they need to start treating them well.”

Eye on KW is a regular feature on Entrevestor that showcases startups and the ecosystem of Kitchener-Waterloo.