Some partnerships just make sense. Such is the case with Fuckup Nights FuN) and Get On Board (GoB). This synergy, which has developed organically and is based on shared values, has led us to be part of this IT professional recruitment platform’s journey toward the investment round they are currently conducting through Republic.
Part of the collaboration between GoB and FuN includes the participation of Pepe Villatoro, Co-Founder of FuN, in an expert panel at MX Tech Week. Don’t miss it!
To delve deeper into the ideas behind Get On Board as an organization—and its successes and failures—we interviewed its founder, Sergio Nouvel. Let’s get to it!
FuN: Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the founding of Get on Board and how the platform has innovated in the tech talent market in Latin America?
Sergio: Get on Board started as a project by and for the tech and startup community. It began as a very simple job portal that my partner Jorge built over a weekend to help Chile’s then-fledgling tech community in 2011. From there, we took the project and began to expand it, first as a side project and then as a full-time company.
I believe that GoB’s greatest innovation over the years has been to go against standard market practices in order to look out for the community. Job portals operate like classified ads; we moderate every job listing that appears on the site and reject many of them. Many recruiters hide the actual employer from you and make you register and take tests just to show you the jobs; at GoB, all jobs are visible and employers are clearly identified. And finally, most applicant tracking systems (ATS) are focused solely on the company; Get on Board offers a system where both companies and professionals can manage their side of the process.
FuN: Can you tell us about a setback you encountered during the construction and expansion of Get on Board?
Sergio: If you’re not failing at something, you’re not experimenting enough. One of the experiments that failed was launching our own headhunting service, which we called Concierge. First we tried doing it ourselves, and then we tried partnering with someone else, which turned out even worse. It helped us realize the problems with the headhunting model in the tech market: you’re competing against your own client, you don’t involve your client in the selection process, and you recycle the same candidates over and over again. It’s not a good business model, and it’s very opaque. That’s when we learned that services that simply provide a shortlist to their client are denying that client an important part of the process—the ability to get to know and evaluate the potential of people who aren’t a 100% match but who could grow within the company. In the end, the headhunting model is almost like a grocery list of requirements, and we didn’t like doing that at all. It didn’t feel right, so we shut it down shortly thereafter.
FuN: How does Get on Board ensure transparency when addressing errors in the processes used to connect startups and tech companies with tech professionals in the region?
Sergio: At Get on Board, we try not to have any “secret sauces.” What you see is what you get. The algorithms we use for our Talent Database are simple. In this industry, there’s a lot of mystery and secrecy, a lot of “trust in the magic of our AI,” and that rhetoric hides algorithms or criteria that not even their creators understand… and the problem is that there are perfectly qualified people who get rejected for a job just because an algorithm’s whim decided so. We want our clients and users to be highly critical of the services they use and to demand transparency; they should be able to explain exactly how they work. We can do that, and that information is even in our FAQ. Simple criteria are powerful because they’re more rational and fair, and when people’s jobs are on the line, that’s essential.
"We're ready to transform the Latin American tech talent market, making it much more efficient, transparent, and diverse."
- Sergio Nouvel, CEO of Get on Board
FuN: How does Get on Board use failure as inspiration for innovation?
Sergio: What people call “failure” is, to me, feedback from the universe telling me, “That’s not the way to go.” Fortunately, we’re a team with few egos, and if we fail at something, we simply try something else. Failure is an important part of learning, because if you never fail, it means you’re not trying hard enough. We humans are like blind people in a maze, groping our way toward the exit; “failing” is ultimately just running into a wall, and the message is that you need to try another direction. The more you see it as part of the feedback loop the universe offers you, the less you fear it, and thus the more you try, and the faster you learn.
The problem of recruitment is extremely complex, and many of the struggles people face when trying to find a job stem from people who underestimated the problem and built solutions or businesses that only address a small part of it. A telling current example is AI solutions that promise to screen your candidates in a few minutes and present you with the top three. Doing that has a host of highly toxic consequences for the ecosystem—consequences that the people building these solutions clearly aren’t considering. Understanding that this is a complex problem—both socially and technologically—has kept us humble and made us realize that the solution isn’t simple, and that we’ll make plenty of mistakes before we find it. We look forward to making more mistakes!
FuN: As CEO of Get on Board, what is your opinion on failures in the Latin American tech ecosystem and how to prevent them, based on the lessons you’ve learned from them?
Sergio: I think that as a Latin culture, we have many beautiful things, but we tend to suffer from an inferiority complex. And that makes our egos more fragile, so we build up too many grandiose stories around what we do just to feel better about ourselves (take, for example, the classic “your envy is my success”). And I think that’s exactly why we struggle to fail and admit when we’ve failed. We’re afraid of being pitied or looked down upon. I don’t think we need to prevent failures; we should celebrate them and normalize them, because that makes it easier to learn from others’ mistakes, and that accelerates your own growth. I applaud the brave people who share their failures, because it’s not a culture accustomed to doing so, and many are doing something they themselves never had.
Thank you so much, Sergio! We hope that more entrepreneurs will view failure through the same constructive lens that you do, and we’re proud to partner with companies that believe in creating safe spaces for failure and innovation.
Sergio Nouvel is the co-founder and CEO of Get on Board, the leading recruitment platform that connects startups and amazing tech companies with the best tech professionals in Latin America.
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