When Owen Gorman was a kid, he spent a lot of time hanging around his dad’s office. “I liked being his kid in the office. When I was five years old, I ran around like an idiot. I’d bring Mini Sticks to the office and bug everyone to play with me,” said the son of […]
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When Owen Gorman was a kid, he spent a lot of time hanging around his dad’s office.
“I liked being his kid in the office. When I was five years old, I ran around like an idiot. I’d bring Mini Sticks to the office and bug everyone to play with me,” said the son of Hugh Gorman, CEO of Ottawa property management company Colonnade BridgePort and one of the city’s most seasoned real estate executives.
Throughout his childhood, Gorman said he’d bug his dad to take him on business trips and his dad’s work was always a topic of conversation around the dinner table.
“I’ve been around it my whole life and I think I’ve always seen it more as an opportunity, like an educational thing, to be honest,” Gorman told OBJ. “I have had a front row seat to running a business and one that does well and is big enough to really mean something.”
Now a commerce student at the University of Victoria, Gorman has decided to forge his own path and build a legacy by starting his own business – not in real estate, but in human resources.
“I’ve always wanted to do my own thing. I don’t want to be in his shadow or anything,” Gorman said of his father. “I’d say the HR side of it definitely wasn’t planned. It was just this idea that happened to fall into that sector. But at the end of the day, running a business is running a business.”
At a social event last year, Gorman ran into high school friends Chris Egener and Benjamin Falkner, a software engineering major at Concordia University and a computer science student at Queen’s University, respectively. The three friends spoke about a business idea Egener and Falkner had been working on and they asked Gorman if he wanted to join as COO.
The business was Hireup, a hiring platform designed to make the recruitment process easier and more skills-based. Applicants don’t compete for a position based on their resumés alone, but rather by showcasing their skills in job-specific competitions.
“If you have (an opening for) someone that’s building websites, the competition would be to build a website that matches the criteria set by the employer and then we objectively evaluate it out of 100, based on a number of different metrics. We want to take the bias out of hiring. We want to base it on skills and giving everyone the equal opportunity to get a job,” Egener, CEO of Hireup, said in an interview with OBJ.
Egener said the idea for Hireup came from his own experience trying and failing to get co-op placements and a frustration with the inefficiency of the hiring process.
“I’d been applying to hundreds of internships and I wasn’t getting any responses. I didn’t even know what the problem was (with my application) because I wasn’t getting any feedback,” Egener said.
Applicants on Hireup get feedback on their application, Egener said, adding that the company is looking to partner with online learning platforms so that applicants can access resources to help them improve skills.
As they build a “hiring marketplace,” Gorman said artificial intelligence will be central to what they are doing, both in helping the platform evaluate applications as well as safeguarding it against misuse by applicants.
“With this volume of applications, a lot of HR professionals use some sort of AI to sift through resumés and nowadays it’s all about keywords. It doesn’t take long for people to figure out what those are and (start) gaming the system. The idea behind (Hireup) is it’s all merit-based, skills-based,” Gorman said.
With the marketplace concept, Gorman said an applicant’s score on job competitions is saved to his or her profile.
“Every competition you compete in, it’ll first be available to the company that hosted it, but once they’ve made their hiring decisions, other companies can come through and see the people that are still on our platform who have not been hired,” Egener said. “By applying for one job, you’re opening yourself up to have visibility from all the other companies on our platform.”
The idea is for Hireup profiles to act as a professional portfolio. “You could use it almost like how an artist has a portfolio for their work … We want the main question, or even a first step in an interview, to be, ‘Show me your Hireup.’” Gorman said.
Gorman said that they are fortunate to be growing an HR/tech business in Ottawa as the city is “a hidden gem in terms of how big of a tech hub it is.”
Though Hireup is geared toward tech-adjacent jobs for now, Egener said the team would be open to expanding the platform to more fields of work.
This project has taught Egener that starting a business is less of a linear path and more of a rollercoaster, he said.
“The setbacks are so important, because that’s just where you learn so much. It sucks when it happens. We’ve had large clients that showed interest but fell out at the last minute. It’s frustrating, because working with them would have been huge for us, but you’re on that rollercoaster. You’ve got to hope that next week you’re on an upswing,” Egener said.
Gorman said that, especially as they get started, the most valuable thing to them is feedback.
“When we ran our beta competition with a local Ottawa company, we just wanted feedback. Just tell us what worked well, what didn’t and we’ll go and fix it. That feedback is really important so we can improve the site,” he said.
The Hireup co-founders hope to graduate within the next two years, as they continue to work full-time to make Hireup a success.
“We’ve committed so much to this that there’s no, ‘Once I’ve graduated, I’ll go get a job.’ For us, we want this to be our future. We want Hireup to be our career. This is something that we all see ourselves doing for a very long time,” Gorman said.
They’ve received grants and support from Concordia University’s innovation fund and the innovation centre at Queen’s University as well as from Invest Ottawa. But beyond the financial support, Egener said success can be attributed to the support from people behind the scenes.
“The environment that we all grew up in, we wouldn’t have been able to do this without that support. It was never a ‘you can’t do this’ attitude. Anything is an opportunity. There are so many people who are involved, maybe not directly, but are equally important. We all just got really lucky we were supported in these opportunities, whether it be teachers or parents,” he said.
“I’m just excited to get to work with these boys and start our own thing. I’d love to be bigger than (my dad) one day,” Gorman quipped.
