Othamar Gama Filho and the advantage of doing less

A company can grow until its founder stops hearing it. Othamar Gama Filho noticed the change when he no longer knew all his employees personally. What reached him came through managers. Each account had already passed through somebody else’s judgment. For an entrepreneur in the recruitment business, this was an awkward discovery: the people were there, but their voices had acquired a forwarding address.

He built Talent Sentiment to shorten that distance. Employees could offer feedback anonymously, including brief responses on their phones. The practical question behind the software was disarmingly personal. How could he know what people thought about working for him if he only heard what travelled up the management chain?

That question gives his later career a useful point of entry. Gama Filho, now the co-founder and CEO of Talentify.io in Greater Orlando, has worked across recruiting, digital media and mobile technology. His businesses have changed shape. He keeps returning to places where an ordinary exchange becomes unnecessarily difficult: an employee offering an opinion, a candidate applying for work, a hiring manager arranging an interview.

A growing company, a quieter founder

In 2013, Talent Sentiment was taking shape as a separate venture. Gama Filho had stepped away from running Recruiters Brasil to concentrate on it, while remaining on that company’s board. The idea had been tested inside a business before being offered outside it. Its first audience was close enough to tell him when it did not work.

The design favoured short interactions. Managers could ask focused questions; employees could answer without attaching their names. In its early free version, the platform covered eight dimensions of working life, including the job, management and workplace infrastructure. Elaborate surveys were not required for every exchange. A small question could arrive while an answer still mattered.

By January 2015, he was explaining another reason to send those questions to phones: some employees might distrust answering sensitive questions on a company computer. Anonymity in a product description and confidence in using the product are separate achievements. The person answering has to believe the promise.

He had already taken Talent Sentiment to international startup gatherings. At Dublin’s Web Summit in October 2013, he also became an informal photographer for fellow Brazilian founders, sending pictures of their stands to a Brazilian startup publication. Pitching his own company apparently left time for a little foreign correspondence. The gesture preserved a glimpse of the group around him, rather than just his own exhibition table.

A meeting worth crossing a border for

Gama Filho was born in a beach town in northeastern Brazil. His father was an entrepreneur. He went to Miami, studied at the University of Miami between 2000 and 2004, and met someone interested in starting an e-commerce business in Brazil. He returned. The geography of his career began moving back and forth well before Talentify had an American office.

“I always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he said in 2022. There followed years of trying businesses in Brazil, including recruitment outsourcing. Helping large employers hire across the country exposed the limits of the operation. Some of the work could be turned into software. He wanted someone who understood the industry to look at it.

He contacted Rudy Karsan, the founder of Kenexa. A proposed half-hour conversation became a three-hour meeting. Karsan offered mentorship, with investment a possibility if there was traction. Encouragement was enough to help prompt a move to the United States with his wife; a small team remained in Brazil.

The software connected steps that employers otherwise had to assemble across tools: advertising a vacancy, letting candidates screen themselves and arranging interviews. “We put everything in one solution,” Gama Filho recalled. There is a respectable amount of entrepreneurial ambition contained in the word “everything.” Delivering it introduces rather more work than saying it.

The customer with two seats at the table

Talentify was established in 2015 by combining recruitment, mobile development and online media businesses. Its formal US market entry came in early 2017. The mix helps explain the original product: experience getting people’s attention, experience building for phones and experience handling recruitment could all be put to work on the same vacancy.

Cielo became an early commercial partner and investor. Its January 2018 announcement described FLUX, Talentify’s first product, as software that attracted, screened and scheduled hourly candidates. Sue Marks, Cielo’s founder and CEO, backed the approach. Earlier coverage also recorded Karsan’s informal advice and Marks’s investment interest. Gama Filho had found people with experience selling the kind of service he hoped to change.

In describing the partnership later, he said Cielo sold a service using Talentify’s technology underneath. The arrangement supplied access to customers. It also gave one organisation considerable influence over a young supplier. A customer can want features, while an investor can want growth; when both requests arrive from the same place, the founder has some careful listening to do.

Karsan had warned about that dependence. Gama Filho said the advice helped him resist some requests and seek a separate route to growth. Exclusivity narrowed the obvious alternatives. Selling to employers directly brought long sales cycles and difficult integrations. Building a complete recruiting system would require more capital and more exposure than he wanted.

He chose specialization. The product became simpler, aimed at a problem buyers could recognise and address promptly. Direct-customer revenue began gaining traction around the middle of 2018. In his account, Cielo’s share eventually fell to roughly one fifth of revenue. The company could keep its early relationship while building a broader commercial base.

“From the beginning, we were profitable.”

Othamar Gama Filho, May 2022

The reported figures give that period some scale. In May 2022, he put Talentify’s revenue at $1.5 million in 2019, $3.5 million in 2020 and $9 million in 2021. These are his historical figures. They describe the business at that point, rather than a running total or a measure of his personal wealth.

Monday morning, with evidence

His public writing often lands on details smaller than a funding round. In December 2017, he argued that employers needed job applications designed around phones. Shrinking a desktop experience was insufficient. Candidates still faced forms whose demands were inconvenient on the device they had chosen to use.

His argument linked application design to access and advertising costs. Buying attention has limited value if the destination makes people give up. A person interested in a vacancy can disappear between a click and a completed form. The vacancy remains open, and the employer may mistake a design problem for a shortage of interest.

In January 2019, he examined another disappearance: candidates missing interviews. His team had analysed more than 55,000 hourly interview outcomes across twelve months. Monday between nine and ten in the morning performed well in that dataset; eight in the morning did not. He also acknowledged that correlation did not establish the reason.

There was a practical catch. Employers could not move every appointment into one attractive hour. Overbooking might protect a manager’s schedule but leave candidates sitting around. His discussion considered shorter intervals for roles with high no-show rates, while recognising the experience of people who arrived. A full calendar can look efficient from the chair behind the desk.

Leave room for the recruiter

Gama Filho’s enthusiasm for automation sits alongside an interest in what it leaves people responsible for. In 2018, he wrote about recruiters as ambassadors for candidates and hiring managers, overseers of the application process, and protectors of company culture. Removing tasks could leave more room for relationships, judgment and intervention.

That argument extends the responsibility of a recruiter beyond locating a name. Someone has to notice a poor experience and speak to the hiring manager. Someone has to help a candidate understand the next step. Software can move information through a process; the participants still need a reason to trust what is happening.

He had addressed trust explicitly in a March 2015 essay. Recalling a conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2013, he described two Google engineers suggesting that employee sentiment could be inferred from company emails instead of asking people for feedback. He questioned the implications of that approach. An ability to collect information did not settle whether employees would welcome the collection.

His writing also follows the larger platforms around recruiting. In 2019, he discussed Google’s job-search presence and later considered the retirement of Google Hire. Those were different product stories with consequences for employers choosing systems. His attention went to distribution, integrations and the inconvenience of moving data when a tool disappeared.

Today, Talentify presents its Job Ad Hub around a related operational question: what does each open job need next? The offering brings together recruitment advertising data, guidance and campaign decisions. It is a current expression of a problem Gama Filho has approached from several directions: helping people decide what to do with the information in front of them.

When asked about Talentify’s future in May 2022, he left both financing and a sale open. He also said, “We believe we can go big.” His route to that possibility had already involved leaving some ambitions alone. The useful thread through his career is the attention paid to a particular exchange, and the willingness to make it shorter. An employee can answer. A candidate can apply. A manager can make the next decision. There is plenty to build in the space between those verbs.