The most creative businesses work with the most creative talent.

But it’s easy to get lost in the recruitment wormhole. With so many different potential avenues for hiring to go down, how do you begin to separate your Indeed’s from your LinkedIn’s? And how do you know your company is being seen by the best candidates?

Well, Brainchild is here to help solve that problem.

A talent platform designed for the 21st century, Brainchild connects the best businesses to like-minded candidates, whether they’re looking for freelance, contracted or full-time positions.

To learn more about their people-first approach we spoke to Founder, Tessa Lin-Wang, to get the low-down on hybrid hiring and creating a tech platform that suits both employer and employee.

NearU: Can you summarize what your platform is/does in a sentence?

Tessa: Brainchild is a marketplace that matches startups with emerging creative freelancers based on shared values, skills and market knowledge, to fulfill their marketing and design pipelines. 

What role do you see technology playing in the future of work? How will your platform fit into that

It’s allowed us to have our own sandboxes alongside our 9-5s. There’s a breadth of access to knowledge and interconnection like never before – work is done differently – but I’m especially excited about its ability for people to find opportunities differently. The idea of serendipity is no longer limited to ‘bumping into someone in the elevator at work’ - new spaces are forming (web3) and new ways of filtering are facilitating the chances of them actually happening (AI, machine learning). 

My vision for brainchild is to further catalyze this. We don’t want to stop at creating meaningful matches, but we want to help creatives design and think about their nonlinear careers – before we facilitate new collaborations/partnerships/roles for them to actually make their goals happen.

As an early platform we’ve been staying closely engaged with every company that signs up, so it’s given us a fun peek into their hiring process and where we come in. 

There’s an interesting datapoint around the new filter questions/ qualifiers that founders like to throw at our platform during their search – “are there any creatives who are good at memes?”; “what do they care about?”; “do they have tiktok?”

This has been a goldmine for us to understand what founders truly look for, and what sort of creatives we should be targeting beyond the generic portfolio/ university filters. It’s also helped us to observe the direction that job roles (and not just their titles at face-value) are headed towards – and they’re moving faster than ever.

I would like to think so! There’s a huge incentive for companies from a talent acquisition perspective too – we’ve been able to match a more diverse pool of creatives with them. I get a buzz just thinking of the diversity of creatives (and ideas) that this is going to further unlock.

Outside the Notion/Slack.etc crowd, I’ve recently been tinkering with Almanac, which I’ve begun building long-form wikis with. 

There are also ones that inspire me to reimagine the role of a platform as drivers of digital work. I’ve currently got a couple of tabs open about Gumroad, a platform that drives the commoditization of digital goods for micro-creators. 

We’re currently hyper-focused on emerging creative freelancers: those who are just getting their foot in the door, are intrinsically motivated to learn how different markets work through practice, and have incredible skills/world views to give.

The businesses that we work with have become springboards for many of these freelancers, giving them access to world-class projects and helping them to build their network, before going on to make more informed decisions around how they want to navigate their careers.