RiseSmart, Inc.

Company: RiseSmart, Inc., San Jose, CA
Entry Submitted By: IdeaGrove
Company Description: Founded in 2006 by CEO, Sanjay Sathe, RiseSmart helps displaced employees and job seekers find new jobs, fast, by providing next-generation outplacement and RPO solutions, using one-on- one support to help employers with their workforce strategy, and displaced employees with their career strategy. With 65 employees, RiseSmart also won the Champion of Diversity Award in 2010.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Most Innovative Company of the Year - Up to 100 Employees

Nomination Title: RiseSmart: Putting America Back to Work

Tell the story about what this nominated company achieved since January 1 2010 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

RiseSmart is helping to put America back to work by providing next-generation
outplacement solutions to transitioned employees. The company combines a unique
blend of sophisticated technology and consulting services to help employers with
their workforce strategy, and displaced employees and jobseekers with their
career strategy.

Founded in 2007, the company is disrupting the $3 billion traditional
brick-and-mortar outplacement industry with a new approach. Traditional
outplacement assists companies with their layoffs and downsizing events,
providing office space, grief counseling, and on-site group seminars. That
business is inherently low-tech, purely service-oriented, and most importantly,
is ineffective in helping displaced employees to their next job. RiseSmart
changes all that by aggressively focusing on what employees want and need
most—getting a new job.

The RiseSmart scalable model disrupts brick-and-mortar outplacement businesses
that cannot compete on price due to the high costs of that model. RiseSmart
offers an affordable, cutting-edge approach using a web-based portal application
that pushes participants personalized, relevant job leads, articles, blog posts,
and other individualized content to help each person find a job quickly. Every
participant is also assigned a certified, highly trained, and experienced
transition job specialist who works individually with them to assist in meeting
each unique job search need.

In the front-page Wall Street Journal story, “Outplacement Firms Struggle to Do
Job,” journalists Phred Dvorak and Joann S. Lublin reported that traditional
outplacement support packages “offer little value” to workers and leave many
feeling dissatisfied.

The RiseSmart flagship product, Transition Concierge, places primary focus
around securing a successful end result – a new job for the individual in
transition. That approach is working with astounding results. RiseSmart is
successfully placing individuals in new jobs 50% faster than the national
average (according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics). Because of these
outcomes, the company also achieves some of the highest customer satisfaction
scores in the industry, and has achieved 100% customer retention to date. So
it’s not surprising that RiseSmart is now the fastest- growing outplacement
solution company in the United States.

For organizations experiencing job reductions, Transition Concierge offers a
dynamic new model for transition services. Transition Concierge dispenses with
traditional `soft` services – which are costly to employers, but of relatively
low value to employees. Instead, RiseSmart aggressively helps workers find a new
job-- fast.

In a country where 27.5 percent of employees telecommute, according to Gartner
Dataquest estimates, workers also have little interest in setting up shop in an
outplacement provider’s office space to conduct their job search. Employees
would much rather be at home (or at a coffee shop) networking online on their
laptops.

Because Transition Concierge employees find jobs so much faster, RiseSmart is
also helping employers save money—in the form of reduced severance payments,
unemployment taxes, and legal costs. RiseSmart is the first choice for
organizations where individual needs and personal attention to both the
corporation and the employee come first. More than a dozen Fortune 500 companies
have switched from traditional outplacement firms to become RiseSmart clients.

The Wall Street Journal has highlighted RiseSmart as a new kind of outplacement
firm for Fortune 500 companies – one focused on results. Business Week touts the
RiseSmart methodology as making “a lot of sense.” The San Jose Mercury News
says, “RiseSmart typifies the valley's knack for using technology to disrupt
standard business practices.”

RiseSmart has been named one of the 2011 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area by
the Silicon Valley Business Journal and San Francisco Times, a 2011 Red Herring
100 finalist, and a 2011 TiE50 finalist for most innovative company.

RiseSmart is headquartered in San Jose, CA, and has a wholly owned subsidiary in
Pune, India. The company has received $11.85 million in venture and angel
funding to date, led by Norwest Venture Partners and Storm Ventures of Silicon
Valley.

List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader of this nominated company:

For two decades, Sanjay Sathe was an executive for global corporations. He
served as vice president for enterprise data management for Sabre Holdings, a
$2.5 billion leader in travel commerce. Before that, he was senior vice
president of marketing for Brierley & Partners, the CRM and loyalty management
company. He served in executive roles in Europe and Asia with corporations such
as Lufthansa and HSBC.

Sathe might have stayed on the corporate track, but in 2006, he hit a bump in
the road – when he was “transitioned” by Sabre. He found the experience of
searching for a new job frustrating and inefficient, so he decided to create a
company that would search job listings on jobseekers’ behalf. That was the
genesis of RiseSmart.

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