Don Charlton

JazzHR

Founder and former CEO

For a six-month period in 2008 Don Charlton sort of “blacked out,” he said. By day, he worked as a graphic designer. At night, he built his startup business. 

He called it his entrepreneural coma. Once you land an idea, he said, “The only thing you can do is focus on writing the next line of code.”

In 2009 — just as unemployment hit a high of 10 percent at the tail end of the Great Recession, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — he launched JazzHR, formerly “The Resumator,” as a recruitment software tool for small businesses. 

“Recessions are actually a great time to start a business,” said Mr. Charlton. It’s a time where workers have to become savvy, learn how to pivot, innovate.

“I didn’t want to be an unemployed designer at 50,” he said.

While there were existing digital tools for marketing and sales, like MailChimp and Salesforce, Mr. Charlton realized that the hiring industry didn’t operate well online, yet, and that small companies were suffering the most.

Around 90 percent of firms were still relying on email to recruit workers, he said. Companies that did use online job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder had to hurdle a huge paywall that effectively sequestered small businesses from advertising their open jobs.

Mr. Charlton found his primary market in technology startups, which certainly didn’t have the expendable funds to pay for job postings. 

He created JazzHR as a platform for businesses to post jobs online, recruit and track applicants, manage the interview process and measure recruiting performance at a reasonable cost. The startup — which now employs 55 between two offices in Chateau and Waltham, Mass. — also uses big data to analyze the skills potential employees should possess.

He formed relationships with recruiting companies who became unofficial affiliates, using and marketing the product. But he also had to watch as those businesses and niche job board companies suffered — mostly at the hands of job aggregators like Indeed.

His earliest clients included the likes of Uber, Instagram and Tumblr.

“These firms were still hiring to some degree, and they couldn’t find candidates,” he said. “The economy was not performing well enough to supply.”

That might be because the city did not yet have an impressive resume itself. Early entrepreneurs who tried to cut their teeth in tech were face-planting, he said.

“Pittsburgh was nowhere near on the map like it is today,” Mr. Charlton said. “It had a really dark period where there were people who took a shot in the early 2000s … and a lot of them got burned.”

Still, JazzHR managed to secure “Don and the interns” type of cash, he said.

AlphaLab invested $25,000 in 2009 when Mr. Charlton joined the East Liberty-based software accelerator. Today, the company has amassed at least $24.6 million in funding, according to Crunchbase, a platform for startups to self-report financing rounds.

The startup teams Mr. Charlton worked with were once lean and couldn’t afford to hire outside recruiting firms or implement a human resources department.

That’s still reflected in the firm’s pricing scheme: JazzHR offers a suite of services starting at $39 per month to promote jobs online and screen resumes for those cash-strapped companies. The top tier is $309 per month for additional features.

Although Mr. Charlton left his role as CEO, with Pete Lamson now at the helm, he hasn’t forgotten the lessons he learned.

“The biggest challenge was always feeling like you had just enough resources to keep on the lights,” he said. “And not being able to invest in growth was a pent-up frustration.”

Courtney Linder: clinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1707. Twitter: @LinderPG.

First Published: May 8, 2018, 8:00 a.m.