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Trace’s Story: Drowning out the noise & finding nerds with Wellfound's Curated

How entertainment and sports technology company, Trace, uses Curated to level-up their sourcing game and find the best talent for their team.

Industry: Entertainment, Sports, Media Technology

Company size: 51-200

Trace is the company behind the ground-breaking technology that automatically films and edits video into highlights for every player on the field. With Trace, players, parents, and coaches are delivered the edited moments that matter to them, eliminating the arduous task of sifting through a 3-hour game for split-second clips.

Led by founders Anatole & David Lokshin, Trace has revolutionized sports highlights as we know it, providing consumers with the video they want, without the video they don’t. With Trace technology, every experience is tailored to the spectator, and athletes and spectators alike are loving it. Currently, hundreds of thousands of athletes use Trace monthly, from national teams to kids just starting out their athletic journey.

Technical talent hiring challenges for Trace

The challenge: Finding enthusiastic technical talent without the headache, hassle, and most importantly, without time wasted for their small but agile team.

Trace has a history with various sourcing companies, but after trial and error, they now exclusively rely on Wellfound to find the right candidates for their expanding teams. The reason being? They discovered a game-changing similarity between our product and their own: it cuts down noise, curates content and saves valuable time.

“What we’ve found through Curated is better candidates, faster sourcing, less headache, and overall better results. To sum it up, here at Trace, what we give our customers is time back; what Wellfound did for me as the hiring manager is much the same — it gave me time back. There’s so much noise on the other platforms, we didn’t find that on Wellfound.” —David Lokshin, Founder

Key differentiators of Curated for hiring top engineering talent

Curated follows through with it's promise: effective curation of top technical talent. From product designers to engineers, Trace utilizes Curated to find the best hires across various technical skill sets. Compared to other sourcing tools, Trace found it easy to personalize their sourcing to fit their unique needs, and the streamlined efficiency ensures the team can make great hires faster than ever.

Trace also took advantage of expert sourcers at Wellfound to discover, vet, and pitch quality candidates based on their unique preferences and needs. Sourcers also assist with seamless interview scheduling to minimize friction and initiatie meaningful connections without any back and forth.

The takeaway, Wellfound keeps efficient and effective recruiting at its core to ensure Trace continues to find the perfect candidates for their growing team.

Andi Narveez, Director of Marketing at Trace, speaks to this key differentiation compared to costly competitors:

“LinkedIn and a lot of others have become content marketing platforms, with people posting daily, weekly updates to build their brands and to get likes and comments. That interface has become very repetitive, and somewhere along the way the value and intended use case of recruiting talent got lost in the mix. Wellfound has preserved the recruitment element; enabling that transaction in the most efficient way possible”

Trace was looking for nerds, and they found them on Wellfound

The Wellfound profile is one of the most important factors in finding the best technical talent for Trace. With niche features woven into the profile, it makes it easier than other platforms to discover candidate attributes beyond the traditional resume. With integrations for coding projects, personal websites, portfolios, and other links related to side passions and skill set, Trace is able to find alignment through their actual work, rather than words on paper.

“Wellfound is nerdy across the board, everyone nerds out on their thing. They can’t help it. When I think of Wellfound vs. other sourcing platforms, the others are expensive, they’re not technical, and they don’t understand what it means to be a nerd. For example, at Trace we don’t hire anyone who doesn’t have a side project. LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to talk to engineers, or provide insight into what excites them. Wellfound has links to add a GitHub portfolio, easter eggs within their code, all the little things that make it easier to understand the candidate as a whole. To sum it up, Wellfound segments and segregates when it comes to nerds."—David Lokshin, Founder

Trace's Curated success metrics

Curated user since: 2022

Number of Curated candidates hired: 4

Key roles hired: Graphic Designer, Product Designer, 2 Full-Stack Engineers

Ready to build a talented, enthusiastic team to nerd out over your product? Check out how Curated can help bring your dream team to life.