According to CNBC, 38.6 million people quit their jobs last year, and that’s just through October of 2021. If you are feeling FOMO because you weren’t part of The Great Resignation, the good news is that there is still time to put in your notice and find the career of your dreams. Chicago tech is starting the year off strong, and the 10 companies featured here are kicking 2022 off by bringing on new talent.
While the companies we’ve rounded up are all different, they’re all offering new hires more than just a change of scenery. Liz Walla of Hireology was promoted in 2021 and given the opportunity to build a new sales team in the company’s newest industry vertical. After working with a senior colleague, Paula Zabala decided to pitch a women’s mentorship program to leadership at Litera, which was well-received. Josh Hoag of Vibes had the chance to work with some of the top AWS consultants around on a recent project and beefed up his own AWS skills in the process.
If growing your career or skill set is high on your to-do list for 2022, continue reading to learn more about some of the best open opportunities in Chicago tech right now.
What they do: Deliverr is a third-party logistics provider that enables e-commerce companies to compete with the heavyweights of the internet when it comes to shipping. The company’s 70-plus warehouses and logistics tech enable it to offer brands of all sizes two-day shipping.
Describe Deliverr’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
Embracive. Working almost entirely remote, feeling embraced might be the last thing you’d expect from your company. At Deliverr, regardless of what team you’re on or department you’re in, we’ve found a way to make everyone feel welcome and a part of the team. Sales can be very competitive, but our sales team genuinely wants everyone to succeed and we love celebrating each other’s wins.
If you’re not feeling confident for a call, don’t worry. We have about 70 “ready to shadow” account executives who are happy to join you until you get your footing. Our team, as widespread as we may be, is just a Slack or video call away.
How long have you been with Deliverr, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
I joined Deliverr in August of 2020, and at that time we had just 13 sales reps total and the sales organization was, well, completely different from what it is today. Not only have I and the company grown in that time, but most of the people I worked with have grown as well. I started as an individual contributor to really understand the position and the product. It wasn’t long before I moved into a team lead position managing an initial team of five. That number quickly increased to over 15 people and in six months I became an SMB sales manager.
With teams continuing to grow, I helped to create a developmental role for management by adding an assistant team lead to each of our teams. This was an exciting step as we helped three reps gain management experience for the first time. I was definitely challenged in the last year and used it as an opportunity to perfect my change-management style. Starting next month, I will be taking on my next challenge as our newest mid-market manager. Growth at Deliverr is inevitable if you want it and work for it!
What they do: Vibes is a mobile marketing company that enables brands to interact with consumers at scale. The company takes an omni-channel approach, enabling clients like Allstate, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Ford to market new products and promotions via SMS, push notifications and through mobile apps and wallets.
Describe Vibes’ company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
Empowering. Leaders and management encourage innovative thinking and action and strike an excellent balance between providing us with direction and guidance while making space for autonomy. I feel empowered because I receive incredible support and because Vibes is extremely focused on setting people up for success. My leaders make sure I have the tools and resources necessary to do my job, and when I don’t, all it takes is reasonable justification to fulfill my requests. At Vibes, my manager partners with me to make sure I have what I need to succeed and encourages me to be creative in how I do my work.
Vibes is also a people-first company, and I am consistently encouraged to bring my authentic self to work. Additionally, my boss provides actionable guidance on how I can successfully do the same for others. Between the support and focus on allowing me to be myself, I know that I have what I need to make decisions and contribute my best work.
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
I recently had the opportunity to build a new model that will help our customers create more engaging and effective marketing campaigns. At Vibes, we work with some huge multinational brands, and it’s exciting to help them make data-driven decisions about how to activate and inspire their consumers.
Recently, I had the opportunity to work on a propensity-to-buy model alongside best-in-class AWS consultants with the objective of learning if this type of purchasing model would help our customers improve their audience targeting to deliver more engaging mobile messaging content. In collaborating with the AWS consultants, I was able to more effectively and efficiently use AWS pipelines for different model deployments.
On top of getting the chance to work with these subject matter experts, I was also able to engage enterprise brand leaders from different industry verticals to participate in testing our models to see if they would garner the results they were seeking. Working with global brands allowed me to learn from amazing marketing teams and test at an unbelievable scale.
What they do: Sprout Social is a social media management, analytics and customer care platform used by over 30,000 companies, organizations and institutions, including Subaru, UNICEF and Purdue University.
Describe Sprout Social’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
Engaging. Sprout Social has an engaging company culture where employees are inspired to do their very best in any given situation. An engaging company culture begins with leadership. At Sprout, we often hear from senior leadership on the importance of working together to prioritize being the most accessible and adaptable team while growing and learning from one another.
Sprout’s leadership team invests in their employees’ success and wellbeing. After the hardships of 2020, our leadership team encouraged employees to take time off as needed to recover from burnout and prioritize mental health. We are encouraged to block off our calendar to catch up on work and dedicate one day per week to focus on tasks of our choosing to help us be more productive and obtain a healthy work-life balance.
How long have you been with Sprout Social, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
January marks my third anniversary at Sprout Social. Throughout this time, I’ve grown professionally by working on specific skill sets that apply to customer success and getting involved in collaborative projects among multiple departments. In my early stages as a customer success manager, my long-term goal was to improve on sales and negotiation tactics. Before Sprout I was a social media strategist for advertising agencies and I did not have to exercise negotiation skills in external conversations so much.
Aside from the assistance of my manager, who coached me on best practices, Sprout launched department-wide sales enablement courses and workshops to help teams improve this skills. Sprout’s leadership team has also played an important role in my professional growth by sharing progressive techniques that have worked well elsewhere. Throughout my time here, I have been supported in my goal to further develop this skill and have the resources to keep track of and measure success and improvement throughout the year.
What they do: Enova is a fintech company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide loans to consumers and small businesses who cannot access traditional credit lines.
Describe Enova’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
Inclusive. In fact, Enova’s five core values derive from inclusivity. I am fortunate to have a team that is diverse in background, experience and expertise. My team is composed of people with varied cultural backgrounds and experiences who contribute rich insights. Our response to remote work, both as a team and business, exemplifies this culture.
Unfortunately during remote work, informal chats in the kitchen and at our desks were replaced with more formal and time-consuming video calls. This initially created some fatigue within my team, but our inclusive culture helped us collaborate and share best practices for remote work. Most of my team members participate in several affinity groups, which help immensely in building a culture of belonging.
How long have you been with Enova, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
I joined in August 2010 as an analyst on our business analytics team and had the opportunity to work on a variety of business problems until March 2013 when I left to work at a bank. However, I missed working on new business opportunities and learning from the brilliant minds at Enova, which brought me back to lead the portfolio analytics team with the aim of building my technical and model-building skills. As I raised my hand to take on more, I was tasked with leading one of our U.S. products in 2016, which challenged me to work with stakeholders to help grow our direct mail program.
In 2018, I was handed the reins of all our U.S. products and exposed to cross-product decision-making. I brought together cross-departmental minds to build a unit framework to assess customer lifetime value. This gave me the opportunity to learn new skills, own new responsibilities and help stakeholders make decisions that keep our customers first. Now as a director of portfolio analytics, I lead a team of data scientists and credit risk analysts who oversee all consumer products. Enova’s commitment to its people and the way it values ownership has allowed me to carve out my own unique journey.
What they do: Litera uses artificial intelligence to help law firms spend less time putting together legal documents. Litera’s software suite is designed to make it easier for legal teams to draft and collaborate on documents and also features an automated analysis tool that scans for both typos and text that may create a reputational risk.
Describe Litera’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?’
Welcoming. We [Clocktimizer] recently got acquired by Litera and have felt welcomed from day one. Litera is very diverse: We cover almost all of the time zones, and this naturally means that we get to meet people from different cultures, countries and ethnicities. One thing I have found we all have in common is how open we are to one another. We empower each other and speak positively about the future. I feel we are all aligned and will accomplish great things because we’re being taken into consideration no matter where we are located or where we come from.
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
The launch of our new training concept, masterclasses, which I love. We got the idea from Foundation, our sister company in the firm intelligence unit, and we adjusted it a bit to serve our customers better. We were able to grow this initiative and make it consistent and have recurrent attendees. I did this together with my colleague, Lea, and I learned so much from her, which gave me the idea to reach out to Litera and ask about mentorship programs for women where people like Lea can share more of their experiences with young professionals like me! They were absolutely responsive and interested, which makes me believe I am at the right company.
What they do: Accelerated Digital Media is a digital marketing firm whose specialty is performance marketing. The company takes a data-driven approach to its work and offers custom strategies for clients on paid search, programmatic and social media advertising.
Describe Accelerated Digital Media’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
Collaboration. When companies go through a period of growth, it can be an enormous challenge to develop and preserve a lively, supportive culture. Over the past two years, our team has grown in size by over 400 percent and many of these new team members are fully remote. Being a people-first company, it’s vital to value everyone’s thoughts and not only welcome feedback but consistently ask for it. This helps us to adapt our company culture as our needs evolve.
We also have a culture team that gathers monthly to discuss how we can organize events throughout the year— both in-person and virtually — to inspire a healthy amount of fun, and we love to try new ideas to keep events fresh and engaging.
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
As an agency, we pride ourselves on cultivating a workplace that supports its employees in their professional as well as personal pursuits. Having grown so much, this year, we noticed an opportunity to make our benefits package better reflect our values. We expanded our maternity and paternity leave policy to better support the physical and mental health of our employees and their families. As the landscape of the modern family unit changes, we also ensured that our benefits package is inclusive of coverage for domestic partnerships.
I’m incredibly proud that my organization actively looks for opportunities to support each team member’s success and personal fulfillment. To this end, I anticipate us reviewing and enhancing our benefits offering regularly.
What they do: Pangea was founded as a mobile remittance company and has since branched out. Today, in addition to remittances, Pangea also offers a mobile banking app and debit card and partners with other businesses to offer its software as a service.
Describe Pangea’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
Nimble. If a strategy we thought would work isn’t successful, we are willing to course-correct as a team. Earlier in 2021, we were projected to be just short of our customer acquisition goal for the month. The entire team across marketing, product, engineering and operations came together to quickly shift our focus to meeting that goal. Within a few days, magic happened. We went from possibly missing our goal to surpassing it.
That wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t have an agile and adaptable culture focused on quarterly outcomes. We always welcome new team members who will help us rethink our processes and approaches to make us better.
How long have you been with Pangea, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
I joined Pangea in 2018 as the VP of product, and at the time Pangea was solely a remittance application. Since then, I’ve built a team that has launched new capabilities like international bill pay, scheduled transfers, and a no fee, no minimum mobile bank account for the underbanked. Pangea was recently acquired by Enova International, and while it continues to operate as an independent subsidiary of Enova, we have a similar mission to help hardworking people get access to fair financial services.
Now, as SVP of product and marketing, I am responsible for driving consumer growth across organic and paid channels. In 2022, I’m looking forward to continuing to build my team of creative and performance marketers and customer-obsessed product designers and managers.
What they do: Hireology creates software designed to make it easier for teams to recruit, hire and onboard top talent in the automotive, hospitality, healthcare and professional services industries.
Describe Hireology’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
Progressive. Hireology’s CEO, Adam Robinson, says one of his favorite things about our company is watching people grow and develop within the organization. As a business, we are growing and innovating at a rapid pace, which creates opportunities for career advancement. To help foster this progressive culture, we offer mentorship programs and weeklong job shadow opportunities where employees can gain exposure to positions they’re interested in or simply learn what our peers in other departments do. In 2021 we promoted 44% of our employees, myself included!
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
Over the past decade, we’ve successfully partnered with hundreds of customers in the hospitality space, and earlier this year we named hospitality as our newest vertical. For the past eight months, I’ve been working with our business development, marketing and sales teams to ensure we have the necessary resources to continue delivering value to our customers in this industry. Leveraging my sales background and knowledge of Hireology’s technology, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with top industry leaders to gain insight into the market and understand current needs from their perspective.
After completing this process, I now have a greater understanding of what it takes to scale a business; it’s critical to have a structured framework that provides a thoughtful and data-driven approach to identifying and launching new markets. Having successfully validated our product-market fit in hospitality, I’m looking forward to the new challenge of building a hospitality sales team, sharing my knowledge and providing our hospitality customers with everything they need to build their best team.
What they do: SpotMe is a B2B event marketing platform that enables users to create a custom online or hybrid event using a no-code platform. SpotMe also offers tools for keeping online attendees engaged, which include an applause feature, live Q&As and live polling.
Describe SpotMe’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
Nimble. In this new post-Covid-19 era, I truly believe that SpotMe has proven how nimble we are as an organization, both from a product and team standpoint. When Covid hit, it impacted our business in ways I don’t think even our executive team saw coming. We had to rethink our approaches, strategies and processes when events came to a complete halt. Within a matter of months, we had a new direction for our existing products, expanded to new products and created new and restructured roles for our employees, which has enabled us to continually grow as a company.
How long have you been with SpotMe, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
I’ve worked at SpotMe for almost five years and in my time here I’ve held about three different roles. As my business acumen grew, SpotMe continued to find new and exciting roles for me. Each new position presented its own set of opportunities and challenges, as well as giving me the ability to work with some of our Fortune 500 clients. I’ve worked alongside some outstanding individuals and been given great opportunities to develop my project management, strategic thinking and problem-solving skills. Most of all, I have truly learned how invaluable it is to have great coworkers. Not only do they make going to work enjoyable, but I know I’ll learn constantly, laugh often and I trust that each team member will get the job done.
What they do: BigTime’s software offers time, billing and expense-tracking solutions for professional services firms across a variety of industries, including accounting, consulting and architecture and engineering.
Describe BigTime’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
Selfless. It could be as simple as joining a 7 a.m. meeting or as complex as reworking your day because something critical has surfaced. The instances are countless, instances where a team member makes themselves available to support someone in need.
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
I find unique value behind every project, but the one that helped me grow most recently was with a Native American-owned business that had three divisions and was considering BigTime for their architecture arm. In my 15 months here, I’ve found that firms most easily see the flexibility of our system in the context of reporting and invoicing. In this particular instance, I was going too granular with a person who didn’t need that level of insight. And the result?
I wasn’t recommended to leadership. By pulling the curtain back too far, I actually showed too much and it gave the perception of difficulty versus flexibility. In short, keep it simple and let questions and ideas drive the depth of your discussion.
