Right now, Bellhops looks more than a little like another insular, exclusive group for distributing opportunity among the few. New college graduates often find their first jobs through fraternity connections, a leg-up in life that sometimes compounds a pre-existing privilege. Yes, fraternities are about friendship, communal living, and partying, but they're also about creating a pre-approved network for sharing opportunities later in life. The living résumé is another way in which the Bellhops community mirrors Greek life. Called living résumé, this feature fulfills the same role as, say, a letter of recommendation from a college job. Inspired by this trend, the company set about building a new product meant to help bellhops share their reviews with potential future employers. At least one Bellhops alum landed an engineering job that way. In fact, some bellhops have actually used their testimonials and ratings in grown-up interview settings. "Effort, attitude, and punctuality are some of the most important skills you can bring to an entry-level job," he said. While moving skills probably has little real-world application outside of the gym, Doody says these other categories are universally high-value. "We are starting to even things out now that we are searching for more qualified candidates that don't come directly from our platform."īellhops has a ratings system that allows both users and fellow bellhops to review each other based on punctuality, effort, attitude, communication, and moving skills. "With the majority of our bellhops being male, you can see the natural trend as we have grown from a small company," he wrote. Part of the problem, Doody wrote in an email, is that the pracitce of promoting especially talented movers to full-time directors has severely limited the diversity of the Bellhops talent pool. The company is working to shift the gender discrepancy across its workforce. These people, he said, are much more likely to consider relocation to Chattanooga and a career at Bellhops. Doody described using LinkedIn to track down Southern prep school graduates who went on, often post-Ivy League, to get jobs at companies like Facebook or Google. At Bellhops, playing on similarities and shared culture is one of the few ways (besides the pontoon boat) that the company can get talented engineers to move to Tennesse. Bellhops typically apply to the company after hearing about it through friends, many of whom are recruited via college athletics, ROTC, fraternities, or other social clubs. Nearly 80% of the Bellhops office staff is male, as are 99.6% of applicants to be bellhops, according to Doody. "The culture is a super-big portion of how we do things," said Doody. Here is a video of their office staff celebrating a positive Yelp review: Applicants are asked to submit videos of themselves doing push-ups. It keeps a pontoon boat on the Tennessee River to help recruit engineering talent. In November, the company raised some $6 million in Series A funding from investors including Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian and Chris Sacca's Lowercase capital.ĭespite having spent the last three years at a tech incubator in Tennessee - the company culture still bears the markings of having been conceived at a public university in the South. The company came of age in Birmingham, Alabama, where Doody and his co-founder Stephen Vlahos expanded it to cover off-campus moves - typically jobs whose size and difficulty places them just above what the average person might be feel comfortable doing herself, but just below what would merit hiring fully professional movers. The idea for Bellhops came to life on the campus of Auburn University originally, the focus was solely on moving college students. The fact that he was sweatband-less clearly upset Christian, but luckily Goode was able to locate a second in his car. The only difference was that Goode was wearing the bright green sweatband that bellhops are known for, while Christian - who, despite being Team Captain, had only done two moves before - hadn't received his yet. Goode and Christian arrived at my house, separately, in nearly matching outfits exercise shorts, athletic socks pulled halfway up the calf, sneakers, and T-shirts bearing the names and logos of their respective universities. I had hired them through Bellhops, a Chattanooga-based startup that aims to harness the underutilized labor pool of college undergraduates by allowing people living nearby to commission them as amateur movers. Christian, along with Stephen Goode Jr., a 19-year-old rising sophomore at UC Berkeley, was there to help move me and all my belongings 10 blocks north to a new apartment in Oakland, California. "Your succulent game is on fleek," Sean Christian, a rising senior at UC Davis and proud Theta Xi, told me in my living room on Sunday.
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