Moving Up, But Not Away

In today’s marketplace, companies looking to hire and retain top talent are finding it difficult to do so because the cost of hiring and replacing valuable employees is high.

The 2011 Employee Engagement Report conducted by BlessingWhite, a workforce development consulting firm, revealed that the number of North American employees determined to leave their organization has nearly doubled since 2008. Thus, the onus is on large organizations to keep talented employees from jumping ship.

Enter UpMo (www.upmo.com), a Silicon Valley-based talent recommendation engine that helps enterprise-level companies retain talented employees who might be thinking of leaving for other opportunities. How? UpMo uses an employee’s social media accounts (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) to create a profile that shows HR managers and recruiters where the employee would like to go in his or her career and if there are open positions that are of interest to that employee within the company. For the employee, it allows them to be up front about their career goals and to liaise with those who can help them to achieve those goals.

This helps employees move ahead and employers to recruit personnel internally who may have otherwise gone unnoticed. “We want to let people own, manage, and drive their careers,” says Promise Phelon, the company’s founder and CEO, who also started The

Phelon Group, a management consulting company, before founding UpMo. “More people think about landing a job when they’re in between roles, but they think about their careers when they are actually in a job.”

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After generating revenues of $10 million at The Phelon Group, she sold her shares to her partners in 2008 to start UpMo. Phelon knew it was going to be hard, but her persistence paid off.

Phelon intentionally pursued wealthy investors with the mindset that they would be willing to take the biggest risks. She was right. She raised an angel round of $4 million, and her investors–which include Pat Sueltz,

the former president of SalesForce.com, and Brian NeSmith, former president and CEO of Blue Coat Systems–are some of the most respected and influential people in Silicon Valley. “Our angels are the lifeblood of our company,” says Phelon. “They have helped us make great connections.”

With 20 full-time employees–most of whom work on the software engineering team–the company is now raising a second round of financing that will be used to extend its current offering into the mobile space, integrate with existing collaboration platforms such as SalesForce.com, and provide more robust analytics. While UpMo originally launched as a service for individuals, Phelon saw more opportunity in the enterprise space. The company re-launched in January 2012 with the intent of working more closely with organizations to help them understand how their structure and business units are set up so people can move throughout their company. HR managers and recruiters are provided with a dashboard that gives them an overall view of the organization and its employees. UpMo’s algorithm uses collaborative filtering and crowd intelligence to help them get in touch with others who share their goals or who are in positions they would like to move into. Phelon has big hopes for the company‘s future. “We want to build a product that every professional uses.”

–Sian Morson