Why aha! exists
Two things built this company. Ten years of hiring hourly staff badly and learning why, and a dissertation on a desk outside a childhood bedroom.
I was the person this is built for
For ten years I owned a Massage Envy Spa. The business ran on hourly people, and hiring them nearly broke me. I was drowning in unqualified applicants. I treated the job posting as a formality, when it was really my first interview, and I was failing it. I ran interviews like interrogations, and the best candidates were not impressed. I lost promising hires in their first few weeks, because what I was calling onboarding was really just paperwork. And I did all of it in the gaps, because there was never a week when hiring was the only thing on my desk. I did not want to hand it to a recruiter. I wanted a better way to do it myself. That is the whole reason this company exists.
Where the curiosity came from
I never met my great-aunt Bertha Friedman. But her desk sat just outside my bedroom door, piled high with research documents and letters from her career. In the 1930s, when most women were not considering college at all, Bertha earned a doctorate in child psychology. I read her dissertation, Foundations of the Measurement of Values, and found a kindred spirit. Her work asked what people actually value, and how you would even begin to measure it. Her aim was to help teachers guide students by understanding the values behind their success. Her question became mine, moved out of the classroom and into the workplace. Not only can this person do the job, but what does this person value, and will this environment let them thrive. Those two things sit behind everything we build. One taught me what goes wrong. The other taught me what to look for.
What we are not
aha! Talent Experts is not a recruiting agency. We do not source or place candidates for you, and we do not fill your seats. We build the system that fills them, and we teach your team to run it.
What we do
Fractional talent acquisition
A senior hiring leader inside your business for three months, building automated sourcing, screening, employer branding and campaigns into the tools you already run.
DREAM Hire Engine™ hiring system build
The full system on our platform: a branded career site, a 24/7 chatbot, one-way video interviews, one dashboard to decide in, and five AI recruitment specialists your team can use for any role.
The DREAM Hire Framework™
Everything we build runs on the same five stages.
Define
What the role actually needs, and what success looks like in the first 90 days.
Reach
Where your candidates already are, and how to get in front of them there.
Engage
Keeping candidates warm without anyone having to chase.
Assess
Structured interviews and scorecards instead of gut feel.
Motivate
Onboarding and the first weeks, so the people you hire stay.
It draws on performance-based hiring, hiring for attitude, and structured scorecards. None of it is guesswork, and none of it rests on how someone happened to feel in the room that day.
Andrea also speaks at masterminds and industry conferences, including YPO, EO, Pinnacle Global Network, Salon Cadence and The Dog Gurus. See speaking.