Fast-growing startups often struggle to hire exceptional talent quickly and improve diversity at the same time. BreakLine’s mission is to help fast-growing tech companies hire top-performing candidates from diverse backgrounds. Every company has different needs and as such, we work very closely with teams to form a joint success plan identifying priorities, short-term and long-term goals, and defining how success is measured for our partners.
All BreakLine participants apply to the program and are vetted extensively before being admitted. We carefully curate each cohort during an extremely competitive application process, which requires:
Throughout every phase of the admissions process, the #1 thing we’re assessing is “does this person have a track record of sustained professional excellence?”
There are two main channels we use to find talent:
While BreakLiners have a wide range of backgrounds, the majority join our program with 5-12 years of professional experience. BreakLine is not a coding academy or Bootcamp. Instead, our role is to provide education that helps individuals with a track record of professional excellence pivot into new roles. We believe that excellence is transferable and are confident that BreakLine participants have the skills necessary to uplevel your team no matter the role they come into.
Because BreakLine works alongside high-growth companies, we understand the roles our partners prioritize. From Sales, Customer Success, and Product to Software Engineering, Data Science, and Cybersecurity–BreakLine helps our partners hire top-performing candidates that can help drive growth. Beyond these areas, we’ve seen BreakLine candidates hired into every business unit including Finance, Operations, Strategy, and Project Management.
Our curriculum is focused on helping BreakLine participants get hired. Rather than upskilling our participants or providing certifications for technical skills, we help BreakLine participants take the experience and skills they already possess and translate them into career opportunities.
The three pillars of our education are Strategic Communications, Career Discovery, and Professional Networking.
Strategic Communications: interviewing is a storytelling skill set. Most people don’t have the appropriate coaching and context necessary to do well in their interviews. Everything from the stories you tell, the data you share, and your executive presence have an impact on the interview process.
Career Discovery: giving context around career pathways and helping participants connect the dots on where their background and skill sets align is essential. Deliberate career discovery leads to a higher candidate retention rate. Studies show that upon transitioning out of the military, veterans change careers 3x before settling on the right career. Our hypothesis is they didn’t spend enough time on career discovery.
Professional Networking: this is core to why we establish Breakline as a community – we’re building a network of advocates and champions. When our BreakLine participants enter a company, they might be the first, or in the minority, so we want them to have a ton of support. We’re really enabling folks to thrive. We teach classes through their first year on the job. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
BreakLine relies on a high-touch partnership model with our Customer Success team working alongside recruiters and hiring managers across our partner network. We work closely with your team to form a joint success plan identifying hiring priorities, short-term and long-term goals, and defining key success metrics. Our Customer Success team will hand-match high-performing candidates for each of your roles based on the specific candidate profile you are optimizing for.
No, BreakLine is not an agency. Agencies take talent already in the industry and shuffle them around to different companies. At BreakLine, we use Education as the mechanism to pull people into tech from outside ultimately creating new pools of talent. Agencies focus on quantity using volume to fill job recs, whereas BreakLine’s approach is very curated and focuses on quality. Our Customer Success team is dedicated to your success hand-matching excellent candidates for each of your roles.
Our team also works closely with candidates and provides support after they’ve been hired to ensure that candidate retention is high. The BreakLine network is a community that candidates can use to find support and ultimately success in their careers over the long term.
