BC Business
The Sauder graduate studied finance but realized that it just wasn't for her. So she became a tech recruiter.
Life Story: Taline Ainein studied finance and human resources at Sauder, but by the time she graduated in 2016, she realized that a career in finance just wasn’t for her. “I was never excited by the job descriptions or by people describing what their day-to-day looked like,” she says. “I noticed myself always being drawn to the recruiter’s job there.”
Landing her first internship at local gaming studio A Thinking Ape, Ainein, who moved to Vancouver from Lebanon at 13 years old, fell in love with tech recruiting. With an inherent desire to create something herself and be her own boss, she co-founded Invenio Talent Partners with Mathew Low in 2021.
The four-member company now partners with high-growth tech startups to help scale teams. Invenio becomes an extension of its clients, with access to accounts, Slack and applicant tracking systems: “When we sign on a new client, we’re onboarded as if we were hired internally to their team,” says the co-founder. This way, the recruiter gains an in-depth understanding of the client’s culture, values and needs before placing candidates.
For her company, Ainein’s goal was to combine internal recruiting (which she loved) with agency recruiting (which was too transactional for her). As a result, Invenio charges clients a weekly rate as opposed to following a contingency model where clients are charged a percentage of the candidates placed.
“The single most important thing for me was to find a job that I would wake up to on Monday and be excited to go to work for,” she says.
Bottom Line: In its first year, Vancouver’s Invenio Talent Partners scaled from zero to 12 clients and generated $1.3 million in revenue. Ainein credits the growth to client referrals, most of them being based in the U.S. The company’s projection for its second fiscal year (based on the current number of staff and clients) is $3 million in revenue.