Moncton’s Qimple Rebrands: Introducing Alongside
MONCTON– One of New Brunswick’s most promising startups has a new name.
Qimple, a platform aiming to improve and simplify the hiring process for both employers and job seekers, has rebranded to become Alongside.
For co-founder and CEO Yves Boudreau, the reason for the rebrand was pretty straight forward. It basically came to down to the fact the name Qimple, which was a play on the words “quick” and simple” was hard to pronounce.
“Qimple was phonetically a bit of a challenging name for us. It was something we wanted to address a while back, but it was trying to find the right time to do it. We had some constant challenges with misspelling and pronunciation,” Boudreau says. “And I think the biggest thing was that every single one of our conversations, either with new clients or anybody for that matter, we would waste time discussing how to pronounce it, how to spell it and what it means, versus really discussing things that are more interesting and more important.”
The staff also wasn’t feeling it anymore.
“As we grew, it became a name that our team wasn’t necessarily connected with or felt that represented us anymore,” Boudreau says. “So I think all of those things combined it became inevitable for us to do it.”
They found the name “Alongside” after enlisting the help of Pauly Ting, who helped the company discover its “brand essence.” The selection of the actual name came with help from naming agency, Heirloom.
“Pauly really helped us identify some of those common values that we had and the words that came up a lot were ‘together’ and ‘togetherness’ and our desire for both employers to get a great experience and put their best foot forward, but also for job seekers to present themselves in the best possible light,” Bourdreau says. “So we care deeply about both of those evaluations and that’s why Alongside represented all those things for us. Working alongside employers, working alongside job seekers, but also internally as a team…working alongside each other and helping each other out.”
Twenty-sixteen has been a pretty big year for the company. This past summer the company announced it raised $1.1 million in seed funding and their team has grown from five to 13 people. They now have over 105 active companies and nearly 1000 job postings since launching in early 2015 with a 65 per cent hiring success rate. This November, Boudreau says they plan relaunch a total redesign of the Alongside platform, the biggest update since the company first launched. He says going through the rebranding exercise was like starting a new.
“It really brought our team together, so it’s not just about a logo and colours and a fancy tagline. Especially with a lot of new people joining the team…it really gave an opportunity for everyone to voice what they stood for,” says Bourdreau. “More importantly than just a logo, it’s change the strength of our team. You feel it. It feels different. It’s almost like a fresh start and it’s exciting.”