YOU SHOULD KNOW

YOU SHOULD KNOW

Daniel Oppong

The founder of OhanaHealth is helping bring tech talent to town

DANIEL OPPONG is a problem solver with a network.

A former recruitment director for health care seed-stage investment fund Jumpstart Foundry, Oppong used his experience working in the startup space to become an entrepreneur. He says he strives to create meaningful solutions for real people: “For me, it’s mostly about following my curiosity — doing things that I’m interested in with people that I enjoy.”

Oppong works his day job with a technology startup in Seattle, called Limeade, that focuses on employee wellness. When he’s not working on making the workforce happier and healthier, he’s striving to fill it with promising young adults. His latest venture serves as a major professional development and recruiting tool needed in an industry destined for massive change: the intersection of health care and technology.

Oppong in 2017 founded OhanaHealth, a talent acquisition and job placement company, during his time at Jumpstart. His goal was to make tech positions at health care companies more attainable to young professionals by coupling job opportunities with workforce development and internal networking programs. The professional development part is key, Oppong says, due to the daunting nature of much of health care for non-clinical workers. It is a difficult assimilation he knows well.

“When I came to Jumpstart, I had never worked in venture, never worked in health care, never worked in tech. So I had a pretty massive learning curve as far as: What does it even mean to think entrepreneurially? What does it mean to work in health care? What are all these acronyms that I’m hearing all the time?” he says. “We wanted to create a meaningful way to support early-career candidates as they kind of transition into their first job.”

OhanaHealth now recruits fellows from all over the country and places them in health IT roles within high-growth businesses that pay Ohana for new talent. Most of those companies are startups based in Nashville, which has long faced a large deficit of technologists that regularly causes promising area ventures to compete for the same local talent. This is a problem OhanaHealth aspires to solve.

“We have seen more students apply from outside of Nashville than we have in Nashville, which is interesting,” Oppong says. “We’ve had students from Stanford to Colombia to UPenn — all over the place — as well as HBCUs. So I think it’s a pretty broad spread. We’ve been able to bring in people from di erent parts of the country that are actually moving here for these jobs. So I think there is an economic impact opportunity.”

In their first year, Oppong and his five-person team collected applications from 170 students across six schools to join the program and partnered with Jumpstart to feed talent to the 10 to 15 early-stage businesses the fund

'There are other companies that play in the space, but there aren’t any other ones that focus exclusively on health and health innovation.'

invests in annually. By this year, the talent pool had grown to 1,000 students from 120 universities and the company was filling job vacancies for a number of other fast-growing businesses, including some being cultivated at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.

So far, the venture’s numbers aren’t large. Of those 1,000 applicants from 2020, only 1 percent have been placed into a job opportunity. And after four years of fellowship programs, Ohana has placed only 36 candidates with partnering companies — although Oppong expects to grow that number by 50 percent just next year. He also is ready to add scale with OhanaConnect, a more self-serve jobs board geared to young professionals and companies that was launched in September.

Next on Oppong’s to-do list: Building new growth opportunities by integrating artificial intelligence and data analytics to the job board as a way to identify opportunities most compatible for users and build a subscription-based payment model for companies looking to hire Ohana fellows. He also wants to further grow his network of businesses and young professionals and provide services he says other job search platforms don’t. It’s the part of his job that — unlike those labyrinthine health care acronyms — comes naturally.

“There are other companies that play in the space, but there aren’t any other ones that focus exclusively on health and health innovation,” he says. “That’s one of our greatest differentiators.” > KARA HARTNETT