October 4, 2022
Description
In this episode, Chris and Arran go into detail about who is Job.com. Listeners will find out Job.com mission and vision for the future, details of how the company came to be, and more information about it’s co-founder, Arran Stewart.
Arran Stewart is the Co-founder and CVO of Job.com.
Transcript
Chris:
Hello, and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change in talent management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today we have a very special guest, chief visionary officer and co founder of job.com. Arran Stewart, this is going to be a two part conversation. But today’s episode is all about job.com The mission and where it is going welcome Arran Stewart to the Talent Tide Podcast. How are you?
Arran Stewart:
I’m very well, Chris, and thanks for having me on here. So I’ve actually to be fair of all the podcasts and all the different things I’ve been on for all out my career, I’ve been most looking forward to and waiting with bated breath to be on talent tide, because I remember when we first you know, kind of did the deal with endevis. And I remember looking you up, I was like, he’s got his own podcast. I was like, Well, how long is it gonna be until I get on there. And now you know, a meer, you know, 14 months after closing the deal, and you become part of the family. I’m finally on the
Chris:
shelves, and I’m on it just like a pretty girl, you can’t
Arran Stewart:
be too easy. Too easy.
Chris:
You know, I had to make the beg and ask a couple of times.
Arran Stewart:
I did.
Chris:
The level that you had to be at before you come on, you had to work at agile a little bit. So we have two parts. I’ve given you two parts. There’s a very select few people have ever gotten two podcast episode. So this one I’m excited about because like I said in the intro, we’re going to be learning more about who job.com is, which I think is really important. You know, you’ve been on podcast before talking about job.com You’ve had different conversations where in my opinion, the opinion was what job.com was, or is might have been misconstrued. Oftentimes, we’re out in the market at different conferences and things. You know, we always get the thing of like, Oh, your job board? And it’s like, no, no, we’re not. But let’s have a conversation about that. And so I thought, You know what, we’ll record a podcast and we’ll just let everybody know we can we can listen in this way. So before we get there, how about you introduce who Arran Stewart is because you got this funny accent? You know, I live in America, but obviously you haven’t always and I don’t think everybody knows who you are. So why don’t you share with with everyone who Arran Stewart is?
Arran Stewart:
Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I do have a funny accent. And I sometimes wonder is getting better. I got feedback, actually from a friend of mine in the UK that was like, Hey, you use a lot more American words now you’re starting to sound like you’re changing. I was like, gosh, and then actually when I thought about it, it’s true. So so I’m Arran Stewart, I am from Luton, which is a town north of London, rather large town called a million population grew up there born and raised 25 years I lived there. I’ve been in recruitment rec tech for 15 years, I have been fortunate enough to have a very colorful career in the space. Originally started at s3, shout out to the guys at s3 actually owned a job board called the IT job board, which was kind of like my first true work gig in this space. I had other jobs. My very first job was in construction Lane curbs. And then I did car insurance sales for the Royal Bank of Scotland. I’ve done all sorts of stuff, but really in this industry. I started and it was it was with s3 in the IT job board. I was very arrogant. When I was young and thought when I was working there. When I was working on the job board that I could, they’d given me a subdivision of the IT job board called IT jobs in the city. And they were like having me go out there and kind of effectively take that job board to market this in the 2000s. And I was like taking note of all the money that they were making out of this website, which honestly at the time was very primitive. Like, we wouldn’t even tell our clients, we wouldn’t even have access to database to our clients, we would just tell them we had this it almost felt like a made up number that they would tell us Oh 650,000 candidates in the database it’s like Okay, is there where are they? Like, you know, there’s just there’s just made up but they were making a fortune, like 10s of millions. So I was like I can do this myself. So I left and I set up. This was at a time where LinkedIn in my opinion was really getting a hype and like you know all about networking and people being able to network with each other and, and I came up with this brilliant harebrained idea that you could create a job board that was for networking for blue collar workers and allow them to kind of almost refer each other into work and stuff like that. When you say out loud, now it doesn’t sound too stupid. And if anything, might even sound a little bit like Job, just just throwing it out there. But this was, you know, 15 years ago, it failed miserably. I spent so much of my own cash on it up to my eyeballs in debt, it was a real tough, horrible time. But off the back of it, we created a distribution products, which basically allowed you to multiplex your job onto lots of different platforms and sites. And it also included the media buying in it. And a friend of mine was like, he was a, he was a director of Michael Page at the time, and he was like, you should just productize that and take that to market. And that was born I resourcer. And that was the business that then became part of Hamilton Bradshaw Ryder, the whole James Caan crew, all of that stuff. And that was the one that I would say, kind of put not put me on the map. That’s not true. But it definitely was a major step towards changing my life, changing the direction getting credibility, working with some incredibly talented humans that obviously existed in that organization. They set up a separate article, Hamilton Bradshaw Rida technology, so RIDA stood for recruitment industry development agency. And I was just in charge of basically put him in deals and roll up deals to do with, you know, augment, or, you know, augmenting tech for recruitment and stuff. And, yeah, so that was cool. And then in 2000, to 2011, we set up myjobmatcher, which is what we know today is job.com. And I can’t believe that we’ve been doing this for 11 years, and five years ago, I moved to the US and I’m married, we’ve got five beautiful kids, I’ve got a dog called Bernie. And I’ve got two top choices as well that I’m currently looking at oppositely in my office, so and that’s me Arran Stewart.
Chris:
I love it. I think that that’s a good intro for you. Because I’m not sure everybody understands like how long a you’ve been doing the job.com thing, right and how you got here. So I want to get into that sound, but also your background, right? Everybody knows you, honestly in America as job.com Arran Stewart and so I think helped me to paint the picture of like how you got to being job.com Arran Stewart is really important for our market here. Who are you? You know?
Arran Stewart:
Who’s this guy? Who is? Who is this weirdo? So no, no, I’m, well, I appreciate it. And I think it’s great. You know, America has been really kind to me, in a sense of when we arrived here, it’s very scary moving to a completely different country. Thankfully, culturally, it’s not hugely different. There are some nuances between Aussie London and Texas, of course, but in a sense of language, and barriers, and all that stuff, you know, those things are overcome quite quickly. But America has been an amazing move for us as a business and my family. And I’ve been really lucky that so many industry professionals in the market have given the time of day to want to learn more about my story, the company’s story, what we’re trying to do, and in some respects, you know, have been advocates to what we’re trying to achieve. There’s a lot of humans still in the market that still don’t understand what we are who we are, which is, you know, part of today probably helps towards maybe clarifying some of that, if they have the time to listen, our job is just to continuously spread the message until the message becomes clear.
Chris:
Absolutely. We’re going to have the time who’s not going to want to listen to to both guys.
Arran Stewart:
Everyone’s listening to the tide, bro. Everyone’s everyone’s everyone’s is tidy at the tide is.
Chris:
So you talked about coming to America. But before that job.com was around, right? What is job.com? Can you kind of take us through how job.com came to be in its current iteration and what it is?
Arran Stewart:
Well, so this is the bit where, for anyone that confuses us as a job board, of course, I completely understand how and why that would happen. Firstly, job.com was a job board here in the US from 2001. At one point during the 2000s. I believe that before the true rise of Indeed, it was possibly with CareerBuilder monster is one of the largest job boards in North America. I mean, it had, I remember when we bought the business, I mean, we did the due diligence on the historical traffic. It was huge. Like I said, like, I think like 35 million unique visits a month, which kind of puts it not too far behind where zip recruiter is today. So yeah, it was it was massive. So anyone that did remember it or knew it back then with its original ownership, of course, but in 2017 You know, job.com had not was a victim of what happened to the industry right? The you know, the king is dead long live the king which was when in detail monster basically A and then CareerBuilder didn’t really progress either. And then you had the new incumbents you had indeed. And then you also had the heavily funded zip recruiter kind of take market share. And then was this kind of slightly historical left behind job board called job.com, which really had not progressed or kept up with what brings a candidate to a website, which is marketing and SEO, they have not invested or double down in that, like the other competitors, like, indeed, zip, indeed, went down, SEO zip recruiter bought every piece of radio and TV, they could possibly get their hands on, you know, and that’s how they built their empires. So when we acquired the business, it was in distress, it was a business that was had gone backwards, but was sat on a whole heap of, you know, like 55 million registered users, and also had, you know, possibly the best URL known to man for our space. But we realized as a business ourselves, which had started as my job match, oh, we were an aggregator in the UK, we would match people’s resumes to an aggregated job search or population and basically send them an email with the most relevant jobs for them every day, and it was very populate got millions and millions of people using it, you know, every month. But again, that behavioral patterns of the job seeker, were driving more and more towards zip recruiter, and indeed, and we could see the writing on the wall that unless you had huge amounts of money for marketing, you were kind of really not going to compete. And it paid homage we paid homage really to my background being with Hamilton Bradshaw, which was obviously a big product, a group of recruitment and staffing agencies. And then my business partner, Paul Sloyan, had built and owned and sold multiple recruitment, staffing agencies as well. And we were like, Okay, is there a way when you look at the experience of how a recruitment and staffing agency works, right, and there’s 20,000 of them in North America? And there’s 227,827 Recruitment consultants in North America? What is their process for how they deal with a human, and I got battered for this on the chat and cheese show. So if like, you know, if either of those two are listening right now, hopefully, you’ll give me a squeezed when I explain this, and compare us to Uber. Okay. But what did Uber do for the process of ordering a cab, it streamlined it, it removes so many of the clunky processes of how to order a cab, where to order a cab, you know, deciding your destination, all of those different things, right. So our first iteration with job.com was to automate recruitment and staffing for a consumer facing URL, like Uber is a consumer facing platform for traditionally for ordering a cab and it streamlined so many of the clunky processes that do that job.com want you to do the same. We want you to create a process where you’re immediately assigned to a recruitment consultant through a website URL, something you’d never see on Indeed, you’d never see on zip recruiter, you would go through more scrupulous matching, not generic broad, what I would call curiosity matching, which is what Indeeds and recruiters do, because they want to drive high levels of response, you know, their goal is for high levels response, we want to we want to be much more filtered and find that needle in the haystack. Because we’re making money when we do placements. We wanted to do the screener. And we also wanted to do sheduled, within which scheduling within the ecosystem. So the experience for the job seeker was I go all the way through to one knowing which recruiter I’m dealing with to knowing if I was successful, and actually matched the job or not three if I pass the screener questions, and if I did do that, four I’m talking to Sarah, the recruiter tomorrow at 1030 and experience you just don’t get on a normal job board. And that akin like for like for him for an Uber, you know, excuse me for using it but it’s it’s something that we can all resonate with, is streamlining processes to create a digital experience towards recruitment and staffing. Obviously, that’s only the first guys and iteration of what we’re doing. We have so much more planned within our roadmap and how we make that, you know, exponentially better for the job seeker. But but that’s what we’re doing. We needed a route to market well, the recruitment of staffing industry is hugely competitive. And I think at first I remember we acquired high virgins. It was like why they bought this small little recruitment agency in the middle of Florida. And now it’s obviously become more apparent why we’re doing it and it was again, on the on the cheese chat and cheese podcast. They’re like they’re forcing the recruiters to use it and it’s like, Well, I wouldn’t use necessarily such aggressive language as forcing there’s no one there with guns at people’s heads just machetes, you know. So
Chris:
As far as I know everyone wanted to use it from
Arran Stewart:
everybody want to use them because they want to be part of a digital digital revolution
Chris:
wants to make your job easier. And that’s really what the technology that we’ve developed is about is making the lives of recruiters easier every day to make
Arran Stewart:
it easier for Think how many of those processes from job selection to advertising to database searching and matching to then matching and shortlisting screening and scheduling, if all of that is done in a singular streamline process through a domain URL, like job.com, and it’s been done 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and I’m not having to do any of that, as a recruiter, I’m just waiting for good candidates to land in my inbox to do to sorry, my calendar to tell me when I’m going to do a quick 15 minute call with them. That’s that’s pretty cool. Right? But the user experience is exponentially better for the job seeker. And now, I don’t go into that black hole of like, I just applied for a job on, you know, indeed, and I don’t know whether or not I’m going to speak to anyone or I don’t know whether or not they’ve even looked at my resume. I have no idea. I actually know that if my resume doesn’t pass the match that I’m not going any further. I know that if I answer the screener questions wrong at job that I’m not going any further, I know that I’m sheduled if I didn’t make up for it, as I, you know, I’m gonna repeat myself now. But I’m scheduled to talk to Sarah tomorrow, I know that I made it that’s, that is an exponentially better user experience as a minimum viable product.
Chris:
For the comparison, Uber makes the most sense, right? And, and we’re obviously honing in on that. But the reality is, when when, and look, I never had to experience this because I’m a millennial. But I assume from movies that if you wanted a taxi, you had to stand out on the side of the road in New York and hope that one would stop by with your thumb out in the in there, right. Or maybe you could go to a dial up phone and call them and say, Hey, I need a taxi at this time or whatever. That’s how it works. That’s the same experience a candidate has when they go to a job board, they’re putting their information in, they’re holding their finger out, and they’re hoping that somebody stops, but they may not. And okay, somebody stops, they have no idea what the experience is gonna be like when they get in that car. They don’t know who the driver is. They don’t know if they’re any good or not. And that’s what the technology that we’re developing at job.com does. It allows them to be able to see a recruiter profile, the same as you get an Uber profile, it allows you to see in the future state ratings of said recruiter right and be able to say
Arran Stewart:
yes, that’s right, which we like we’ve we’ve worked with great recruiters, by the way, plug right in. Yeah, I
Chris:
can see oh, wait, the recruiter that I’m working with is actually an engineering recruiter, like they only do engineering, recruiting. That’s what I want to be as an engineer. So now I’m talking to somebody that understands my industry. And that is why I think the comparison to Uber makes the most sense, right, is we’re creating an experience that’s great for the end user. But in the end, it actually creates a great experience for the recruiter as well.
Arran Stewart:
Yep. So I just want to point this out that you did a much better job of explaining this than I did. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna actually hand the baton over to you, Chris in the future. And we like don’t talk to Aaron, because he gets too fluffy on words, because he’s British. And they will try and say, Chris is much better. You did a freaking brilliant job of explaining that. You know,
Chris:
as co founder. You know that, then you are right.
Arran Stewart:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You don’t want to the smartest person in the room, I’m saying are the smartest person on this podcast. So that’s great. But I do want to double click in though because I actually purposely listened to the chat and cheese podcast again, the other day where they kind of talked about our marketing, our positioning the message to the market. And the reality is, is that they will write, you know, they are writing what they said. And, and obviously, you know, when they beat me up on the Uber thing, because I’d only done a rant on LinkedIn and not provided some context behind it. I was like, Okay, well, obviously, I’m not saying that with the Uber for criminal se, but I’m saying this is how that process automated many components ordering a cab. That’s kind of where we’ve gone with the, you know, the recruitment staff inside through a digital platform for a job as a digital staffing platform. So and which again, you know, it’s new terminology is
Chris:
using to everyone, right, like that’s the problem is that, yeah, we’ve been around for so long, Arran, that there’s it is confusing, like what do you mean a digital staffing? Does it staff those staffing companies use digital processes to find candidates? Sure. Right. But
Arran Stewart:
they do. They do. But do they do it in a singular URL that represents their business or brand the whole way through? Do they provide do they provide complete transparency for who the client is the whole way through the application process? No, they don’t like like, like our candidates land. And they’ll know that they’re going to beta Scott White. You know, and that’s just you know, that that’s, you know, this this is, this is the difference. These are the fundamental nuances and differences that you’ll see. I mean, eventually, we want to have for salary transparency the whole way through the hiring process, too, because, as we’ve seen the laws change in in, you know, New York State and New York itself. And I think there’s nine other geographies around the US now that game through this transparency piece, you know, we love transparency, right? That’s what we want. I mean, we’re standing hugely promotional now, which is kind of what this this is, I don’t. But I just wanted, you know, for anyone that’s interested that does want to know. And then, of course, except there’s going to be bias from me, because obviously going to have the founder rights, of course, I’m biased. But these are the nuances. These are the differences, that we have a roadmap towards creating a vertically integrated hiring experience that takes you the full way through the journey of hiring to the point that you end up at the company. And in the end, when we redeploy you on assignment, off assignment off assignment, because sometimes I think people forget if they’re not familiar, but like seven, 8 million people moves work in the last 12 months, roughly 66% Those movements are typically internal labor market movement, Ilm. So people moving in existing company. So 34% brand new hires 16 million of that 34%, which basically half are, what more is are from staffing, recruitment agencies, staffing agencies are putting over half the brand new talent into work every year. So it would naturally feel like why is there not an Uber esque Amazon esque digital experience, that is a view on destination URL, there is just taking people from the point of application to the recruiter they’re dealing with to the client, they’re going to be hired by and then forever, redeploying them out in the market, akin to what recruitment staff he is currently do, but digitally, through a digital experience, you know, I don’t go to the store and wander around the store and look for what I want to buy, then go to the cashier and then put it there and they pay it. I just go to Amazon and I do it all digitally. It’s the same thing. I browse I look for I’m looking for I do it much quicker. You know, it’s this is the same process automation for what would normally be a bricks and mortar heavy, clunky process. Good news Arran,
Chris:
you mentioned that you thought we were selling too much the talent tide podcast represented by job.com. So you can sell as much as you want to, you’re paying for this time.
Arran Stewart:
Job.com is a hate or technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform and talent solutions on the market. Our mission at job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective talent placement, better fit career moves, and a more human hiring process. Wow. Well, I’m hoping like, you know, when we share this that you know, people do listen, if they’re interested to learn more. And actually just to give some kudos back to SIA, by the way, so because I had a proper random them a moment. Firstly, John, who’s sia personally, who’s actually a friend as well, he reached out to me with a huge email explaining, you know why there might be a misconception in the market what we need to do to do it. And it was a really, really depth thought out feedback to me, and it made me feel bad. They actually made me feel bad for my rant. So if SIA, have you listened to this, I’m sorry. Because John was
Chris:
so directly to the folks that say, Hey, let’s send it to
Arran Stewart:
John. John is a really nice, so they’re all really nice, actually SIA. And the reason why I bet and I was annoyed is because I know that their strategy behind having first content news to market for SEO to be the beacon of knowledge in the industry, stuff like that, which they are, but they have worked with us and me for some time. And I was annoyed that the opening gambit was job board. I was like you. Yeah, I was like, you know, that is not what we are. So mutually, I think we can all agree that they definitely realize we’re not and they do. And but same time. Maybe I shouldn’t have maybe I shouldn’t have been so brutal with my response, but it frustrated me because, you know, I want them to remain this beacon of knowledge in the industry. So they have to go above and beyond to make sure whatever information they release to the market is accurate. Okay, because they’re not the consumer. They’re not like if, if a candidate called us a job board, if a person in HR called us a job board, if a person hiring managerjob as a recruiter because I completely understand but the voice of the industry who’s going to be on the post of this stuff like when they called eightfold AI chatbot it was like, you know, it was it was not cool, but I do I’m sorry, SIA because you did write me hugely long at The Nation and I want to be with them at the CWs. And the gig economy piece thing in Dallas, I got to see him face to face, you know?
Chris:
each other accountable. Right? So that’s really what is being accountability partner. So well, let’s keep this thing rolling. Because we could talk on this all day. And this was my concern with bringing Arran Stewart on is that he and I would talk throughout and not get anything accomplished. So we made to do, yeah, we’re probably gonna start a daily a daily thing here. So we can just get all of the things out that we want to say. So why did you come to America?
Arran Stewart:
Good question. That you Okay, well, let’s talk about the we can get into some truth as well. Because it’s always sunshine and rainbows and stuff like that, right? I came to America because we have reached a point with my job matter which that’s what it was at the time, right? Where it was like, Where does this business go? there been some fundamental changes with GDPR in the European Union, and then also been some fundamental changes with what was called universal job match. So anyone in the UK that’s an industry will know exactly what I’m talking about. But basically, the government’s website for reaching unemployed people in the United Kingdom told us that we could no longer use that to reach those users. Because it was I think, kind of classes anti competitive, which is just the UK all over. So now you can’t reach people who are unemployed with jobs. So that’s anti competitive. It’s like, yeah, whoever made that up is a genius. So But nonetheless, it may trading and growing in the UK, and already a small market, tiny market next to us, just not as appealing. And you’ve got to look at, I will spend just as much time there trying to grow the vision of what we’re doing as I will in the in the United States, but the US, USA is just a, you know, a bigger, more affluent, more, adopting more, it’s just a better market. You know, I’ve lived and breathed in both. And I can tell you, this one is a better market, it just is. So that was the business case. The personal case, I want is a new opportunity for my family and my children. Okay, I grew up in a really ghetto part of the United Kingdom, actually, if share the article voted the worst place to live in the whole of the UK. So it I can’t remember the name of your you don’t have to do is put in this code. It was it was just called the Endo. They call it the end of humanity. Luton Town. That was the article, right? I grew up in that and I grew up in a worse part. My wife and I both grew up in the worst part of it, right, we’ve made up all of our lives. And we weren’t living there then and after. But I just had like relationships and historical memories, and just things of that nature to do with my life there that I was just very comfortable closing a chapter on and saying, You know what, I want to live the American dream. And I want to go to a place where I can nestle myself in a lovely little suburban bubble, which I have here in Lakeway, in Austin, and I can raise my kids that way. And I’m delighted to tell you everything I thought that would happen around that actually did. And we have a beautiful neighborhood. We have a beautiful home that we built. My kids are so happy at their school, my wife has met her lifelong best friend here now who they’re just like that Aaron, Jenny. And I’m really happy I made that leap. The only thing that wasn’t good, which was the most challenging thing of my life as we were trying to create this new world for ourselves. My new life, my family was my eldest daughter is not my wife’s, okay, I had her my ex relationship. And at the time, she did not live with me. I had her every weekend, we had gone through several, you know, fairly lengthy court decisions and battles with her, her mother and I wished by the way, her mother’s a brilliant mother, were great friends, but it’s just sometimes when you’re trying to go through those circumstances, you know, disagreements can happen. Okay. But we’ve gone through some fairly lengthy court battles, I’ve managed to gain, you know, be have access, retain again. And then maybe a few months after that final battle, you know, I had to then sit her down and very mind was so close and tell her that I was going to move to America. And it was the hardest conversation I ever had to have in anything in my life. And, you know, she asked me she never see me again, which obviously just broke me down in tears as a father. And you know, the first year I flew 132,000 Miles flying back and forth to pick her up for school holidays and just to see her and stuff like that. It was really tough. But as it transpired, because of the beautiful American dream, and the beautiful place that we live, and the wonderful people that live here. My daughter also fell in love with what America has to offer. And she moved with us and aim fell in our custody in 2020. So, you know, it all beautifully worked out in the end and I was so grateful to the universe for that happening. So yeah, that’s that’s why I moved to America there’s a challenges but actually thank God it turned out really really good for us you know, there’s a saying in the UK right there’s a TV show called Only Fools and Horses and it would be a real like cockney guy talk like that and me like he who dares rodders He Who dares right and that’s kind of what always goes in my mind anyone that knows the UK and knows Only Fools and Horses will know exactly what I’m talking about very well common thing UK but he who dares Rodders he who dares. So And definitely we did and it worked out good.
Chris:
We will be putting the YouTube link in the in the podcast notes at the end of the show for that. Hey, guys, my new hashtag that might be jumped out comms new hashtag.
Arran Stewart:
He Well, we have to make sure it’s inclusive. So we
Chris:
might not do? Whoever? Yeah, whoever does? Yeah, who can make it? I’m on board with that. Yeah. You know how jeff.com came to be? We’ve covered how you got to the greatest nation on Earth. And it’s true.
Arran Stewart:
I agree with I agree with so
Chris:
how do we Where’s job.com? Going? What what I mean, obviously, there are misconceptions about what it is today. But let’s let’s kind of wrap up here with with word job.com goes from here. What is what is it?
Arran Stewart:
Well, we we finished this sort of first iteration process automate, the first component of a recruitment consultants desk and a job seekers experience which is job goes out to market talent lands on the job reads it loves it can see which recruiter is working on it and who they’d be assigned to. They apply shortlist match screen shedule but then that bits done. But then the bit that needs to be done after that is all of the feedback loop and creating a beautiful image and timeline for the candidate that says this is where you are, you’ve been submitted to the client, you know, this is their feedback, or this is when your interview is with the client or you are successful or not successful or the negotiation piece. And then if you get hired than a piece after that, which is Hey, thanks, Aaron for being in your job for the last six months you’re coming to you and your assignment, we found another great opportunity for you. You can go forward for this. Basically creating what I would call my career, you no excuses of terminology, but almost concierge, something that just stays with me, right? If I sign up to job.com, why would I ever not want to be on it? It puts me into great roles. It puts me in touch with a human force anywhere else. I always know where I am in the hiring process. And I can, you know, consistently find myself new opportunities and know exactly who I’m going to work for which recruiter I’m dealing with and have transparency on my salary, all these extra things that just provide a much better experience, end to end. That’s that’s the sort of nearest and dearest didn’t you know, crudest of experiences that, you know, we continue to build out and make better? We have a huge vision, which we’ll see. Because I’m you know, I don’t like to do things by halves, but I will. Yeah, and I’ve talked about this in the past. I’ve been talking about this for five years, but it’s around the standardization of information. You know, we’ve got hundreds of recruiters a job that calm that are validating humans and credentialing humans every day to get them into companies. And there are hundreds of 1000s of recruiters doing this every day for 16 million people being placed into work every year by the staffing agencies, there is not a single source of truth behind someone’s career history anywhere. Okay, that’s on a framework that we’re all willing to adhere to, or what would be classed as a Cooperative Governance Framework. Okay. We have done an extensive amount of patents around this continue to do a huge amount of patents into the future for this, which is to create a single source of truth by citing someone’s credit history and objective quantitative based, did Aaron work I resource it yes or no? Did Aaron get this degree? Yes or no? Did he get this grade? Yes or no? information that can be forever crystallized. And you know, we’re all about blockchain. Right? And we’ve had people were like, oh, it’s blockchain, because they’re using a gimmick work. No, we, I mean, some of our patents are hugely extensive in utilization of that technology and why we believe that a single source of truth by someone’s career history, there’s only one other area in our lives that we’re used to having a single source of truth and that’s in our credit score. We allow that to a date that like you know, we’re dear to that with everything from our car loans to our houses, to our mortgages, etc. This this think of this as a credit score for your career. And it’s something that everyone in industry would adhere to as a single source of truth behind you. It sounds hugely ambitious. But I feel that there are many players out there in the market, I think that are also looking to do this trying to do this. The piece where I think that we have a competitive advantage to doing over others is that one, we are consumer facing digital experience running high volumes of candidates through a process, which allow us to gain this single source of truth data over everyone else and to we are seriously patenting the life out of this. And and I think we’ve got, you know, not to reveal the secret sauce, but I think we’ve probably got the jump on most people when it comes to doing this stuff. And that’s, I want job.com to become the home of someone’s career history. That’s what I want it to be for them. If 60 million Americans are going through the route of recruitment and staffing, then that’s a big enough populace of data. That means we can become the home of where people manage their career. So
Chris:
you’re talking about that. And I think most people initially say, everybody’s a little bit closer to their data than they’ve ever been before in history, right? There’s, there’s concern about who does what with data, but maybe how do you quell fears of humans that are worried about their data? And what it means to have your data in a centralized place? Like we’re talking about here?
Arran Stewart:
Yeah, so So, again, so let’s make sure we use sort of terminology. So single source of truth on a decentralized service system, right, which is blockchain. So yeah, why why would I do that? Well, we’ve all become pretty, you know, credit score came out in 89. And I know most humans that are concerned about their lives, their careers, their their financial health, they adhere to the framework of making sure that they have a great credit score, because it allows them to live their lives the way that they want to. But the moment most studies show that 78 to 85 percent of candidates lie in their resume during the hiring process. And and that’s gamification is causing issues when it comes to the time it takes to validate someone really, if they were who they said they were when you place them into a company, retention. Some of those, some of that misinformation might be like, Oh, I cycled three times a week. And it’s like, no, you don’t have that peloton in your garage is a bloody close hanger, okay? And that’s fine, who cares? It doesn’t really make any difference. But it might be a bit of senior developer at such and such. And actually, you will know more than a junior or some, some of this more significant will the fears for a person as well, the people that really will not want it will be the ones that know that they’re providing misinformation, okay, because anybody that can see the writing on the wall that providing a validated profile for yourself to streamline your onboarding, your hiring, if I could tell you that average time to hire in the United States is roughly 42 days. And if you have this profile, and skip all of this stuff that we have to do, you can be an actual 10 days earlier than normal. That’s a game changer for people. That’s a real game changer. And I think that’s something that we want for candidates and clients. Because as we become more and more digital in the future, change the tiny accountability on achievements and accolades, our meritocracy is going to become more and more essential, as we start to become more and more digitalized in our day to day lives. I know you Chris, as a person personally, if I’ve never met you before, and you’re only digital, like most things are now becoming digital, it becomes really difficult to really know if I can trust you, if you are, who you say you are, and stuff like that. So creating this digital accountability version of ourselves in the hiring process, I almost believe it’s just an inevitable, it’s inevitable
Chris:
how transparency is a good thing. And I think that, you know, both companies and candidates probably initially will ask the question, but why would I want this? And I think of it as this way, look, we’re becoming a much more transient workforce, right? Like, people move around. So as a company, you want to have accurate verified data on candidates, because the likelihood that you’re keeping them around for 25 or 30 years is probably not going to happen. Maybe less than 1% of your workforce right now will be there with you in 20 years. Right. Like that’s just the new age of hiring. And on the candidate side, I think unless they work at fortus healthcare, that everyone stays there forever. Jeremy? Yeah. On the candidate side, it’s about I think most candidates want a fair shot, right. And we see so much of the hiring process being referrals, right, like, Oh, I know that person. Yeah. And that’s their way of verifying that we should hire them. And what we’re saying is, what if it’s not about who you know, but it’s about what you’ve done. And I think when we talk about the American dream and the American way, I think too often we get, we get stuck in the idea of, it’s about working, we say that it’s about working hard. But the reality is unfortunate. A lot of times, it’s about who you know. And what we’re trying to do is trying to help break down the barriers, trying to make it a more inclusive environment for everybody. We want it to be about what you’ve done, what your experiences have been. And I think that at the core is who, you know, we realistically want to present ourselves to the market as
Arran Stewart:
Yeah, I mean, I agree with every word, and you actually touched on something there as well about removing the who, you know, because who, you know, actually also has, you know, diversity barriers, right, there are major diversity barriers on the who, you know, piece, you know, does that young African American guys know, the Caucasian guys that work at Morgan Stanley? Absolutely, you know, not saying that Morgan Stanley is all like that, but finance is typical for that, right. And just getting people in based on their validated merits, you know, and, and I think that that’s, that’s something. So that’s really the future for what we’re trying to do. That’s something that we’re investing heavily and hedged heavily against, with our IP and patents and strategy. And, you know, I’m kind of very much looking forward to seeing that someone’s gonna do it, right, someone’s gonna do, I believe that we will, I believe we will become that I think we’ve got, we start really heavily marketing job.com to the consumer, which is sort of on the cards. latter part of next year, we’ve stealthed our way to where we’re at, right? A lot of people are like, what are they done? Who are they raised? Who have they got behind them? And we’ve kind of done that a little bit on purpose because there’s a big competitors out there who are definitely thinking about what we’re doing right now. And we know that they are because they release platforms to do it and then they sunset them you know, like indeed hire you know, it’s on the minds and lips of everyone look at hired part of look at very part of adeco. You know, people are thinking about what we’re doing. I think paying kudos if they do listen, I think the other people in the industry who are very admirable, who are doing similar things, what we’re doing sort of, there is a difference is job bot. I think those guys I mean, that woman Heidi, who’s CEO there, she’s like proper, she’s like a culture queen, like and they don’t, she’s great, isn’t she man, I get excited looking, I want to work at job bot. I want to go there, I want to get I want to go on their trips. So they so but nonetheless, you know, it’s it’s, it’s it’s good. You know, they’re a good company. But I think the market is going that way. I think more and more competitors are coming into the market. I believe that job.com has what it takes to be to be honest. It’s got Arran and Chris, you know, which is always you know, to bald guides. To be fair, we’re missing the third ball guy on this Paul Sloyan, so and then yeah, so we could be like the picture of the coneheads. Or to go. This is what working at job.com does.
Chris:
It gives you the gray ones in your face. This is a perfect segue because we just started getting into recruitment technology. And I think this is a good place to wrap up part one. And part two, we can really get into what the future of recruiting is how it’s going to change. How we help modernize recruiting, right. So this is my little like, ticket for part two, like come back and listen. But Arran, I’m really glad that we got to do this finally. Finally, yeah, so
Arran Stewart:
listen, he kept me waiting. He kept me waiting long enough that it felt you know, it felt meaningful. You know, I don’t feel like an author for I feel I feel appropriate. And also as promotional. Promotional as this has been, which hopefully people that have listened to have also enjoyed learning a little bit more about us. I think you know, it’s good. I’ve enjoyed being on the podcast.
Chris:
Glad you were here. And that’s a wrap on another episode of the talent tide podcast. We’ll see you soon. And remember, success is on the other side of fear. Talk to you soon.