James Mackey and Elijah Elkins speak with Julian D’Angelo, Founder and CEO of Talin, about their AI-powered candidate and sales automation product. They dive into the tech stack inefficiencies that SMB Staffing and Recruiting companies have. Julian shares how he’s leveraging his growth background to build Talin and help SMB Staffing and Recruiting companies grow faster through accelerating candidate and sales pipelines.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
#1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show
.
I'm your host.
James Mackey Got my co-hosthere today, elijah.
What's up, man?
How are you Doing well?
Doing well, awesome.
And we also have Julian, thefounder and CEO of Talon, on the
show today.
What's going on, julian?
How are you?
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Hey, james, I'm doing well.
Thank you for having me and I'mexcited to dive in.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Yeah, for sure, let's do this.
So I guess, before we jump intoall the technical stuff and
what you're doing in hiring, Iwould love to just get a sense
for who you are as a person Areyou calling us or joining us
today from Toronto or where areyou right now?
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Yep, based in Toronto right now, out of the DMZ.
Our incubator that we're a partof here is one of the larger
incubators in Canada.
And yeah, born and raised herein Toronto and yeah, been in the
downtown core basically most ofmy life now.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Oh, that's awesome, and so your team is part of an
incubator.
Which incubator are you?
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Yeah, we're in the middle of the DMZ's 18-month
incubator program.
Yeah, some it's produced anumber of pretty prominent.
A good chunk of the Canadianstartups that you'll hear about
have come out of DMZ BorrowWellcompanies like Majuri, so on.
There's collectively raisedlike $2 billion in funding.
(01:16):
Since Incubator is about 10years old, yeah, and it's just
been steadily growing and helpand is a really important
resource.
Here we don't have anywherenear as much funding
opportunities and and generalresources as you do in the US,
obviously, so this has been ahuge kind of cornerstone for
Toronto tech scene for a longtime and it's only getting
(01:36):
better.
So we've been here for aboutsix months now.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Oh, cool, nice.
So did you start the companysix months ago, or when did you
found the company?
Speaker 3 (01:46):
No.
So we we had various it waspart-time for a while like well
over, like over a year of justI'll go, actually I'll just go
to the very beginning becausethat sort of leads into that.
But my background,interestingly enough, is not in
in recruiting, which I so farhas been actually a bit of an
advantage, I think, and itbrings a different lens to
(02:07):
thinking about some of theproblems in recruiting.
But my background is in growth.
So I was a growth marketer,user acquisition, demand gen guy
in venture backed B2B SaaS.
Most of my career was there andI got to the point where I was
consulting independently, doingfractional head of growth work
for a few different YC companiesand that was where I
(02:28):
essentially get as many kind ofdo from what I learned in the
industry got pulled intorecruiting where I had these
clients of mine who essentiallysaid, hey, we need help building
out our marketing teams, oursales teams and so on, and they
actually asked me to help withsome of their recruiting
functions internally and so on.
And they actually asked me tohelp with some of their
recruiting functions internallyand I started doing that and
(02:52):
then ended up spinning off anarm of my consultancy as just
being a recruiting arm thatspecialized in growth hires,
just taking my niche andleveraging that in that way.
And that's where I started toget to understand the industry,
get to know other recruiters,other recruiting firms, tech
stacks, workflows and obviouslythe problems that exist in the
industry.
And I'm like an outsider.
I'm already pretty establishedin my career and I have a craft
(03:12):
which is obviously notrecruiting right, that I'm
whatever an expert at.
And that's when my jaw justhits the floor, what the tech
stacks look like for recruiterscompared to the tech stacks that
I'm used to.
And now growth is known forgetting the newest, shiniest
toys right.
The first, the most complexautomation, just a lot of tools
(03:34):
that you need to be a good likegrowth marketer, like most
people in most other industries,just simply wouldn't know how
to operate it.
It's like being like a having abeing, like everyone drives a
car and you drive like aforklift and someone getting
into a forklift for the sametime like trying to operate it.
And then this like problemsurfaces in recruiting that I
said, everything is completelymanual compared to my workflows
(03:56):
that I built that were heavilyautomated in a lot of ways.
And so that's when that lightbulb goes off.
We just start tinkering withprototypes, looking at different
parts of the recruitingworkflow what's the lowest
hanging fruit, where you spendthe most time doing manual,
tedious work and that was theinception for talent.
And we built some really earlyprototypes that that did some
(04:17):
really simple automations and wewere able to sell it and they
weren't really good, so that waslike they were bad it.
And they weren't really good,so that was like they were bad.
Early on.
It was exactly as most kind ofV1s or prototypes are and they
should be right and you'retesting and you're iterating,
and.
But then we were still able tosell them and that, to me, was
the market pull or thevalidation that I needed to say,
(04:39):
hey, there's something here.
And I think the recruitingmarket is bigger than I think
people realize.
Based Based on our research,you got 200,000 agencies
globally that are less than 50employees.
It's a pretty massive market.
And then not a lot of companiesbuild specifically for agencies
.
A lot of them build for justrecruiting use case in general,
(05:01):
and the ones that do buildspecifically for agencies, we
didn't think their tech was allthat impressive.
So those were all theingredients and a very long
winded way of saying yeah.
Then we went all.
In January of 23 is when my CTOco-founder joined me and we
went full time and startedbootstrapping, basically up
until up until we recently justraised some money.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, oh, that's awesome man.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I was your CTO doing the hands-on engineering at
first or still, or, yeah, we hadlike third-party contractors
before that when I was likepart-time, just basically paid
folks like build out that v1,which obviously comes with its
own set of challenges, and thenwe quickly realized we need a
serious cto and and that's whereI found so trevor is my c.
He was engineer number four atLupio, which is a pretty
prominent Canadian startup.
They grew to 500 employees.
(05:51):
He grew that team to 80engineers Really top tier guy.
So I was really excited andlucky to bring him on.
He's rebuilt the whole thingand then a lot more on top of
that since then over the lastyear and three quarters.
Yeah, oh, that's awesome,that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
I since then, over the last year and three quarters
yeah, oh, that's awesome.
That's awesome.
I'm looking at the Talonwebsite right now and the main
thing I'm seeing here is spendless time on your ATS and spend
more time on people, and you'retalking about like task
automation.
So is this a tool that'sheavily integrated with the
(06:25):
different applicant trackingsystems within staffing and
recruiting?
Or I'd be curious to get abetter sense for the workflow
and how your product potentiallyintegrates or just works
alongside an applicant trackingsystem?
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Yeah, absolutely so.
Yes, we integrate with most ofthe major ATSs that you'll find
in recruiting agencies,especially Crelate, recruiter,
flow Recruit, crm, bullhorn,like all of them.
Right, we didn't want to buildan ATS.
There's a lot of ATSs.
The vast majority of ATSs arebasically systems of record.
(06:58):
The apps that exist in thoseATSs above and beyond what they
do are unfortunately not thatgreat.
That's most CRMs.
It took HubSpot a long time tobecome more than just a system
of record.
It's a really hard thing to doto build a system of record
business CRM, business, ats,business, whatever and then
(07:20):
build really good apps over top.
That's why my thesis is they'renot going to be good all in
ones.
They simply won't, because wefocus on all of the functions
outside of that, essentially intwo areas.
There's only two things wereally care about.
One is growing your recruitment, business sales automation and
candidate automation, engagement, data enrichment, outreach, etc
(07:41):
.
And today and in the future,this might, might change.
It's all very focused on a veryoutbound perspective.
Right, the classic hunting witha spearfish.
As opposed, we don't do a lotjob posting integrations we
don't do we.
I think job posting as a wholehave their place.
You talk to any recruitingbusiness.
They're built on the backboneof kind of outreach right and
building out their own network.
(08:03):
That obviously has a ton ofvalue, just having their own set
of database of people they knowthat trust their firm and so on
.
So it's really outboundtechnology.
That is all of the differentpieces you need, whether that's
multi-channel outreach, dataenrichment.
We have the best personal emailcoverage of any company.
It's better than Zoom Info'spersonal email coverage.
(08:23):
We spent the last year and ahalf building that out and then
now we're starting to reallyincorporate a lot of the AI
functions to take that level ofautomation and make that
outbound as effective as humanlypossible and take it beyond the
status quo.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Got it Okay.
So it's multi-channel outreachfor sales and candidates dialed
into staffing agencies sub 50employees, Is that?
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Bingo yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Okay, got it, cool, got it, and you're currently
incorporating AI.
I'd be curious about it.
Doesn't even necessarily haveto be like what you're currently
doing, but I guess there's afew ways to dial into this
question.
You could talk about how you'recurrently implementing it.
You can talk about customerconversations, right.
What do they want?
What's the feedback they'regiving you, based on what you
have or what you're thinkingabout building, and then in the
(09:10):
future, where you see yourproduct going, and implementing
AI.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Yeah, of course, no great question.
So I'll talk to you about.
We had this major release lastweek, actually, so very recently
, and the problem, this specificproblem and it's interesting
because there's a bunch ofinteresting use cases and so
right now everyone is trying tofigure out how do we prioritize
them, what's the most impactful,et cetera.
So one that we did just becauseit was it felt like really low
(09:34):
hanging fruit and it impacts aproblem that we've been really
vocal about since we basicallystarted our company was
copywriting specifically in ourmessaging, in that outreach
messaging to both candidates andthen on the sales side as well.
Let's be honest, a lot ofrecruiters are not good
copywriters and it's not by anyfault of their own.
(09:55):
As a recruiter, you have tojuggle a lot of different hats.
You're wearing more hats, I'dargue, as a recruiter than you
are as a salesperson Because,especially an agency recruiter,
you're as like a salespersonbecause, especially an agency
recruiter, right, you'rejuggling your sales process,
getting new clients and you haveto actually service those
clients and you think of all thedifferent workflows and
processes that are in that it's.
You're doing a lot of differentthings.
(10:15):
So, naturally, like you're not,there's no copywriting training
for recruiters.
Typically you don't see.
I'm seeing a lot more of it nowbecause it's incredibly
important, but you don't see aton of it.
So you see that's like problemA.
And then problem B we saw is wejust met a lot of recruiters
that were personalizing theirmessaging, that's going out to
candidates on a very one-by-onebasis.
(10:37):
It takes a ton of time and, aswe've been, we're obviously
power users internally of AIourselves, with not just ChatGPT
but all of the.
We're using all of the mainLLMs to understand, like where
they sit in the stack and wherethey kind of excel.
We started to see an opportunityto have that, to build over top
of those LLMs and train them topersonalize candidate outreach.
(10:59):
We're not the only ones doingthis.
A bunch of companies are tryingthis.
But again, you look at like ourbackground in growth, our
background in growth and we'repretty strong copywriters
internally.
We have an edge there, in myopinion, because we know what we
do Canada campaigns we still doour own recruiting.
We do recruiting for clientstoo.
On the services side, we try todog food our own product as much
(11:21):
as we humanly can and we dooutreach campaigns that get 60%
reply rates from candidates andwe're building out those data
sets internally of what'sworking at a really high level
and we're training those LLMs onwhat's really working.
And that's proprietary right.
You can't just easily copy that.
And, yeah, we're enabling andessentially in Talon, the idea
(11:41):
is you can go build your sort ofbase template, of which we
provide you a lot of like reallygood templates and then you can
essentially say, hey, we ingestthe full LinkedIn profile,
especially like your LinkedInbio, right, the description of
your current company, your ownpersonal description of your
time at those companies.
Those are those really data richpoints where you get good
(12:03):
personalization.
And we ingest all of that dataand we've essentially trained
the model to take that data andapply it to your base template
and change up the copy or injectthat personalization in a very
subtle way with the goal ofcreating relevancy and because
the problem with personalizationtoday is a lot of it is shallow
personalization that doesn'tmatter, the candidate doesn't
(12:24):
care, a candidate doesn't care.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
It's like awkward too .
I hate the personalization thatI sometimes I'll get like a
sales email.
I don't know why this bothersme, like I listened to your
podcast episode where you'respeaking to so and you were
discussing this and I reallyliked this and it's three
paragraphs and then hey, by theway, I'm going to pitch you on
something.
There's a relevant way topersonalize too.
I'd be curious, like on thepersonalization front, how much
of it is like the nuance ofunderstanding the customer
(12:48):
versus understanding thestaffing agency, versus
understanding the individualyou're reaching out to or like
maybe because there's abalancing act.
You can personalize based onwhat the staffing agency
specialization is with thespecialization or what the
customer does that they'rerepresenting, or personalization
based on the candidatebackground.
So there's like multiple waysto think about personalization.
(13:09):
So how do you, are youbalancing those things, or is it
primarily dialed into acandidate's background and
experience?
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Yeah, great question.
So the goal is to and we knowthis kind of from our own data
the more relevant you can makethe draw that parallel between
the role itself that you'rehiring for and then the
candidates crown.
Uh, you need to make thecandidate feel like you have
(13:35):
essentially sourced themspecifically for this role and
you have reason to believe thatthey would obviously be a good
fit for that role and like thereason why so.
I'll give you like an exampleof like how we've this is a
common personal for that roleand the reason why so.
I'll give you an example of howwe've this is a common
personalization that our RAIwill do based on how we trained
it.
Let's say you are hiring for asales role and in the sales role
(13:56):
, you've mentioned in yourtemplate that they're looking
for someone with experienceselling into SMB, for example.
We will if we can find anythingabout that person's LinkedIn
profile that suggests they havehad experience.
Let's say they got promotedthree times and they sold into
(14:18):
SMB before.
The ad personalization wouldspit out something like hey,
james, congrats on getting, ornot even congrats, that's it.
By the way, we trained it tonot use a lot of corny lines
that you'll see in thepersonalization.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah, like a lot of kind of fluff words that you see
in a lot of.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Remove it right.
We've trained it to be as clear, concise and talk like you
speak Sorry, rather to writelike you speak as much as
humanly possible.
That's the foundation of goodcopywriting, right.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
It would say something like hey, james really
liked your background at likecompany X, thought you got
promoted there quite a few times.
Client of mine is looking forsomeone who's got experience
like yourself selling into SMB.
Right, that does not sound likea template, right, I have an
observation.
Right, really good outbound hasan observation and then some
(15:05):
kind of like value statement,problem statement, value
statement, something like that'stied to the observation and
that's the formula of how youcreate relevancy, right?
Personalization hey, notice wewent to the same school.
No one cares.
Hey, notice, also own a Germanshepherd, or something like that
.
Nobody cares.
That's not relevant to me.
That's, you're just mentioningfacts, right.
(15:27):
So that's the and it's reallyhard to do to create relevancy
at scale for like a hundredcandidates that I have in a
campaign that's going to go outand be able to do that all at
once.
And we obviously have likeerror rates, like we're not
hitting it a hundred percent ofthe time.
Nobody's hitting it a hundredpercent of the time.
So now we have to build intothe UX a very smart way for the
(15:47):
user to approve the messages sothey could say, hey, I like
these set of messages, theseones can discard these and just
use the original template.
So these are all these kind ofsmall problems and nuances that
have to go into building thisfeature that are very specific
to, obviously, the recruitinguse case.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, for sure, Elijah.
Do you have any thoughts youwant to jump in on this topic?
Oh, for sure, Elijah.
Do you have any thoughts youwant to jump in on this topic?
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Yeah, I'm just curious with the way that you're
approaching the market.
So, as you mentioned, likethere's a huge market globally,
but are you trying to focus inon kind of Canada first, maybe
because there's, I'm assuming,less competition there for tools
like this or similar use cases.
(16:30):
Then there might be in, like Idon't know, like the UK or the
US, obviously like those arehuge markets where there's a lot
of people like trying to buildproducts really quickly.
Are you trying to almostdominate the Canada market to
then be able to get a wave oflike customers and that momentum
, or are you trying to gomultiple places at one time?
I'm just curious.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Yeah, I know.
So 80% of our customer base isin the US and we purposefully
did that, obviously reason beingfor in terms of raising capital
.
If you have all Canadiancustomers, that's a massive
negative, like right off the batto VCs and investors.
They want to know that you canwin the US market.
If you win the US market, youwill become a unicorn, right?
(17:10):
So that was very purposeful,purpose and strategic, like
early on.
Also, we knew just like byvirtue of being in Toronto and
obviously we spoke a coupleweeks ago we spoke at a pretty
big Toronto like tech conference, stuff like that like we'll get
natural word of mouth inToronto, whereas the US we're
gonna have to put in the work toactually build that foundation
there.
So we'll take the easy wins inCanada, like when we can get
(17:31):
them, but we need to win in, weneed to win the US, we need to
win in the UK.
We need to build really gooddistribution channels, like in
those places, in order to get inthere.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
I think the approach for agencyof doing both like the business
development side and thesourcing side on the outbound is
very logical.
A lot of companies, right, jim,they would have the outbound
use case really solid for, likecorporate, but then you wouldn't
really use it much on the BDside, right.
(18:02):
But then there's otherplatforms, like SourceWhale in
the UK, who've done a reallygood job building for the
business development side inrecruiting, right.
So that's like kind of acategory.
Then you've got all these salestools like Limlist, right, like
all these sales tools who theysay, oh, you can use this for
recruiting.
But when you look at theworkflows, you look at the email
(18:25):
contact info, they're pulling,they're pulling mostly business
emails right, like they're notset up for the personal emails.
So I just find it interestinglike that approach of doing both
and focusing in on staffing andrecruiting, helping them with
both use cases.
I think it would go really wellfor you having that focus,
because I've seen Sourcewell'sgrowth in the UK from doing BD
(18:48):
and sourcing at the same timeand it seems to have gotten them
good traction in the agencymarket in the UK specifically.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
I'm just wondering though, because you're like
targeting the SMB segment, soI'm wondering too, like just for
SMB software companies or SMBcompanies in general, I can see
this being a good fit for themtoo, potentially for doing both.
If they're not looking toonboard like a massive CRM
sequencing tool that's going tobe more expensive potentially
than just like a one kind ofproduct that can basically just
(19:17):
fit the needs of puttingtogether like a target account
list for outreach probably not,as it's not like a HubSpot per
se, but or but it's or it's notlike a tool where you have to
integrate a CRM with asequencing tool.
So I could see like in the SMBmarket in general, it being like
attractive even as an internaltool.
I'm just curious do you haveany customers that are using it
(19:37):
internally for recruiting, or isit like are you guys 100% in
staffing?
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Yeah, we've.
It's funny We've actuallynaturally, yeah, we've had a few
like internal recruiters justhear about us and sign up yeah,
we're, and we didn't.
We decided not to targetinternal recruiting because I do
feel like that market is likevery saturated with some very
well funded companies.
I think that, honestly, the onethat I'm hearing that's that I
think is going to probablydominate seems like Ashby is
(20:05):
that's the one that I'm hearinghas the most robust workflows.
I think they're going to Idon't know, probably.
It sounds to me like, based onsome of the functionality I've
seen, it's seeming like lookingbetter than gem in some ways.
Hard to tell, but like pointbeing.
Point being is that knew thatthese problems existed right In
that are very unique to agenciesand agencies have their own
(20:25):
unique workflow.
That is totally different froman internal recruiters
standpoint and there wasn'tenough people working on that
problem and the market was hugeand we just said hey again, if
we win a fraction of that, thisis going to be a very successful
company.
And not only that.
We feel like we can.
Based on what we're seeing fromcompetition and the pace at
which they move, I'm prettyconfident we can dominate this
(20:47):
market.
So we wanted to try and go bebig fish in a small pond.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Oh yeah, and, as you say, staffing isn't necessarily
a small pond either.
It's a massive addressablemarket and it's also, in a sense
, niche, which is cool.
You can be highly targeted inyour product development and
your go-to-market strategy andalso have a massive addressable
market, which is a really coolcombination of things.
And I'd say, Elijah, I don'tknow if this is spot on, but
(21:15):
probably half of the founderCEOs we've had on for this
series have at least a prettylarge customer segment of
staffing which I don't know what.
I guess I just hadn't reallythought about it, but the more I
think about it makes a lot ofsense.
Remember, we had a Priora onthe show and CEO sorry, I'm just
blanking on his name.
Let me get it real fast.
It was.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
James.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Was it or Aaron?
Aaron, there you go.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Aaron, yeah, so he really smart guy and a Priora.
They're focused, dialed in on alot of staffing companies.
It's like an AI voice agent.
So people like apply inboundand then their AI voice agent
actually immediately calls thecandidate to do the screening.
It's pretty cool and theyraised like what should they
(22:01):
raise?
I think they raised like acouple million or something like
that.
So it's just interesting.
They're getting a lot oftraction in staffing and
recruiting and the way that theyexplained it was it made a lot
of sense.
They staffing and recruitingagencies have a lot of high
volume right.
So just from a volumeperspective, they need a lot
more support and it makes sense.
That's why a lot of theseproducts, too, are addressing
(22:21):
top of funnel.
It's higher volume.
Staffing and recruiting ishigher volume.
Essentially, if a staffingrecruiting company is in
business, they're hiring,they're always hiring, so it's
like consistency too.
And then he was talking aboutlike margins, like as services
companies, like traditionally, alot of staffing companies
actually have like pretty crappymargins and even at scale, like
when you see enterprisecompanies like they still don't
(22:43):
really have great margins a lotof the time.
So it's there's that emphasisor like desire and need to find
ways to cut costs, bring costsdown.
So it's a combination of highvolume, lower margin business
that is ripe for automation andAI solutions in terms of the
products that we're seeingcoming out, so it's pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
And those investments .
Ideally, a firm is looking atsomething like Talon, they
should be able to wrap theirhead around it as an ROI,
positive investment, like ourprimary pitch.
Like when I'm on demos withcustomers and stuff like that, I
go hey, listen, if you're agood fit, if you look at this
and you think that I can get youeight to 10 hours back in your
week, you'll churn in threemonths.
(23:26):
And the calculation I do, letme go.
How many hires or how manyhours does it take you?
Let's assume that you have thebusiness, and if you don't, by
the way, talent can help you getthat business.
But let's assume that you doand that you have the ability to
take on more pipe.
How many hours does it take oneof your recruiters to make a
placement?
Depends on the industry.
They might say, yeah, about 50hours of labor when we'll be
(23:49):
able to make a placement.
What's the value on that?
Yeah, that's probably in thenet.
It's about 35K in revenue forthis type of hire that we do
quite a bit.
Okay, great, extrapolate thatout.
I'm going to give each of yourrecruiters back 300 hours a year
in manual labor.
That's six additional hires perrecruiter across the board.
(24:10):
What's that worth to you on adollar figure right?
The staffing industry has theluxury of, I think, being able
to think that way, because theyget paid the more they hire,
right.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, for sure.
As you see, the focus is on ROIversus, and it's a revenue
generating function versus acost function within an internal
company.
So that's also a very importantpoint that I hadn't considered
too.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, which is why I think staying focused on
staffing is probably the bestbet, right?
Like you see, a lot ofcompanies they try to do both
and build for the internal usecase and build for staffing, but
the workflows are so different.
The value of candidateexperience, if we're honest, is
very different.
They're just completelydifferent workflows and even
(25:01):
values that they're delivering.
That I think it's really I'vejust seen very few do it well
where they genuinely build forboth use cases, Usually they end
up starting to lose a little inone area or the other.
But I think you guys are reallysmart and going after both the
BD side and the sourcing sideand staffing just makes.
Yeah, I think it makes a ton ofsense.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Yeah, I mean, like you have exceptions like
LinkedIn, recruiter and, I think, potentially tools like Gem.
Actually, I think Gem is makinga bigger push into staffing
right now.
I think, at least on theLinkedIn side there's a
different pricing for staffingagencies because it's like
higher volume, so they actuallybring down the cost of LinkedIn
recruiter seats, and I think Idon't know exactly but I think
(25:43):
there's some other players, likein the sourcing, outbound
sourcing space, that are takinglike a similar approach.
So I think more companies areidentifying like a market
opportunity in staffing andrecruiting that are on the
internal side.
Again, I think this is a newermotion for Jim, but yeah, it's
interesting to see thatevolution.
I think you're right, though,dialing in on staffing and
(26:03):
recruiting.
There's already so muchbusiness to be won in that space
.
You really don't need Unlessit's just as easy to sign up
customers.
Obviously, the technology couldwork for in-house in terms of
the outbound sourcing cadences.
That's valuable to anyone, butjust from a go-to-market
perspective too, it's justadding that kind of clarity and
specialization.
(26:24):
I'm sure that gives you a lifttoo, just saying, hey, we
specifically build for SMB staffand recruiting right.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Yeah, exactly, and on the BD side, we get into some
really interesting use casesthat can then lend themselves to
build highly targeted, highlysegmented and very personalized
outbound campaigns.
Right, you look at job changedata Like, we have a client
we're working with where theyknow that a certain type of role
when it changes about three tofour months, into that person
(26:53):
starting their role, they'reprobably rejigging their team
and so we're able to automate,like that sequence in this
really timely way which is, bythe way, this is the outbound
that works today.
Right, taking a template,blasting it to 5,000 people
doesn't work anymore.
But using that formula, takingintent data in the form of a
(27:15):
trigger, right, somethinghappens, that is, whether it's a
LinkedIn post or a judging,whatever.
We can take those use casesthat are very unique to agencies
, build that data, build thosedata pipelines into our product
and that then creates thesereally successful outbound
campaigns.
And we've you got, we gotclients for the first time.
(27:36):
They, like, they see a five to10% reply rate on a BD campaign
which is novel to them.
Right there, that's unheard offor them.
So it's and again we'll getback to this theme of if you to
do that as an agency, you needsomeone on the team who's an
outbound expert and you do notfind a whole lot of outbound
experts in recruiting agencies,unless they purposefully go find
(27:59):
one, and there's not a lot ofoutbound experts in general on
the market as a whole.
So it's like how do weproductize that expertise so
that they can plug in andessentially have go from a three
out of 10 outbound motion to aneight out of 10 outbound motion
with virtually no additionalacumen needed to make that
(28:20):
happen?
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I think the sub 50 makes a lot of sense too right,
because sometimes larger firmsstart to specialize more and
then the recruiters aren't likedoing 360, like they're not
doing their BD and outbound fortheir own roles, and then it's
not that the value goes down.
But then if someone's justdoing BD for staffing, say
(28:43):
they're at a 150 person firmthey may be saying do I want
Talon or do I want Apollo?
or whatever, you're in adifferent category.
But for the 360 ones they'rethinking I don't want two
different tools, that's a wasteof time, it's a waste of money,
it's a waste of time and forthem this can be that tool,
(29:07):
that's their one tool where theycan say, let's say, they're
doing mondays and tuesdays,they're doing some bd.
I'm sure it doesn't work thatway, but if it's that clean for
them mondays and tuesdays andthen three days of sourcing.
They just check their campaign.
Yeah, I think that one toolapproach for the 360 recruiters
is, yeah, spot on.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
We know that for a fact.
They hate having more tools.
We know they're bound toLinkedIn, recruiter which, by
the way or CRM, or I mean we seepeople with both who literally
(29:54):
are doing like Bullhorn andHubSpot at the same time to then
stack two, three, four tools ontop of that to have BD and
candidate functions for outboundor whatever is.
We do not want to be doing that.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Yeah, yeah, so spot on A quick question about like
product roadmap Do you seeyourself going more in a CRM
direction where it's likethere's a talent engagement for
passive talent or people thatare already in your ATS that
you're trying to target in thefuture?
Is there any kind oforganization behind that?
What are your thoughts on justthe evolution of the product
(30:29):
from that perspective?
Speaker 3 (30:30):
your thoughts on, just like the evolution of the
product from that perspective.
Yeah, for sure I think it'll bea lot easier to stay
differentiated and beatcompetitors if we go the other
way, whereas if we focus moreand go more and more top of
funnel, we focus on the intentdata we bring in.
Right now we're built over topof, like recruiter, like sales
nav, bringing in GitHub, indeed,going like truly like multi
(30:54):
data source.
So any type of recruiting firm,does not matter who they are,
can use us that intent data.
Just making, at the end of theday, like, if you look at, what
do recruiting firms need toexcel at to grow their business?
It's.
I got to get clients and I gotto place candidates.
So as long as we stay very, weare always on the cutting edge
of those, and I think obviouslyyou're seeing the tech that's
(31:16):
coming out today and obviouslyevery six months we get another
LLM that's like a magnitudebetter than the previous LLM.
I don't know if you guys haveplayed with O1 at all on ChatGPT
, but for math and coding it'slike mind boggling.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
When did that one come out?
Speaker 3 (31:31):
The preview came out a month ago.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
And I think they rolled out API used to tier five
users, but it'll eventuallybecome I'm sure within the next
one to two months it'll probablyreplace 4.0 as their premium,
expensive model.
But, point being, as soon asyou go down the path of system
of record, we're now justbuilding table stakes, functions
that other people have, and theplay is for talent to become
(31:55):
more of an all-in-one, whichthere's value of all-in-one.
And the thing that's maybeworking against us is to
elijah's point like smb, theylike all-in-ones, but if we do a
really good job of unlocking,like novel functionality that
takes the sourcing process andtakes it from 10 hours a week to
two, we're talking aboutchanging their workflow in a
(32:20):
pretty dramatic way versushaving them just cut another
tool out of their tech stack.
To me, the former is where thehuge value on lock is going
forward.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
There aren't a ton of all-in-ones on the staffing
side for firms of that size,other than maybe like loxo right
, but they've stuffed so manythings into their all-in-one
that it's a it's confusing fromlike a pricing perspective.
And yeah, I just I've wanted touse it a few times and I've
heard a few other people usingit, but it's like do people like
(32:53):
them?
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Like I wonder how they're around for a while.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
I'll give them.
I'll give them this Cause we'vetalked to lock.
So they've done a good job ofgo to market, cause it's the
most common ATS that weintegrate with and the ones that
we see yeah, we see it the most, I would say, of like right now
.
So they did a good job of go tomarket.
When we first started about twoyears ago it was just plain
disdain for them.
Like I would honestly say, outof like our first 20
(33:22):
integrations, maybe one personsaid they actually liked them.
It was, they had adoptionproblems and it was convoluted
and it was basically a system ofrecord.
They've I and it was convolutedand it was basically a system
of record.
I saw some key hires they made.
They hired a couple ofinteresting people that I knew
in the industry, who I knew werelegit, and I think I'm hearing
(33:44):
less of that kind of disdain onthem.
I think they're moving in apositive direction but, that
said, I think the product isprobably overly complex.
It's confusing to your point onlike pricing.
They also and this is we win alot of contract.
We're month to month, we're PLGmonth to month.
You can hop in and start a freetrial on talent in five minutes
and Locktoe is still on, likeannual contracts, which I know
(34:06):
is great for cashflow, but again, your sub 50 recruiting do not
like them and that's why oursales cycle is three weeks two
to three weeks from meeting tothem, just putting in their
credit card and the billingscompletely automated right with
Stripe.
So, yeah, it's an interestingone and again, I think, if
they're a direct competitor ofours at this point, but we also
integrate with them, so in someways, in some ways no, but I
(34:28):
know for a fact if we're focusedon the use cases, we're focused
on, loxo will just not be ableto keep up building those things
.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
And they're one of the only ones, though, julian.
There's not a lot of otherall-in-ones for staffing other
than Loxo that touch top offunnel the way that you all are.
Not that I'm aware of.
At least Bullhorn, no Averture,no Salesforce.
No People are using Salesforcefor that.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Yeah, exactly, you're right.
You could make the argumentthat Bullhorn uses its
marketplace to try to be more ofan all-in-one, but I think a
lot of the apps in theirmarketplace are ghost apps.
I know a bunch of apps that dooutbound in their marketplace
that I've never Our Bullhornintegration is like very robust,
(35:17):
that's like that.
Them and loxo are two mostcommon.
I've never met a singlebullhorn user.
That is like effectively usingtheir marketplace and so we're
just.
One of our plays is to become areally de facto make bullhorn
decent, uh-huh, yeah, okay, weare.
It's, oh, it still is, butautomated.
We automated a ton of the dataentry in Bullhorn because it is
like switching off of Bullhorn,for especially if you go 50 plus
(35:40):
, even, I'd say, once you get 20, 30 plus, that's where you
start to see a lot more Bullhornversus your five to 10 person.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
I don't see why if you're not enterprise, why you
would get Bullhorn.
It's like why, if you're like asas company, you get salesforce
under 10 million ar, like I.
I try to like for my agency,try to implement salesforce.
It was I just wasted so muchmoney when all I really needed
was hubspot sales professional.
Yeah, like anyways.
Yeah different topic but Ithink it's like why are you
(36:07):
paying?
I don't know.
I had such an awful experience.
We used Bullhorn back in 2018,17 at SecureVision and it was
just a massive waste of time.
I hated it.
It was probably the worstexperience I've had with an ATS
on the staffing side.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Let's not put that on the YouTube clip.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Oh, I think we're actually.
I think we're actually.
I'm going to be inviting on theCEO from there.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Hopefully you won't listen to this episode yeah,
they were not on our target listof company.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
I'm gonna do outreach to all of the big ats providers
, like all of them.
Not necessary, I don't know ifit'll be for the series per se,
but trying to get all of them onthere, but anyways cool, very
cool, yeah, yeah, I, I hear you,I hear you on that what about
your thesis?
Like your thesis for a fewminutes left.
I'm just just curious to getyour thoughts on LinkedIn
(36:56):
recruiter.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
You said you have an interesting perspective on that
right, someone who clearly wantsto sign up early, innovator
right, they sign up for thelatest and greatest stuff.
Especially a company like oursis going to attract that kind of
(37:18):
person.
And like ai sourcing orcompanies that give like their
own database, let's say evenlike whatever searchable
database for candidates and sayand try to there's companies
trying to replace linkedinrecruiter right one that comes
to mind is better lead like.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
I've been following them for a while yeah, I
actually used to use them for afew months are they on our?
Speaker 1 (37:35):
are they on our list?
Okay?
Speaker 2 (37:37):
I think so, yeah, yeah okay.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
So I'm very curious on your experience with better
leap, because I have a fewanecdotes from them it was.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
yeah, it was solid I struggled little bit with.
So let me say their unlimitedcredits was great, like that was
nice that I wasn't having toworry about credit usage.
The pricing was I think it waslike $333 a month, pretty sure,
per license for a staffingcompany to have that unlimited
on the credit side.
(38:09):
Have that unlimited on thecredit side.
And then the AI sourcing wherethey would AI recommend
candidates, was decent, actuallynot too bad.
Like I was impressed comparedto other AI tools I'd used
before.
Though not blown away, it didthe job for what I needed.
It was just sequencing.
I didn't keep it.
I used it for one contract witha customer, actually James, the
(38:32):
one that we worked on together.
Yeah, just I used it with them.
But yeah, I didn't feel like itwas worth the $333 a month to
keep it active after that point.
And you can use it for BD?
Very well, I don't think.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
They got looks like $13 million in funding last year
.
Anderson Horowitz and listen,I'm looking at the same one.
Let me just drop this in thechat real fast.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
That's a good, their brand right.
Their branding's good.
I don't know, julian.
You've seen their website.
It's a solid looking brand.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
For sure this is the right website, the one I dropped
in the, the zoom chat or thereis like their linkedin page.
I want to make sure we'retalking about, because on the
website too it also it has.
It's now branded toward healthcare really they may have
discovered a new opportunity,that's a different logo too.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Oh yeah, did they rebrand and move out of yes?
Speaker 1 (39:18):
is that company?
Speaker 3 (39:19):
first wow they pivoted.
Wow, they pivoted.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
That's their second pivot because I talked to one of
their early on people a fewmonths ago and I think he had
helped them pivot from somemarketplace for recruiters into
what it was previously and nowthey're niching in on healthcare
.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Well, look at, like here's the thing like you raise
the amount of money that theydid and I think they had, I
remember I think they had a flatround.
I think they raised two roundsa couple of years apart at the
exact same valuation.
Like they may not be in controlof their board anymore or have
at least given away some boardseats.
They got VCs.
They are forced now to grow ata pace where if something's not
(40:01):
working, they are going to dowhatever they possibly can to
grow at absolute breakneck speed.
And so my anecdotes with themis hey, the AI sourcing was like
interesting, but it wasn'tenough of a magnitude of
improvement to justify it.
And then we're talking aboutsourcing.
It's the most time consumingthing in my opinion in the
staffing business.
(40:21):
One of them at least.
If you're sourcing like one byone candidates, like you have,
let's say, you have a campaignof 50 candidates, a decent size
campaign that's going to go out,most recruiters are making sure
all 50 of those people arerelevant.
That takes a lot of time to domanually.
So there's an opportunity therein my opinion.
If you do it well, you shouldbe providing a ton of value.
(40:44):
So I heard this like a bunch ofplaces, and then this is how it
comes.
Let's tie this back to my thesiswith LinkedIn Recruiter.
Linkedin is like the primarydata source.
Only 85% of all LinkedInprofiles are actually scrapable
via like open web right, soindexed on Google, meaning
they're scrapable.
Any external database ismissing 15% of the entire talent
(41:08):
pool on LinkedIn.
There is nothing they can do toget that talent pool Absolutely
nothing.
Linkedin will never sell it toyou.
You cannot get it unless youillegally scrape and then
LinkedIn will sue you.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Platform, and then you're yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Exactly so.
As a result, if you're saying,hey, I'm going to replace
LinkedIn recruiter, your enduser has to be cool with missing
15% of their base of potentialcandidates.
Guess what, if I hire let's sayI hire for finance they are all
on LinkedIn.
That is my number one datasource.
You're saying to me okay, so Ilook at, I placed up 200
(41:46):
candidates this year across myentire firm.
You're telling me 20,.
25 of them would not beavailable to me if I only use
something like Better Leap anddidn't use LinkedIn Recruiter.
Good luck with that sell.
In my opinion, I think we needto use LinkedIn as a primary
data source.
We pull data from it, etc.
(42:07):
You build over top of it, youuse multi-data source.
I'm a believer in a world wherewe are pulling in data from
lots of sources, building ourown databases, not saying, hey,
I've built you one database.
That is the be all, end, allfor everything you need.
Now I think with healthcare,better leak might be able to do
it.
That's where and that's maybeone of the reasons that they
(42:28):
pivoted.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
But anyways, that's my go a little bit more.
Niche Healthcare is anotherarea like staffing and
recruiting, where it's like amassive addressable market.
But it's also a niche thatmakes sense.
A lot of healthcare companiesare going to want to see folks
that are dialed into that space.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
And lots of data in healthcare that is not on
LinkedIn.
Also high volume.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Very high volume.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
The pivot makes complete sense to me.
I'm happy they did it.
One less competitor for us.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah, that's what I was about to say I'm very happy
they did that.
They're at 13 million andcompeted a different direction.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
I think if LinkedIn would just allow more monthly
pricing and reasonable pricingfor smaller companies on
LinkedIn Recruiter I just allowmonthly right and it's a couple
hundred bucks a month they wouldactually cut out the need for
people to look outside theplatform for like replacement
solutions.
(43:25):
Like you were saying, julian,it would be more just like, oh,
an augmented thing, and youwouldn't be that play of
replacing which higher ez waspitching for quite a while.
Oh, you don't need linkedin ifyou have us, and most people
ended up still having both, likeyou said, because of the
missing profile if linkedinwould just stop being so greedy
(43:46):
and they would just allow likemonthly pricing, couple hundred
bucks.
They make a ton of money off ityeah, like you're, yeah, like a
monopoly business.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
They're not going to hurt to do that.
They're not going to bend atall.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
I know you got LinkedIn stories, James.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
You cannot negotiate with them and it pisses me off
when it's particularly whenthere's like a market correction
and it's like I got this longass contract with LinkedIn.
God, yeah, I built my companyaround LinkedIn, so I really
shouldn't be complaining toomuch.
All my sales candidates.
Linkedin made it possible forme to grow my business the way I
(44:25):
did.
But, yeah, there's zeroflexibility you get what I'm
saying.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
It's always a love-hate thing with LinkedIn
man.
It changed the game.
It made stuff scalable.
You're coughing up $6.50 amonth, or whatever it is, for
the rest of your life.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
Yeah for sure.
Hey, man, I think we're comingup on time here.
This has been a really greatepisode.
I've really enjoyed this cooltalking shop about staffing,
recruiting, your approach.
I think it makes a lot of sensedialing in top of funnel.
For a lot of reasons, I don'tthink we even got to get to
everything, but that's the signof a good episode.
Julia, thank you so much forjoining Elijah and me today.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
Yeah, thank you guys both.
I had a lot of fun today and,yeah, hopefully I get to do it
again sometime.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Oh yeah, for sure, man, and you can always reach
out to us if you want to come onthe show again or you got a big
like feature release orsomething like that.
Just let us know All right, I'mdown Sweet.
Cool.
Well, everybody else tuning in.
Thank you for joining us.
We got a lot of great episodeson AI for Hiring that we've
already published, so make sureto of Greenhouse, Jim Workable,
(45:34):
BrightHire, Pillar, a lot ofother companies, so we're going
to give you a good mix of largeestablished players, early stage
startups and everything inbetween, so that you get a solid
pulse on how differentcompanies are thinking about
solving issues in talentacquisition with new LLM
technology and whatnot.
Be sure to continue to tune in.
Thank you for joining us today.
Take care.
Hey everyone, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show
.
I'm your host.
James Mackey Got my co-hosthere today, elijah.
What's up, man?
How are you Doing well?
Doing well, awesome.
And we also have Julian, thefounder and CEO of Talon, on the
show today.
What's going on, julian?
How are you?
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Hey, james, I'm doing well.
Thank you for having me and I'mexcited to dive in.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Yeah, for sure, let's do this.
So I guess, before we jump intoall the technical stuff and
what you're doing in hiring, Iwould love to just get a sense
for who you are as a person Areyou calling us or joining us
today from Toronto or where areyou right now?
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Yep, based in Toronto right now, out of the DMZ.
Our incubator that we're a partof here is one of the larger
incubators in Canada.
And yeah, born and raised herein Toronto and yeah, been in the
downtown core basically most ofmy life now.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Oh, that's awesome, and so your team is part of an
incubator.
Which incubator are you?
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Yeah, we're in the middle of the DMZ's 18-month
incubator program.
Yeah, some it's produced anumber of pretty prominent.
A good chunk of the Canadianstartups that you'll hear about
have come out of DMZ BorrowWellcompanies like Majuri, so on.
There's collectively raisedlike $2 billion in funding.
(01:16):
Since Incubator is about 10years old, yeah, and it's just
been steadily growing and helpand is a really important
resource.
Here we don't have anywherenear as much funding
opportunities and and generalresources as you do in the US,
obviously, so this has been ahuge kind of cornerstone for
Toronto tech scene for a longtime and it's only getting
(01:36):
better.
So we've been here for aboutsix months now.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Oh, cool, nice.
So did you start the companysix months ago, or when did you
found the company?
Speaker 3 (01:46):
No.
So we we had various it waspart-time for a while like well
over, like over a year of justI'll go, actually I'll just go
to the very beginning becausethat sort of leads into that.
But my background,interestingly enough, is not in
in recruiting, which I so farhas been actually a bit of an
advantage, I think, and itbrings a different lens to
(02:07):
thinking about some of theproblems in recruiting.
But my background is in growth.
So I was a growth marketer,user acquisition, demand gen guy
in venture backed B2B SaaS.
Most of my career was there andI got to the point where I was
consulting independently, doingfractional head of growth work
for a few different YC companiesand that was where I
(02:28):
essentially get as many kind ofdo from what I learned in the
industry got pulled intorecruiting where I had these
clients of mine who essentiallysaid, hey, we need help building
out our marketing teams, oursales teams and so on, and they
actually asked me to help withsome of their recruiting
functions internally and so on.
And they actually asked me tohelp with some of their
recruiting functions internallyand I started doing that and
(02:52):
then ended up spinning off anarm of my consultancy as just
being a recruiting arm thatspecialized in growth hires,
just taking my niche andleveraging that in that way.
And that's where I started toget to understand the industry,
get to know other recruiters,other recruiting firms, tech
stacks, workflows and obviouslythe problems that exist in the
industry.
And I'm like an outsider.
I'm already pretty establishedin my career and I have a craft
(03:12):
which is obviously notrecruiting right, that I'm
whatever an expert at.
And that's when my jaw justhits the floor, what the tech
stacks look like for recruiterscompared to the tech stacks that
I'm used to.
And now growth is known forgetting the newest, shiniest
toys right.
The first, the most complexautomation, just a lot of tools
(03:34):
that you need to be a good likegrowth marketer, like most
people in most other industries,just simply wouldn't know how
to operate it.
It's like being like a having abeing, like everyone drives a
car and you drive like aforklift and someone getting
into a forklift for the sametime like trying to operate it.
And then this like problemsurfaces in recruiting that I
said, everything is completelymanual compared to my workflows
(03:56):
that I built that were heavilyautomated in a lot of ways.
And so that's when that lightbulb goes off.
We just start tinkering withprototypes, looking at different
parts of the recruitingworkflow what's the lowest
hanging fruit, where you spendthe most time doing manual,
tedious work and that was theinception for talent.
And we built some really earlyprototypes that that did some
(04:17):
really simple automations and wewere able to sell it and they
weren't really good, so that waslike they were bad it.
And they weren't really good,so that was like they were bad.
Early on.
It was exactly as most kind ofV1s or prototypes are and they
should be right and you'retesting and you're iterating,
and.
But then we were still able tosell them and that, to me, was
the market pull or thevalidation that I needed to say,
(04:39):
hey, there's something here.
And I think the recruitingmarket is bigger than I think
people realize.
Based Based on our research,you got 200,000 agencies
globally that are less than 50employees.
It's a pretty massive market.
And then not a lot of companiesbuild specifically for agencies
.
A lot of them build for justrecruiting use case in general,
(05:01):
and the ones that do buildspecifically for agencies, we
didn't think their tech was allthat impressive.
So those were all theingredients and a very long
winded way of saying yeah.
Then we went all.
In January of 23 is when my CTOco-founder joined me and we
went full time and startedbootstrapping, basically up
until up until we recently justraised some money.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, oh, that's awesome man.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I was your CTO doing the hands-on engineering at
first or still, or, yeah, we hadlike third-party contractors
before that when I was likepart-time, just basically paid
folks like build out that v1,which obviously comes with its
own set of challenges, and thenwe quickly realized we need a
serious cto and and that's whereI found so trevor is my c.
He was engineer number four atLupio, which is a pretty
prominent Canadian startup.
They grew to 500 employees.
(05:51):
He grew that team to 80engineers Really top tier guy.
So I was really excited andlucky to bring him on.
He's rebuilt the whole thingand then a lot more on top of
that since then over the lastyear and three quarters.
Yeah, oh, that's awesome,that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
I since then, over the last year and three quarters
yeah, oh, that's awesome.
That's awesome.
I'm looking at the Talonwebsite right now and the main
thing I'm seeing here is spendless time on your ATS and spend
more time on people, and you'retalking about like task
automation.
So is this a tool that'sheavily integrated with the
(06:25):
different applicant trackingsystems within staffing and
recruiting?
Or I'd be curious to get abetter sense for the workflow
and how your product potentiallyintegrates or just works
alongside an applicant trackingsystem?
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Yeah, absolutely so.
Yes, we integrate with most ofthe major ATSs that you'll find
in recruiting agencies,especially Crelate, recruiter,
flow Recruit, crm, bullhorn,like all of them.
Right, we didn't want to buildan ATS.
There's a lot of ATSs.
The vast majority of ATSs arebasically systems of record.
(06:58):
The apps that exist in thoseATSs above and beyond what they
do are unfortunately not thatgreat.
That's most CRMs.
It took HubSpot a long time tobecome more than just a system
of record.
It's a really hard thing to doto build a system of record
business CRM, business, ats,business, whatever and then
(07:20):
build really good apps over top.
That's why my thesis is they'renot going to be good all in
ones.
They simply won't, because wefocus on all of the functions
outside of that, essentially intwo areas.
There's only two things wereally care about.
One is growing your recruitment, business sales automation and
candidate automation, engagement, data enrichment, outreach, etc
(07:41):
.
And today and in the future,this might, might change.
It's all very focused on a veryoutbound perspective.
Right, the classic hunting witha spearfish.
As opposed, we don't do a lotjob posting integrations we
don't do we.
I think job posting as a wholehave their place.
You talk to any recruitingbusiness.
They're built on the backboneof kind of outreach right and
building out their own network.
(08:03):
That obviously has a ton ofvalue, just having their own set
of database of people they knowthat trust their firm and so on
.
So it's really outboundtechnology.
That is all of the differentpieces you need, whether that's
multi-channel outreach, dataenrichment.
We have the best personal emailcoverage of any company.
It's better than Zoom Info'spersonal email coverage.
(08:23):
We spent the last year and ahalf building that out and then
now we're starting to reallyincorporate a lot of the AI
functions to take that level ofautomation and make that
outbound as effective as humanlypossible and take it beyond the
status quo.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Got it Okay.
So it's multi-channel outreachfor sales and candidates dialed
into staffing agencies sub 50employees, Is that?
Speaker 3 (08:47):
Bingo yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Okay, got it, cool, got it, and you're currently
incorporating AI.
I'd be curious about it.
Doesn't even necessarily haveto be like what you're currently
doing, but I guess there's afew ways to dial into this
question.
You could talk about how you'recurrently implementing it.
You can talk about customerconversations, right.
What do they want?
What's the feedback they'regiving you, based on what you
have or what you're thinkingabout building, and then in the
(09:10):
future, where you see yourproduct going, and implementing
AI.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Yeah, of course, no great question.
So I'll talk to you about.
We had this major release lastweek, actually, so very recently
, and the problem, this specificproblem and it's interesting
because there's a bunch ofinteresting use cases and so
right now everyone is trying tofigure out how do we prioritize
them, what's the most impactful,et cetera.
So one that we did just becauseit was it felt like really low
(09:34):
hanging fruit and it impacts aproblem that we've been really
vocal about since we basicallystarted our company was
copywriting specifically in ourmessaging, in that outreach
messaging to both candidates andthen on the sales side as well.
Let's be honest, a lot ofrecruiters are not good
copywriters and it's not by anyfault of their own.
(09:55):
As a recruiter, you have tojuggle a lot of different hats.
You're wearing more hats, I'dargue, as a recruiter than you
are as a salesperson Because,especially an agency recruiter,
you're as like a salespersonbecause, especially an agency
recruiter, right, you'rejuggling your sales process,
getting new clients and you haveto actually service those
clients and you think of all thedifferent workflows and
processes that are in that it's.
You're doing a lot of differentthings.
(10:15):
So, naturally, like you're not,there's no copywriting training
for recruiters.
Typically you don't see.
I'm seeing a lot more of it nowbecause it's incredibly
important, but you don't see aton of it.
So you see that's like problemA.
And then problem B we saw is wejust met a lot of recruiters
that were personalizing theirmessaging, that's going out to
candidates on a very one-by-onebasis.
(10:37):
It takes a ton of time and, aswe've been, we're obviously
power users internally of AIourselves, with not just ChatGPT
but all of the.
We're using all of the mainLLMs to understand, like where
they sit in the stack and wherethey kind of excel.
We started to see an opportunityto have that, to build over top
of those LLMs and train them topersonalize candidate outreach.
(10:59):
We're not the only ones doingthis.
A bunch of companies are tryingthis.
But again, you look at like ourbackground in growth, our
background in growth and we'repretty strong copywriters
internally.
We have an edge there, in myopinion, because we know what we
do Canada campaigns we still doour own recruiting.
We do recruiting for clientstoo.
On the services side, we try todog food our own product as much
(11:21):
as we humanly can and we dooutreach campaigns that get 60%
reply rates from candidates andwe're building out those data
sets internally of what'sworking at a really high level
and we're training those LLMs onwhat's really working.
And that's proprietary right.
You can't just easily copy that.
And, yeah, we're enabling andessentially in Talon, the idea
(11:41):
is you can go build your sort ofbase template, of which we
provide you a lot of like reallygood templates and then you can
essentially say, hey, we ingestthe full LinkedIn profile,
especially like your LinkedInbio, right, the description of
your current company, your ownpersonal description of your
time at those companies.
Those are those really data richpoints where you get good
(12:03):
personalization.
And we ingest all of that dataand we've essentially trained
the model to take that data andapply it to your base template
and change up the copy or injectthat personalization in a very
subtle way with the goal ofcreating relevancy and because
the problem with personalizationtoday is a lot of it is shallow
personalization that doesn'tmatter, the candidate doesn't
(12:24):
care, a candidate doesn't care.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
It's like awkward too .
I hate the personalization thatI sometimes I'll get like a
sales email.
I don't know why this bothersme, like I listened to your
podcast episode where you'respeaking to so and you were
discussing this and I reallyliked this and it's three
paragraphs and then hey, by theway, I'm going to pitch you on
something.
There's a relevant way topersonalize too.
I'd be curious, like on thepersonalization front, how much
of it is like the nuance ofunderstanding the customer
(12:48):
versus understanding thestaffing agency, versus
understanding the individualyou're reaching out to or like
maybe because there's abalancing act.
You can personalize based onwhat the staffing agency
specialization is with thespecialization or what the
customer does that they'rerepresenting, or personalization
based on the candidatebackground.
So there's like multiple waysto think about personalization.
(13:09):
So how do you, are youbalancing those things, or is it
primarily dialed into acandidate's background and
experience?
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Yeah, great question.
So the goal is to and we knowthis kind of from our own data
the more relevant you can makethe draw that parallel between
the role itself that you'rehiring for and then the
candidates crown.
Uh, you need to make thecandidate feel like you have
(13:35):
essentially sourced themspecifically for this role and
you have reason to believe thatthey would obviously be a good
fit for that role and like thereason why so.
I'll give you like an exampleof like how we've this is a
common personal for that roleand the reason why so.
I'll give you an example of howwe've this is a common
personalization that our RAIwill do based on how we trained
it.
Let's say you are hiring for asales role and in the sales role
(13:56):
, you've mentioned in yourtemplate that they're looking
for someone with experienceselling into SMB, for example.
We will if we can find anythingabout that person's LinkedIn
profile that suggests they havehad experience.
Let's say they got promotedthree times and they sold into
(14:18):
SMB before.
The ad personalization wouldspit out something like hey,
james, congrats on getting, ornot even congrats, that's it.
By the way, we trained it tonot use a lot of corny lines
that you'll see in thepersonalization.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah, like a lot of kind of fluff words that you see
in a lot of.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Remove it right.
We've trained it to be as clear, concise and talk like you
speak Sorry, rather to writelike you speak as much as
humanly possible.
That's the foundation of goodcopywriting, right.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
It would say something like hey, james really
liked your background at likecompany X, thought you got
promoted there quite a few times.
Client of mine is looking forsomeone who's got experience
like yourself selling into SMB.
Right, that does not sound likea template, right, I have an
observation.
Right, really good outbound hasan observation and then some
(15:05):
kind of like value statement,problem statement, value
statement, something like that'stied to the observation and
that's the formula of how youcreate relevancy, right?
Personalization hey, notice wewent to the same school.
No one cares.
Hey, notice, also own a Germanshepherd, or something like that
.
Nobody cares.
That's not relevant to me.
That's, you're just mentioningfacts, right.
(15:27):
So that's the and it's reallyhard to do to create relevancy
at scale for like a hundredcandidates that I have in a
campaign that's going to go outand be able to do that all at
once.
And we obviously have likeerror rates, like we're not
hitting it a hundred percent ofthe time.
Nobody's hitting it a hundredpercent of the time.
So now we have to build intothe UX a very smart way for the
(15:47):
user to approve the messages sothey could say, hey, I like
these set of messages, theseones can discard these and just
use the original template.
So these are all these kind ofsmall problems and nuances that
have to go into building thisfeature that are very specific
to, obviously, the recruitinguse case.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, for sure, Elijah.
Do you have any thoughts youwant to jump in on this topic?
Oh, for sure, Elijah.
Do you have any thoughts youwant to jump in on this topic?
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Yeah, I'm just curious with the way that you're
approaching the market.
So, as you mentioned, likethere's a huge market globally,
but are you trying to focus inon kind of Canada first, maybe
because there's, I'm assuming,less competition there for tools
like this or similar use cases.
(16:30):
Then there might be in, like Idon't know, like the UK or the
US, obviously like those arehuge markets where there's a lot
of people like trying to buildproducts really quickly.
Are you trying to almostdominate the Canada market to
then be able to get a wave oflike customers and that momentum
, or are you trying to gomultiple places at one time?
I'm just curious.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Yeah, I know.
So 80% of our customer base isin the US and we purposefully
did that, obviously reason beingfor in terms of raising capital
.
If you have all Canadiancustomers, that's a massive
negative, like right off the batto VCs and investors.
They want to know that you canwin the US market.
If you win the US market, youwill become a unicorn, right?
(17:10):
So that was very purposeful,purpose and strategic, like
early on.
Also, we knew just like byvirtue of being in Toronto and
obviously we spoke a coupleweeks ago we spoke at a pretty
big Toronto like tech conference, stuff like that like we'll get
natural word of mouth inToronto, whereas the US we're
gonna have to put in the work toactually build that foundation
there.
So we'll take the easy wins inCanada, like when we can get
(17:31):
them, but we need to win in, weneed to win the US, we need to
win in the UK.
We need to build really gooddistribution channels, like in
those places, in order to get inthere.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
I think the approach for agencyof doing both like the business
development side and thesourcing side on the outbound is
very logical.
A lot of companies, right, jim,they would have the outbound
use case really solid for, likecorporate, but then you wouldn't
really use it much on the BDside, right.
(18:02):
But then there's otherplatforms, like SourceWhale in
the UK, who've done a reallygood job building for the
business development side inrecruiting, right.
So that's like kind of acategory.
Then you've got all these salestools like Limlist, right, like
all these sales tools who theysay, oh, you can use this for
recruiting.
But when you look at theworkflows, you look at the email
(18:25):
contact info, they're pulling,they're pulling mostly business
emails right, like they're notset up for the personal emails.
So I just find it interestinglike that approach of doing both
and focusing in on staffing andrecruiting, helping them with
both use cases.
I think it would go really wellfor you having that focus,
because I've seen Sourcewell'sgrowth in the UK from doing BD
(18:48):
and sourcing at the same timeand it seems to have gotten them
good traction in the agencymarket in the UK specifically.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
I'm just wondering though, because you're like
targeting the SMB segment, soI'm wondering too, like just for
SMB software companies or SMBcompanies in general, I can see
this being a good fit for themtoo, potentially for doing both.
If they're not looking toonboard like a massive CRM
sequencing tool that's going tobe more expensive potentially
than just like a one kind ofproduct that can basically just
(19:17):
fit the needs of puttingtogether like a target account
list for outreach probably not,as it's not like a HubSpot per
se, but or but it's or it's notlike a tool where you have to
integrate a CRM with asequencing tool.
So I could see like in the SMBmarket in general, it being like
attractive even as an internaltool.
I'm just curious do you haveany customers that are using it
(19:37):
internally for recruiting, or isit like are you guys 100% in
staffing?
Speaker 3 (19:43):
Yeah, we've.
It's funny We've actuallynaturally, yeah, we've had a few
like internal recruiters justhear about us and sign up yeah,
we're, and we didn't.
We decided not to targetinternal recruiting because I do
feel like that market is likevery saturated with some very
well funded companies.
I think that, honestly, the onethat I'm hearing that's that I
think is going to probablydominate seems like Ashby is
(20:05):
that's the one that I'm hearinghas the most robust workflows.
I think they're going to Idon't know, probably.
It sounds to me like, based onsome of the functionality I've
seen, it's seeming like lookingbetter than gem in some ways.
Hard to tell, but like pointbeing.
Point being is that knew thatthese problems existed right In
that are very unique to agenciesand agencies have their own
(20:25):
unique workflow.
That is totally different froman internal recruiters
standpoint and there wasn'tenough people working on that
problem and the market was hugeand we just said hey again, if
we win a fraction of that, thisis going to be a very successful
company.
And not only that.
We feel like we can.
Based on what we're seeing fromcompetition and the pace at
which they move, I'm prettyconfident we can dominate this
(20:47):
market.
So we wanted to try and go bebig fish in a small pond.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Oh yeah, and, as you say, staffing isn't necessarily
a small pond either.
It's a massive addressablemarket and it's also, in a sense
, niche, which is cool.
You can be highly targeted inyour product development and
your go-to-market strategy andalso have a massive addressable
market, which is a really coolcombination of things.
And I'd say, Elijah, I don'tknow if this is spot on, but
(21:15):
probably half of the founderCEOs we've had on for this
series have at least a prettylarge customer segment of
staffing which I don't know what.
I guess I just hadn't reallythought about it, but the more I
think about it makes a lot ofsense.
Remember, we had a Priora onthe show and CEO sorry, I'm just
blanking on his name.
Let me get it real fast.
It was.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
James.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Was it or Aaron?
Aaron, there you go.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Aaron, yeah, so he really smart guy and a Priora.
They're focused, dialed in on alot of staffing companies.
It's like an AI voice agent.
So people like apply inboundand then their AI voice agent
actually immediately calls thecandidate to do the screening.
It's pretty cool and theyraised like what should they
(22:01):
raise?
I think they raised like acouple million or something like
that.
So it's just interesting.
They're getting a lot oftraction in staffing and
recruiting and the way that theyexplained it was it made a lot
of sense.
They staffing and recruitingagencies have a lot of high
volume right.
So just from a volumeperspective, they need a lot
more support and it makes sense.
That's why a lot of theseproducts, too, are addressing
(22:21):
top of funnel.
It's higher volume.
Staffing and recruiting ishigher volume.
Essentially, if a staffingrecruiting company is in
business, they're hiring,they're always hiring, so it's
like consistency too.
And then he was talking aboutlike margins, like as services
companies, like traditionally, alot of staffing companies
actually have like pretty crappymargins and even at scale, like
when you see enterprisecompanies like they still don't
(22:43):
really have great margins a lotof the time.
So it's there's that emphasisor like desire and need to find
ways to cut costs, bring costsdown.
So it's a combination of highvolume, lower margin business
that is ripe for automation andAI solutions in terms of the
products that we're seeingcoming out, so it's pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
And those investments .
Ideally, a firm is looking atsomething like Talon, they
should be able to wrap theirhead around it as an ROI,
positive investment, like ourprimary pitch.
Like when I'm on demos withcustomers and stuff like that, I
go hey, listen, if you're agood fit, if you look at this
and you think that I can get youeight to 10 hours back in your
week, you'll churn in threemonths.
(23:26):
And the calculation I do, letme go.
How many hires or how manyhours does it take you?
Let's assume that you have thebusiness, and if you don't, by
the way, talent can help you getthat business.
But let's assume that you doand that you have the ability to
take on more pipe.
How many hours does it take oneof your recruiters to make a
placement?
Depends on the industry.
They might say, yeah, about 50hours of labor when we'll be
(23:49):
able to make a placement.
What's the value on that?
Yeah, that's probably in thenet.
It's about 35K in revenue forthis type of hire that we do
quite a bit.
Okay, great, extrapolate thatout.
I'm going to give each of yourrecruiters back 300 hours a year
in manual labor.
That's six additional hires perrecruiter across the board.
(24:10):
What's that worth to you on adollar figure right?
The staffing industry has theluxury of, I think, being able
to think that way, because theyget paid the more they hire,
right.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, for sure.
As you see, the focus is on ROIversus, and it's a revenue
generating function versus acost function within an internal
company.
So that's also a very importantpoint that I hadn't considered
too.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, which is why I think staying focused on
staffing is probably the bestbet, right?
Like you see, a lot ofcompanies they try to do both
and build for the internal usecase and build for staffing, but
the workflows are so different.
The value of candidateexperience, if we're honest, is
very different.
They're just completelydifferent workflows and even
(25:01):
values that they're delivering.
That I think it's really I'vejust seen very few do it well
where they genuinely build forboth use cases, Usually they end
up starting to lose a little inone area or the other.
But I think you guys are reallysmart and going after both the
BD side and the sourcing sideand staffing just makes.
Yeah, I think it makes a ton ofsense.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Yeah, I mean, like you have exceptions like
LinkedIn, recruiter and, I think, potentially tools like Gem.
Actually, I think Gem is makinga bigger push into staffing
right now.
I think, at least on theLinkedIn side there's a
different pricing for staffingagencies because it's like
higher volume, so they actuallybring down the cost of LinkedIn
recruiter seats, and I think Idon't know exactly but I think
(25:43):
there's some other players, likein the sourcing, outbound
sourcing space, that are takinglike a similar approach.
So I think more companies areidentifying like a market
opportunity in staffing andrecruiting that are on the
internal side.
Again, I think this is a newermotion for Jim, but yeah, it's
interesting to see thatevolution.
I think you're right, though,dialing in on staffing and
(26:03):
recruiting.
There's already so muchbusiness to be won in that space
.
You really don't need Unlessit's just as easy to sign up
customers.
Obviously, the technology couldwork for in-house in terms of
the outbound sourcing cadences.
That's valuable to anyone, butjust from a go-to-market
perspective too, it's justadding that kind of clarity and
specialization.
(26:24):
I'm sure that gives you a lifttoo, just saying, hey, we
specifically build for SMB staffand recruiting right.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Yeah, exactly, and on the BD side, we get into some
really interesting use casesthat can then lend themselves to
build highly targeted, highlysegmented and very personalized
outbound campaigns.
Right, you look at job changedata Like, we have a client
we're working with where theyknow that a certain type of role
when it changes about three tofour months, into that person
(26:53):
starting their role, they'reprobably rejigging their team
and so we're able to automate,like that sequence in this
really timely way which is, bythe way, this is the outbound
that works today.
Right, taking a template,blasting it to 5,000 people
doesn't work anymore.
But using that formula, takingintent data in the form of a
(27:15):
trigger, right, somethinghappens, that is, whether it's a
LinkedIn post or a judging,whatever.
We can take those use casesthat are very unique to agencies
, build that data, build thosedata pipelines into our product
and that then creates thesereally successful outbound
campaigns.
And we've you got, we gotclients for the first time.
(27:36):
They, like, they see a five to10% reply rate on a BD campaign
which is novel to them.
Right there, that's unheard offor them.
So it's and again we'll getback to this theme of if you to
do that as an agency, you needsomeone on the team who's an
outbound expert and you do notfind a whole lot of outbound
experts in recruiting agencies,unless they purposefully go find
(27:59):
one, and there's not a lot ofoutbound experts in general on
the market as a whole.
So it's like how do weproductize that expertise so
that they can plug in andessentially have go from a three
out of 10 outbound motion to aneight out of 10 outbound motion
with virtually no additionalacumen needed to make that
(28:20):
happen?
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I think the sub 50 makes a lot of sense too right,
because sometimes larger firmsstart to specialize more and
then the recruiters aren't likedoing 360, like they're not
doing their BD and outbound fortheir own roles, and then it's
not that the value goes down.
But then if someone's justdoing BD for staffing, say
(28:43):
they're at a 150 person firmthey may be saying do I want
Talon or do I want Apollo?
or whatever, you're in adifferent category.
But for the 360 ones they'rethinking I don't want two
different tools, that's a wasteof time, it's a waste of money,
it's a waste of time and forthem this can be that tool,
(29:07):
that's their one tool where theycan say, let's say, they're
doing mondays and tuesdays,they're doing some bd.
I'm sure it doesn't work thatway, but if it's that clean for
them mondays and tuesdays andthen three days of sourcing.
They just check their campaign.
Yeah, I think that one toolapproach for the 360 recruiters
is, yeah, spot on.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
We know that for a fact.
They hate having more tools.
We know they're bound toLinkedIn, recruiter which, by
the way or CRM, or I mean we seepeople with both who literally
(29:54):
are doing like Bullhorn andHubSpot at the same time to then
stack two, three, four tools ontop of that to have BD and
candidate functions for outboundor whatever is.
We do not want to be doing that.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Yeah, yeah, so spot on A quick question about like
product roadmap Do you seeyourself going more in a CRM
direction where it's likethere's a talent engagement for
passive talent or people thatare already in your ATS that
you're trying to target in thefuture?
Is there any kind oforganization behind that?
What are your thoughts on justthe evolution of the product
(30:29):
from that perspective?
Speaker 3 (30:30):
your thoughts on, just like the evolution of the
product from that perspective.
Yeah, for sure I think it'll bea lot easier to stay
differentiated and beatcompetitors if we go the other
way, whereas if we focus moreand go more and more top of
funnel, we focus on the intentdata we bring in.
Right now we're built over topof, like recruiter, like sales
nav, bringing in GitHub, indeed,going like truly like multi
(30:54):
data source.
So any type of recruiting firm,does not matter who they are,
can use us that intent data.
Just making, at the end of theday, like, if you look at, what
do recruiting firms need toexcel at to grow their business?
It's.
I got to get clients and I gotto place candidates.
So as long as we stay very, weare always on the cutting edge
of those, and I think obviouslyyou're seeing the tech that's
(31:16):
coming out today and obviouslyevery six months we get another
LLM that's like a magnitudebetter than the previous LLM.
I don't know if you guys haveplayed with O1 at all on ChatGPT
, but for math and coding it'slike mind boggling.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
When did that one come out?
Speaker 3 (31:31):
The preview came out a month ago.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
And I think they rolled out API used to tier five
users, but it'll eventuallybecome I'm sure within the next
one to two months it'll probablyreplace 4.0 as their premium,
expensive model.
But, point being, as soon asyou go down the path of system
of record, we're now justbuilding table stakes, functions
that other people have, and theplay is for talent to become
(31:55):
more of an all-in-one, whichthere's value of all-in-one.
And the thing that's maybeworking against us is to
elijah's point like smb, theylike all-in-ones, but if we do a
really good job of unlocking,like novel functionality that
takes the sourcing process andtakes it from 10 hours a week to
two, we're talking aboutchanging their workflow in a
(32:20):
pretty dramatic way versushaving them just cut another
tool out of their tech stack.
To me, the former is where thehuge value on lock is going
forward.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
There aren't a ton of all-in-ones on the staffing
side for firms of that size,other than maybe like loxo right
, but they've stuffed so manythings into their all-in-one
that it's a it's confusing fromlike a pricing perspective.
And yeah, I just I've wanted touse it a few times and I've
heard a few other people usingit, but it's like do people like
(32:53):
them?
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Like I wonder how they're around for a while.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
I'll give them.
I'll give them this Cause we'vetalked to lock.
So they've done a good job ofgo to market, cause it's the
most common ATS that weintegrate with and the ones that
we see yeah, we see it the most, I would say, of like right now
.
So they did a good job of go tomarket.
When we first started about twoyears ago it was just plain
disdain for them.
Like I would honestly say, outof like our first 20
(33:22):
integrations, maybe one personsaid they actually liked them.
It was, they had adoptionproblems and it was convoluted
and it was basically a system ofrecord.
They've I and it was convolutedand it was basically a system
of record.
I saw some key hires they made.
They hired a couple ofinteresting people that I knew
in the industry, who I knew werelegit, and I think I'm hearing
(33:44):
less of that kind of disdain onthem.
I think they're moving in apositive direction but, that
said, I think the product isprobably overly complex.
It's confusing to your point onlike pricing.
They also and this is we win alot of contract.
We're month to month, we're PLGmonth to month.
You can hop in and start a freetrial on talent in five minutes
and Locktoe is still on, likeannual contracts, which I know
(34:06):
is great for cashflow, but again, your sub 50 recruiting do not
like them and that's why oursales cycle is three weeks two
to three weeks from meeting tothem, just putting in their
credit card and the billingscompletely automated right with
Stripe.
So, yeah, it's an interestingone and again, I think, if
they're a direct competitor ofours at this point, but we also
integrate with them, so in someways, in some ways no, but I
(34:28):
know for a fact if we're focusedon the use cases, we're focused
on, loxo will just not be ableto keep up building those things
.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
And they're one of the only ones, though, julian.
There's not a lot of otherall-in-ones for staffing other
than Loxo that touch top offunnel the way that you all are.
Not that I'm aware of.
At least Bullhorn, no Averture,no Salesforce.
No People are using Salesforcefor that.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Yeah, exactly, you're right.
You could make the argumentthat Bullhorn uses its
marketplace to try to be more ofan all-in-one, but I think a
lot of the apps in theirmarketplace are ghost apps.
I know a bunch of apps that dooutbound in their marketplace
that I've never Our Bullhornintegration is like very robust,
(35:17):
that's like that.
Them and loxo are two mostcommon.
I've never met a singlebullhorn user.
That is like effectively usingtheir marketplace and so we're
just.
One of our plays is to become areally de facto make bullhorn
decent, uh-huh, yeah, okay, weare.
It's, oh, it still is, butautomated.
We automated a ton of the dataentry in Bullhorn because it is
like switching off of Bullhorn,for especially if you go 50 plus
(35:40):
, even, I'd say, once you get 20, 30 plus, that's where you
start to see a lot more Bullhornversus your five to 10 person.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
I don't see why if you're not enterprise, why you
would get Bullhorn.
It's like why, if you're like asas company, you get salesforce
under 10 million ar, like I.
I try to like for my agency,try to implement salesforce.
It was I just wasted so muchmoney when all I really needed
was hubspot sales professional.
Yeah, like anyways.
Yeah different topic but Ithink it's like why are you
(36:07):
paying?
I don't know.
I had such an awful experience.
We used Bullhorn back in 2018,17 at SecureVision and it was
just a massive waste of time.
I hated it.
It was probably the worstexperience I've had with an ATS
on the staffing side.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Let's not put that on the YouTube clip.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Oh, I think we're actually.
I think we're actually.
I'm going to be inviting on theCEO from there.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Hopefully you won't listen to this episode yeah,
they were not on our target listof company.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
I'm gonna do outreach to all of the big ats providers
, like all of them.
Not necessary, I don't know ifit'll be for the series per se,
but trying to get all of them onthere, but anyways cool, very
cool, yeah, yeah, I, I hear you,I hear you on that what about
your thesis?
Like your thesis for a fewminutes left.
I'm just just curious to getyour thoughts on LinkedIn
(36:56):
recruiter.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
You said you have an interesting perspective on that
right, someone who clearly wantsto sign up early, innovator
right, they sign up for thelatest and greatest stuff.
Especially a company like oursis going to attract that kind of
(37:18):
person.
And like ai sourcing orcompanies that give like their
own database, let's say evenlike whatever searchable
database for candidates and sayand try to there's companies
trying to replace linkedinrecruiter right one that comes
to mind is better lead like.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
I've been following them for a while yeah, I
actually used to use them for afew months are they on our?
Speaker 1 (37:35):
are they on our list?
Okay?
Speaker 2 (37:37):
I think so, yeah, yeah okay.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
So I'm very curious on your experience with better
leap, because I have a fewanecdotes from them it was.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
yeah, it was solid I struggled little bit with.
So let me say their unlimitedcredits was great, like that was
nice that I wasn't having toworry about credit usage.
The pricing was I think it waslike $333 a month, pretty sure,
per license for a staffingcompany to have that unlimited
on the credit side.
(38:09):
Have that unlimited on thecredit side.
And then the AI sourcing wherethey would AI recommend
candidates, was decent, actuallynot too bad.
Like I was impressed comparedto other AI tools I'd used
before.
Though not blown away, it didthe job for what I needed.
It was just sequencing.
I didn't keep it.
I used it for one contract witha customer, actually James, the
(38:32):
one that we worked on together.
Yeah, just I used it with them.
But yeah, I didn't feel like itwas worth the $333 a month to
keep it active after that point.
And you can use it for BD?
Very well, I don't think.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
They got looks like $13 million in funding last year
.
Anderson Horowitz and listen,I'm looking at the same one.
Let me just drop this in thechat real fast.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
That's a good, their brand right.
Their branding's good.
I don't know, julian.
You've seen their website.
It's a solid looking brand.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
For sure this is the right website, the one I dropped
in the, the zoom chat or thereis like their linkedin page.
I want to make sure we'retalking about, because on the
website too it also it has.
It's now branded toward healthcare really they may have
discovered a new opportunity,that's a different logo too.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Oh yeah, did they rebrand and move out of yes?
Speaker 1 (39:18):
is that company?
Speaker 3 (39:19):
first wow they pivoted.
Wow, they pivoted.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
That's their second pivot because I talked to one of
their early on people a fewmonths ago and I think he had
helped them pivot from somemarketplace for recruiters into
what it was previously and nowthey're niching in on healthcare
.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Well, look at, like here's the thing like you raise
the amount of money that theydid and I think they had, I
remember I think they had a flatround.
I think they raised two roundsa couple of years apart at the
exact same valuation.
Like they may not be in controlof their board anymore or have
at least given away some boardseats.
They got VCs.
They are forced now to grow ata pace where if something's not
(40:01):
working, they are going to dowhatever they possibly can to
grow at absolute breakneck speed.
And so my anecdotes with themis hey, the AI sourcing was like
interesting, but it wasn'tenough of a magnitude of
improvement to justify it.
And then we're talking aboutsourcing.
It's the most time consumingthing in my opinion in the
staffing business.
(40:21):
One of them at least.
If you're sourcing like one byone candidates, like you have,
let's say, you have a campaignof 50 candidates, a decent size
campaign that's going to go out,most recruiters are making sure
all 50 of those people arerelevant.
That takes a lot of time to domanually.
So there's an opportunity therein my opinion.
If you do it well, you shouldbe providing a ton of value.
(40:44):
So I heard this like a bunch ofplaces, and then this is how it
comes.
Let's tie this back to my thesiswith LinkedIn Recruiter.
Linkedin is like the primarydata source.
Only 85% of all LinkedInprofiles are actually scrapable
via like open web right, soindexed on Google, meaning
they're scrapable.
Any external database ismissing 15% of the entire talent
(41:08):
pool on LinkedIn.
There is nothing they can do toget that talent pool Absolutely
nothing.
Linkedin will never sell it toyou.
You cannot get it unless youillegally scrape and then
LinkedIn will sue you.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Platform, and then you're yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Exactly so.
As a result, if you're saying,hey, I'm going to replace
LinkedIn recruiter, your enduser has to be cool with missing
15% of their base of potentialcandidates.
Guess what, if I hire let's sayI hire for finance they are all
on LinkedIn.
That is my number one datasource.
You're saying to me okay, so Ilook at, I placed up 200
(41:46):
candidates this year across myentire firm.
You're telling me 20,.
25 of them would not beavailable to me if I only use
something like Better Leap anddidn't use LinkedIn Recruiter.
Good luck with that sell.
In my opinion, I think we needto use LinkedIn as a primary
data source.
We pull data from it, etc.
(42:07):
You build over top of it, youuse multi-data source.
I'm a believer in a world wherewe are pulling in data from
lots of sources, building ourown databases, not saying, hey,
I've built you one database.
That is the be all, end, allfor everything you need.
Now I think with healthcare,better leak might be able to do
it.
That's where and that's maybeone of the reasons that they
(42:28):
pivoted.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
But anyways, that's my go a little bit more.
Niche Healthcare is anotherarea like staffing and
recruiting, where it's like amassive addressable market.
But it's also a niche thatmakes sense.
A lot of healthcare companiesare going to want to see folks
that are dialed into that space.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
And lots of data in healthcare that is not on
LinkedIn.
Also high volume.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
Very high volume.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
The pivot makes complete sense to me.
I'm happy they did it.
One less competitor for us.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah, that's what I was about to say I'm very happy
they did that.
They're at 13 million andcompeted a different direction.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
I think if LinkedIn would just allow more monthly
pricing and reasonable pricingfor smaller companies on
LinkedIn Recruiter I just allowmonthly right and it's a couple
hundred bucks a month they wouldactually cut out the need for
people to look outside theplatform for like replacement
solutions.
(43:25):
Like you were saying, julian,it would be more just like, oh,
an augmented thing, and youwouldn't be that play of
replacing which higher ez waspitching for quite a while.
Oh, you don't need linkedin ifyou have us, and most people
ended up still having both, likeyou said, because of the
missing profile if linkedinwould just stop being so greedy
(43:46):
and they would just allow likemonthly pricing, couple hundred
bucks.
They make a ton of money off ityeah, like you're, yeah, like a
monopoly business.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
They're not going to hurt to do that.
They're not going to bend atall.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
I know you got LinkedIn stories, James.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
You cannot negotiate with them and it pisses me off
when it's particularly whenthere's like a market correction
and it's like I got this longass contract with LinkedIn.
God, yeah, I built my companyaround LinkedIn, so I really
shouldn't be complaining toomuch.
All my sales candidates.
Linkedin made it possible forme to grow my business the way I
(44:25):
did.
But, yeah, there's zeroflexibility you get what I'm
saying.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
It's always a love-hate thing with LinkedIn
man.
It changed the game.
It made stuff scalable.
You're coughing up $6.50 amonth, or whatever it is, for
the rest of your life.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
Yeah for sure.
Hey, man, I think we're comingup on time here.
This has been a really greatepisode.
I've really enjoyed this cooltalking shop about staffing,
recruiting, your approach.
I think it makes a lot of sensedialing in top of funnel.
For a lot of reasons, I don'tthink we even got to get to
everything, but that's the signof a good episode.
Julia, thank you so much forjoining Elijah and me today.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
Yeah, thank you guys both.
I had a lot of fun today and,yeah, hopefully I get to do it
again sometime.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Oh yeah, for sure, man, and you can always reach
out to us if you want to come onthe show again or you got a big
like feature release orsomething like that.
Just let us know All right, I'mdown Sweet.
Cool.
Well, everybody else tuning in.
Thank you for joining us.
We got a lot of great episodeson AI for Hiring that we've
already published, so make sureto of Greenhouse, Jim Workable,
(45:34):
BrightHire, Pillar, a lot ofother companies, so we're going
to give you a good mix of largeestablished players, early stage
startups and everything inbetween, so that you get a solid
pulse on how differentcompanies are thinking about
solving issues in talentacquisition with new LLM
technology and whatnot.
Be sure to continue to tune in.
Thank you for joining us today.
Take care.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.