Solving the Mismatch w/Kshitij Jain

[00:00:04] Welcome to The Recruitment Flex with Serge and Shelley. I'm Serge.

[00:00:10] And I'm Shelley, and we talk all things recruitment starting right now.

[00:00:14] Bonjour and welcome to The Recruitment Flex. Shelley, another week, another fantastic guest.

[00:00:24] Can't wait to talk to this one.

[00:00:25] Yes, I agree, Serge. I don't know how we keep doing it. Honestly, I'm still, even

[00:00:30] after four years, so honored when people agree to come on the show and talk to us.

[00:00:35] And today we have a very special guest joining us. It's KJ, who is the CEO of the company

[00:00:42] Jovio. Welcome to the show, KJ.

[00:00:44] Thank you very much, Shelley and Serge. Thanks for having me today.

[00:00:49] So nice to meet you. Where I'd like to start is just to get to know you a little better.

[00:00:55] Can you share with us your journey into the HR tech world?

[00:01:00] Sure. Well, I'll start with a bit of personal information. I have two kids. They just turned

[00:01:06] in a week back. So trouble year starting now. I'm actually a gemologist by trade.

[00:01:11] When I was 17, 18 years old, I was in the business of emeralds, rubies and sapphires.

[00:01:16] I was a gemologist and a monster trader. But then as life moved on, I ended up

[00:01:20] meeting my wife. She's a smart one in the family. She is a lead economist at

[00:01:23] the World Bank that explains why I'm in Washington, D.C. And she said, you know what?

[00:01:28] You have a freedom. Go live your life. Do whatever you want. I got home.

[00:01:31] And one of the big reasons why I am what I am is because she supported me through all the ups

[00:01:35] and downs. When I first came to the U.S., she was a student in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[00:01:41] And I had come with an American dream. I was a migrant, $150,000 worth of debt

[00:01:48] on a student loan from my wife. And it was just everybody told me growing up that

[00:01:53] you can do whatever you want to dream big and work hard. This is the place for you.

[00:01:58] This is land for you. And here I am. I'm a migrant. And all thanks to this great country.

[00:02:02] I feel very proud to have accomplished and helped by people like you along the journey.

[00:02:09] Being in this industry since 2001, I had a very different kind of experience.

[00:02:13] I used to manage back in the day monster.com. I was managing their cross-border business

[00:02:17] between Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia, Turkey, Latin America,

[00:02:23] which kind of pretty much covers the entire world. Used to be on the road,

[00:02:26] 270 out of 365 days of the year. Wow.

[00:02:29] Matt, but the best part of it is I used to meet a lot of talent acquisition heads.

[00:02:34] And I realized the cultural nuances, how recruiting is different in every part of the world,

[00:02:40] how hard it is from a job seeker behavior, adapting to it, what motivates them,

[00:02:44] what are their regulatory compliances, summit policies. It gave me a whole different level of

[00:02:50] appreciation of the life of a head of talent acquisition. It is a hard job.

[00:02:55] And as I was working with Monster and I was traveling around the world, I saw

[00:02:58] people getting onto smartphones and mobile devices. And I used to wonder when I,

[00:03:03] with my family, used to go to cost or some of these places and say,

[00:03:07] how do these people apply to jobs? How does a truck driver, how does a

[00:03:11] a Veroz package handler or a store clerk apply to jobs? They don't have desktop devices.

[00:03:16] And then I started realizing that the entire system was set up in the wrong way.

[00:03:22] The job application process was very long and the people who really need a job don't have a

[00:03:27] desktop device. Application processes are not optimized for mobile devices.

[00:03:31] And I said, you know what? Let me at least make a dent in the universe

[00:03:35] and try to do something about it. And lo and behold, my first startup was created.

[00:03:40] Prior to that, I had failed many times by the way. But this time I think the

[00:03:44] cookie turned out to be right. And we were acquired by Indeed in 2014.

[00:03:48] We were the first ever acquisition and I learned a lot in Indeed.

[00:03:51] I learned that for all things, there are pretty much about

[00:03:55] 50 job titles in the US that account for 80% jobs in the US.

[00:04:01] And these are people like Veroz package handler. These are delivery drivers.

[00:04:05] These are people who work in retail chains, whether it is food retail,

[00:04:08] department retail, so on and so forth. And I said, we've got to solve this problem.

[00:04:13] There's got to be a way that there is a right job for everybody in the world.

[00:04:18] It's our job to get the right job in front of them. And that's the genesis of a name called

[00:04:22] JoView. And that's the mission that we say, you know, it's our job to get them a right job.

[00:04:26] And then suddenly this thought emerged in my mind that, you know what? Let's try to

[00:04:30] solve this problem. The idea is there are people coming to courier site.

[00:04:36] They're not looking at the right jobs. They're sometimes making wrong decisions, applying to

[00:04:39] wrong job. I said, it's a massive problem. So let's get one thing. Let's

[00:04:44] solve the problem of distribution on job boards programmatically and do it right with a tech

[00:04:49] first approach. And I called my co-founders from a previous startup and said, guys, listen,

[00:04:56] you want to get back to the journey with me and let's work together. And very humbled

[00:05:01] and honored that as a team, we got back together and slowly, slowly started working on

[00:05:05] it. And here we are just doing a bit to change the world a little bit.

[00:05:11] Wow. That is a fabulous journey that you have been on. Now you did bring up one term

[00:05:17] that, you know, when I hear the term programmatic job advertising or programmatic

[00:05:23] in recruitment marketing, and I know I'm not alone. Like even when I speak to other senior

[00:05:28] TA leaders, they don't really understand what it is. So can you just like pretend I'm in

[00:05:34] grade five and explain to me in the simplest way possible, what do you mean by programmatic?

[00:05:43] I think the biggest problem with this world, with this entire industry is the word

[00:05:48] programmatic itself. Okay. Okay. Thank you.

[00:05:53] I would say it's simple as that. Companies need to advertise their jobs to the destinations

[00:05:58] and locations where people are going to. They're going to face, they should be putting

[00:06:02] their jobs on Facebook in the way Facebook takes jobs. So they're going to indeed,

[00:06:05] they're going to LinkedIn. You just have to make this decision. The problem is that company needs

[00:06:10] to hire tens of thousands of people for thousands of jobs across dozens of countries

[00:06:18] where every country will have a few dozen top job boards out there. How do you make

[00:06:23] sense all of that? There's too many moving parts. How do you decide which source is

[00:06:28] delivering you the best quality applications? Which source is giving you the most relevant

[00:06:33] job seekers in the fastest time? And there has to be someone who acts democratic,

[00:06:38] acts independent and transparent and say, let me help you do that. Let me put all of that

[00:06:44] together in one box. Send me all your jobs. And I will decide where to distribute it in a way

[00:06:51] that I'm neutral. I'm not taking sides. You can trust me on this. And when the results come

[00:06:57] in, we show you transparently what it is. When you say problematic, the only change that should

[00:07:01] happen is a typical company would have, let's say a thousand plus jobs, maybe made into 20

[00:07:08] campaigns. Each of the campaigns job is sent to about 10 different job boards. You have about

[00:07:13] 200 different combinations and you have to not change the bids and the budget every single

[00:07:18] day. That's about three to 4,000 manual changes that need to happen. Not nearly possible.

[00:07:26] But this is all data. A machine can do the job much better. That's why it should be a program

[00:07:32] that you're doing it and that's why it should be called programmatic.

[00:07:36] Thank you. That was a great explanation. So just one more follow on question if I could,

[00:07:42] please. Should companies that are doing the traditional route, that is they're just choosing

[00:07:49] like one or two because you're right, doing this manually is impossible.

[00:07:54] Why should companies consider doing this? It seems harder or maybe that's just me.

[00:08:01] Wouldn't it be easier to just place your jobs on one place and then come back and see how

[00:08:07] it did because they don't have time for all this, right?

[00:08:13] That's exactly the point. You shouldn't have to do this. Why post a job and wait

[00:08:18] and see the results coming in? Why can't we challenge the status quo and say,

[00:08:24] can we do it better? Nobody becomes best in the world by trying to become the best.

[00:08:28] They become the best in the world by trying to do better every day. That's impossible.

[00:08:33] So if you imagine the problem is not posting the job to the right locations

[00:08:38] or right sources. The problem is so wide that I'm living in this area which is

[00:08:44] Bethesda or Maryland. If there's a company that wants to hire over here,

[00:08:47] it's a residential area, but you might be able to get a person from somewhere in Washington,

[00:08:51] D.C. or across the river in Virginia and you should be able to automatically

[00:08:56] understand and expand that job because ATSs are structured to post a job in the location

[00:09:02] where a person is supposed to be based, where talent works. ATSs do not post jobs

[00:09:08] where talent lives. Now you expand that out, right? Recruiters are not marketers.

[00:09:15] Hiring managers are definitely not marketers. I've seen people writing job titles as CDLA.

[00:09:21] What does CDLA mean? It's a truck driver, a SDE, a software development engineer. Can the

[00:09:27] technology automatically understand that and know which is the most searched job title for

[00:09:32] this? Can machine understand this? And I think we live in a flawed world. People who are

[00:09:38] writing the job and I was giving the example to a colleague of mine and this is a very

[00:09:43] honest thing I'm going to say is when we talk about something and you talk about people,

[00:09:47] I have observed it and tracked it myself. 90% of the time, people use the word he

[00:09:53] and not she. Now this is just my personal observation, but could there be a job

[00:09:58] description that is really truly diverse? That's really truly equal? How many times

[00:10:04] you write keywords like go getter and hard? Can AI transform your job description to be more

[00:10:10] equal? Could it appeal truly to everybody in the world in the right way? Could you also do so many

[00:10:17] other things where, I'll give a simple example. Why should we do that? And I'm going to make a

[00:10:21] statement which is not going to land well with most of the tech industry. Every single

[00:10:25] reporting 80% of the leaders in the world are getting is wrong. And I'll tell you why.

[00:10:31] You all have experienced this, right? You go to a company's website or any career site,

[00:10:35] there is a question that comes in. Accept or decline? Who keys?

[00:10:41] Tracking is pretty much based on cookies. If you decline, you cannot be tracked.

[00:10:44] So that means the data is never going to show you that this source is the reason why Shelley

[00:10:51] applied to a job in the company because it cannot be connected. Cookies will not track it.

[00:10:56] Only recently when Google started talking about and US government started talking about

[00:11:00] deprecating cookies and cookies are going to go away, did the consumer marketing world

[00:11:04] woke up and said, let's do something about it. But the technology they're building is called

[00:11:09] fingerprinting, which is only working on views and impressions. But our business does not work

[00:11:14] on these impressions. It works on people who are clicking to apply for a job. People who are

[00:11:19] finishing the application. It has to be brought in forward for that. So we build that technology

[00:11:24] in-house. We are not using an outsource technology. Now, if you just think of how

[00:11:28] programmatic can really do, if you do it well, this is my previous startup. Why is it

[00:11:32] that 100 people who have intention to apply to a job, only five end up applying to a job?

[00:11:38] Why is that? I care so deeply about it. I'm sorry, you're saying something.

[00:11:44] No, I think I knew what you were going to say. Why is there such a dramatic drop?

[00:11:52] I'll give you one simple reason that 40% of drops. It's the very first page when you click

[00:11:58] on our apply button, you get to a page which is for greater login and password. These are

[00:12:03] secret questions. There is a capture and there's all that stuff. Who are you turning away at that

[00:12:09] point of time? The people who are not desperate, people who are high quality,

[00:12:12] people who don't want to go through the pain of spending an hour finishing the application

[00:12:16] process. If you can just address that as an extension of programmatic. And ATSs are

[00:12:23] not known to be able to build APIs that will work at prime. Could there be a technology

[00:12:27] that can solve this problem? We have that built as an extension of programmatic. So we

[00:12:31] think people first, we think job seeker experience, candidate experience and recruiter

[00:12:37] experience are two experiences you want to solve for. You stay true to them,

[00:12:41] you stay true to your clients. That's what you got to focus on. So just by removing the login

[00:12:46] page, you can get 40% more applications which means across the US if everybody did that

[00:12:52] for the ATS applications and remove the login page, the 40% spends of all the companies in

[00:12:58] the US will go away tomorrow. Every job board will have 40% less business overnight. If this

[00:13:03] one thing can be solved. I've had companies asking for social security number. You talk to

[00:13:09] recruiter and recruiter says, I don't really need it. I need it when I have to give an offer

[00:13:13] later. Why can't you remove that? It's mandatory. Can you pre-fill that information

[00:13:17] to something else so that the users don't drop off over there? I have a question I

[00:13:22] will ask you and I know can be redirected at times. I want to ask all the TA leaders

[00:13:27] and CITROs in the world, isn't hiring the people among the top five things of a CEO?

[00:13:35] I would argue it's the number one thing of a CEO especially at early stage. I would say

[00:13:42] it's the most important. And people for profit companies like FedEx, like trucking companies,

[00:13:46] like so many companies, nurses, healthcare hospitals. If you don't have nurses, your

[00:13:50] business goes down. But had any one of you gone and looked at your application job application

[00:13:55] process ever, please suffer the pain yourself to actually realize that. You passionately

[00:14:01] and sometimes it can come out a little bit strongly. Solve for that. Let's let us

[00:14:05] solve for that together. Let us solve for the entire journey together. I have a lot to cut in

[00:14:11] there. There's a lot of great points. And to answer that last question is it's one of the

[00:14:16] things. The first thing as I'm working with a client, I'm like has your CEO applied for a job?

[00:14:20] Because that is the only way that they're going to change the process because we're looking at

[00:14:26] it from an HR or talent acquisition. It's in our job. We're just so used to register to apply

[00:14:31] in these steps. We forget. It just becomes noise, right? As a CEO coming in and going

[00:14:37] through the process, you're like this doesn't make any sense especially if the CEO is coming

[00:14:42] from a world of conversion when it comes to sales. If he's taking that same process and being like,

[00:14:48] I would not do this for my sales clients. So why are you doing it for candidates?

[00:14:53] I agree completely. But I want to jump into a couple things that you've said there. The

[00:14:56] register to apply is an interesting one because it's very much an American or North American

[00:15:03] issue because from what I'm seeing in Europe, there is very few register to apply in the ATS.

[00:15:10] I might be wrong, but I've seen it in Germany and the Netherlands. 90% don't have registered

[00:15:15] to apply. But there's a broader question there. So there is friction that is negative.

[00:15:23] Registering to apply and say you apply to 50 jobs that are all workday ATS,

[00:15:29] you're still registering 50 different accounts which is crazy just to think about that.

[00:15:36] But the flip side to it is one click apply with no friction. It's got to be in the middle because

[00:15:46] what's your thoughts here about no friction, infriction and I think there's a

[00:15:52] right amount of friction somewhere that sits in the middle. But what's your thoughts there?

[00:15:56] You answered my question. You answered your own question.

[00:16:00] In trying to correct one problem, you so much overcorrected that you've created a

[00:16:05] beast out of that. And by the way, while you did a one click apply, you made people easy to

[00:16:10] apply for jobs. You can't scale your recruiters 10x overnight. If you have 100 recruiters,

[00:16:16] you have 100 recruiters. But if the application volume goes up by 10x,

[00:16:21] are you really doing right by your recruiter experience? Are they going to be able to do a

[00:16:25] good job of even looking at applications? Are these applications even being looked at?

[00:16:28] And please help me understand. Are these even going into ATS as a full application where screening

[00:16:35] questions and all those questions being answered? Recruiters not married to the ATS and whatever

[00:16:39] is in the ATS is a source of truth and a system of record. So what's really happening

[00:16:43] to that? And with GPT coming in, with the ability to understand the questions and the

[00:16:48] context of it, I have known companies that will just take a resume and say you don't even

[00:16:53] have to do one click apply. We will keep on doing the one click applies for you hundreds of

[00:16:58] times a day for every single job that's out there. These are bots that do that. We have created

[00:17:03] a bigger problem in trying to solve this problem and corrected over far this way. There is always

[00:17:10] the right kind of information that you need to be able to screen and engage the right candidate.

[00:17:15] Optimize for that, find the right balance. Don't be as painful as you have in ATS.

[00:17:21] Remove your login, right? That itself, right? You're getting 40% more.

[00:17:24] The tech budgets of companies that I have known companies which spend a million dollars a month,

[00:17:29] they spend $12 million a year. Their entire ATS and HR tech contract pool put together

[00:17:34] is less than a million dollars a year. Yeah. In $12 million a year, $1 million over here,

[00:17:39] imagine if you get 40% more applications over here. That's about four or five million dollars

[00:17:43] over here you say, can you then not use integrating innovation, experimenting stuff,

[00:17:49] giving your recruiters maybe a better reason and so on and so forth? I don't know what I

[00:17:52] don't know, but I think solve the right problem in the right way is my motto.

[00:17:57] Amen. I completely agree with that assessment. I do want to take even a step further back

[00:18:03] in what you said. There were so many nuggets in there that I want to dig in deeper and

[00:18:07] talking about programmatic again. It's interesting because programmatic in the consumer

[00:18:13] and B2B marketing has been around since 1998 as an example. Really programmatic in our space

[00:18:20] is probably 2012, 2013, 2014 and we had Appcast and then Jovio. You all came out in very similar

[00:18:29] timeframes. If you look at most of the marketing that spend on consumer B2B,

[00:18:34] it's bought programmatic. Don't quote me on this number, but I think what I saw was around

[00:18:38] 80%. You're right. We're not close to that when it comes to recruitment marketing.

[00:18:43] I'm a huge fan of programmatic. I've used it as a practitioner for a long time,

[00:18:49] but I think in most of my colleagues, it's so overwhelming to even think about it.

[00:18:54] How do we simplify it so there's a wide adoption across the board that maybe you don't even need

[00:19:00] to use an agency because you can do it internally? How do we simplify this awakening

[00:19:08] of both demand side and supply side? It's a pull and push both sides. First of all,

[00:19:14] don't solve the problem you shouldn't be solving. Don't solve trying to make people

[00:19:19] where core function is human resources, some acquisition and make them technology

[00:19:23] and marketing crews. They're great in understanding people, they're great at

[00:19:28] understanding behaviors, hiring right people. They're not data analysts and gurus. The

[00:19:34] problem does not lie in making people understand this. I think the problem lies in the

[00:19:38] ecosystem that we are working. What I mean by that is, I'll give a simple example. Any

[00:19:44] single newspaper website, sports website, you go behind the scenes in terms of tracking

[00:19:48] codes that are there. They have DMPs and DSPs and supply side partners tracking code. Everybody

[00:19:55] is allowing cookies to be placed in every single page on their website so as to expose

[00:20:00] what is the kind of audience who are coming to different pages of theirs? What is the

[00:20:03] traffic that's coming in? They're exposing that information in full transparency, which

[00:20:09] why the inventory or the supply of people who are coming to a certain website is openly known

[00:20:14] and the demand is also coming to the same box. Imagine supply is coming for every single

[00:20:19] provider in the world and the demand from companies who want to place ads is coming

[00:20:23] the same place and that is when in real time, the matching happens. An ad is bought

[00:20:31] in a consumer tech world. If you are, I'm being very conservative here, if you're half

[00:20:36] a second late, you lose the bid. It's only half a second. Milliseconds decisions are made.

[00:20:43] In our business, the same thing takes hours. Supply side job boards, they will never allow

[00:20:49] anybody to know under the hood which page of theirs, which location of theirs,

[00:20:54] which jobs of theirs are getting what kind of place, what kind of traffic.

[00:20:58] Until that system evolves and matures, it will not get to a place where the right

[00:21:04] information comes in. When this information comes in, we just have to tell people it's

[00:21:08] fully transparent. There's old standards that are established. Everybody is judged by the same

[00:21:13] thing and therefore the demand side, which is the companies will also play by the same rules.

[00:21:19] I always tell my team solve the right problem. Education of talent acquisition leaders,

[00:21:25] they're doing their best. If I've met so many of those, I've met about

[00:21:29] close to a thousand in my entire life of pretty much every single fortune, thousand,

[00:21:32] two thousand companies while I was working at Monster and after that, don't try to have them

[00:21:37] solve a problem where they have to learn a whole different skill set and then go deep into the

[00:21:42] tech and real time bidding and how all of these things work. Make it easy for them.

[00:21:49] Give them something that say it's transparent, it works in real time but supply side ecosystem

[00:21:52] has to mature and evolve which I believe in this industry for whatever reasons

[00:21:56] ain't happening in the near future. That's a really interesting perspective. I've never

[00:22:02] thought about it in that concept of what problem we're trying to solve and this is one in our mind.

[00:22:08] We need to get talent acquisition people to understand this and no, we don't actually.

[00:22:15] Thank you for changing my perspective on that. I've never approached it that way.

[00:22:19] Shelly, do you want to jump into the next question?

[00:22:21] Yes because something you just touched on when you were talking about the same rules applying

[00:22:27] to the job boards as it does in the traditional consumer marketing and the evolution of those rules

[00:22:35] applying to both. So what are your thoughts on the job board industry? I'd love to gather

[00:22:41] your perspective. Will they adapt? Will they change? You've been obviously going back to Monster.

[00:22:49] Surge has been in the industry about as long as that too.

[00:22:52] Yes, I have so many thoughts coming in my mind at the same time. When I started

[00:22:57] working at Monster, Monster existed already for five years. What happened is they'll pull people

[00:23:03] into their job board, give them a search box, list of jobs, click on a apply button,

[00:23:09] go through a career site apply process and apply to jobs. Now please tell me any other

[00:23:15] company since 1995 the way they were treating that experience is still the same. This whole

[00:23:23] pull model making a person search for a job, why can't we change it to a push model?

[00:23:28] That's one thing I can say that mindset has changed. We all have kids. My kids are about

[00:23:32] a week or so back on teens and they're at an age where they're starting to understand something.

[00:23:38] I said I just want to be able to say I'm interested in the job and this is what I do

[00:23:43] and you take care of it. I don't type anything, do anything. I won't even put it in a chat

[00:23:49] bot. I want to be on the road listening to music and say something over here and the job

[00:23:53] application happens. Now this is the generation we are going to get and are we prepared for that?

[00:23:57] Second thing I would say is this pull and push model is one thing but job boards inevitably

[00:24:03] suffer with this whole aggregator model. I think aggregation, arbitrage, when you create a

[00:24:10] brand like Indeed is what Indeed is today because it created a brand people are going

[00:24:15] to indeed.com and searching for a job. These are network effects.

[00:24:20] A network effect means that even if you're not getting traffic from somewhere else people will

[00:24:25] still come to your site. So all those aggregators which have a lot of arbitrage traffic that they

[00:24:30] buy from others and have not built a presence in a brand in the mind of job seekers will

[00:24:35] face a tough time. So I would say job board evolution, they have to invest a lot of time

[00:24:39] in building the brand, network effects have to play out and then they add value services

[00:24:43] on top of it. Right optimizations, provide other guidance, counseling, material, make it sticky,

[00:24:50] make them want to complete a job board but not just for you to look for a job but also when

[00:24:54] you're not looking for a job what are we doing about that? So I would say as a destination side

[00:25:00] job boards will need to evolve a little bit. Think about Gen Z, think about what they are

[00:25:05] going to do. People like us are going to fade away in five seven years. We are the end

[00:25:10] of that generation. Now the next generation is going to say listen we have had enough, our Gen Z's

[00:25:15] are going to drive away. So my request is all the job boards to realize that someone is going

[00:25:20] to come and disrupt them. Indeed it's still the best player in the industry when COVID happened.

[00:25:25] Most of the job boards ever went down to 50-60 percent. Theirs didn't. Why? Because they had

[00:25:29] the brand, they had the network effects. That's why they're in their own league and I think that's

[00:25:34] learning for all the job boards out there. I spent most of my career in job boards. I also

[00:25:39] as a practitioner and I know exactly where you're coming from because working at Workopolis here in

[00:25:44] Canada which was Monster's biggest competitor for a long time, we had built a destination brand that

[00:25:50] people were coming to the site. We made some mistakes as far as job volumes and we were right

[00:25:56] for the market to be taken over in Canada and we saw that across the world with Indeed.

[00:26:01] But Indeed didn't initially really build a brand. They just aggregated all the jobs in

[00:26:06] the internet and gave a one-stop shop that everyone could go and then people realized this

[00:26:11] is like the Google of job search. And then Indeed just bent on marketing and really created

[00:26:17] a little bit of a cult following initially that just grew up to be the behemoth there now.

[00:26:23] I'm a set of Indeed founders and all the company, right? Initially they just aggregate

[00:26:28] jobs from job boards. Anybody going on Google will see Indeed. That created the brand.

[00:26:35] Yeah, okay. And they realized that instead of people coming via Google,

[00:26:39] they're coming to Indeed directly. But they're also smart. They're not just did this.

[00:26:43] They also started aggregating the jobs directly from the company's career site and not from job

[00:26:48] boards. So they were the first to the market, first to the job seeker with an opportunity.

[00:26:52] So now this is also a self-fulfilling cycle as you call it as a watch your cycle playing out.

[00:26:57] You will get all jobs in the world at Indeed. You'll get the freshest job that you'll not

[00:27:01] see anywhere else. And then they started investing a lot more in and building on top of it where the

[00:27:06] experience of quality of jobs, the search quality team of Indeed is really respected because they

[00:27:12] hold the moral ground of saying nothing wrong will go in. Candidate experience is a very

[00:27:17] important thing. They state true to the north star that we help people get jobs. As I said,

[00:27:22] it's either candidate experience or Google experience on both. You do it right by then,

[00:27:27] everything else is falling place. I do want to move into, we talked to a lot of recruiters,

[00:27:32] we talk to a lot of leaders and the biggest complaint that we're hearing right now,

[00:27:37] we alluded a little bit to it earlier, is just the sheer amount of candidates that they're

[00:27:42] getting as the market has slowed down where two years ago it was really challenging to get

[00:27:49] any amount of candidates. But now it's just an overwhelm in talent acquisition department

[00:27:54] that I've shrunk in the past two years. Can programmatic help in alleviating the challenges

[00:28:01] that these recruiters and recruitment departments are dealing with right now?

[00:28:07] So the problem in this is, and this is a paradox I am not able to make sense of this,

[00:28:11] unemployment is at all times. Why people applying to jobs, consumer spending continues to stay

[00:28:18] strong and there are more applications coming in don't over distribute jobs. Okay, first of

[00:28:23] all focus on the job descriptions where you say very clearly this is the kind of profile you're

[00:28:27] looking for, invest in your job descriptions. Put screening questions right before a person even

[00:28:33] starts to apply to a job. Think of the CRM interface has to be put in between a talent

[00:28:37] community interface. You ask for those questions and then instead of taking to the application

[00:28:42] process if the screening does not meet that criteria, for example you're looking for a

[00:28:47] package handler who lives in a 50 mile radius and has done this job for a year,

[00:28:52] I'm just making it up right? Do you live in a 50 mile radius of this zip code? Do you have

[00:28:56] a package handling experience? Have you lived in packages of certain weight of this size?

[00:29:00] No answer puts them to talent community, a right answer gets into the apply process.

[00:29:04] And programmatic companies can actually host that experience and then send them to

[00:29:09] apply process. You want to reduce volume of applications but you do not want to reduce

[00:29:13] the quality of applications. Exactly. And again I think of it like this is solve the right problem.

[00:29:19] Everybody in the industry since I was a kid in this industry has been trying to solve the

[00:29:24] matching problem and my approach is why solve the matching problem? Solve the mismatch problem.

[00:29:31] By solving for that automatically go over there, 80% of the wrong relevant applications

[00:29:37] are either too far away a person is living or belongs to a whole different industry category.

[00:29:43] A big reply to a nurse job, right? Screen them out, put them into a

[00:29:49] IT CRM, send them a nice email saying that you don't fit the job and all that good stuff.

[00:29:53] But solve for the mismatch problem. Don't try to build algorithms where you say I know exactly

[00:29:58] the right person for this job. You know I'm a big believer of Pareto's law, Dr. Pareto said

[00:30:03] one thing 20-80. 40% of things that you do get you 80% there. So solve for these two

[00:30:09] problems you've got 80% of the problem of the quality solved for. And as a result,

[00:30:12] the volumes are also getting increased. KJ, you're definitely a deep thinker when it comes to this

[00:30:19] space and how you're looking at the principles of the problems that we're dealing with. I gotta

[00:30:23] give you kudos on that. I do want to come back to Jovio. Tons of movement in this space. We

[00:30:29] can go back four years where it seemed like everyone got acquired and Jovio was not part of

[00:30:35] that. Then we looked at last year, AppCat goes out buys recruitment marketing firm Bayard, the

[00:30:41] biggest one in the US and then Veritone acquires Broadbean and merges it with Pandalogic

[00:30:48] and Wade and Wendy creating Veritone higher. We're not hearing a lot about Jovio and I'm

[00:30:55] thinking that's a good thing probably but I'd love to get your perspective of where Jovio

[00:31:00] is fitting in this marketplace that seems to be moving quite rapidly. I've got multiple

[00:31:06] interests and offers over a period of years. I'm sure you have. And I want to get one thing right

[00:31:12] in my life. Bring one thing to a good logical conclusion. I don't want to look back at my

[00:31:16] life and say I was a failure because I may have started a company, I may have sold it but did

[00:31:21] I take it to a logical conclusion? Did I grow it through making a dent in the universe?

[00:31:25] When I was growing up, I wanted to change the world. As I aged, my perspective changed and I

[00:31:30] want to bring a change to the world. A small little change is good enough for me. Which

[00:31:36] means that if I have to play true to a belief and partner with people who believe in the

[00:31:40] vision and stay along, I need to stay independent. And also one thing you go to decide who you

[00:31:46] want to be but more important than that who you do not want to be. I get asked a lot of

[00:31:50] questions too what do you want to be when you grow up or what do you want to be

[00:31:53] when I said I actually still don't know what I want to be in my life but I do know what I

[00:31:57] do not want and I know what Jogir does not want to be. Jogir will never be an agency.

[00:32:03] It will never be a job. I have steadfastly maintained from day zero, we've said the same

[00:32:08] thing and we still say the same thing. And I'll tell you the reason why. Companies, clients

[00:32:13] trust us. They want us to be independent, transparent. If you are a part of Job Gold,

[00:32:20] think of it as a match, a team and a referee on the same side. It doesn't sound right to me.

[00:32:27] You're going to always favor the team that you're coming from. The other thing I would say is

[00:32:31] agency's DNA is creative. They add a lot of value in defining employer brand, brainstorming

[00:32:39] with you, employee value proposition, building creative. A creative DNA is the farthest removed

[00:32:45] from a tech DNA. Imagine putting an artist and engineer in the same room. They won't have

[00:32:50] anything common to talk about. So let's ask ourselves what do we not want to be and what

[00:32:56] do we want to stay true to? One thing, if you do one thing in life and you do one thing right,

[00:33:00] you will still be valuable. My previous startup was Bootstrap. It did not raise money except

[00:33:08] from some friends and family. And we had competitors which had raised from 10 to 40 million

[00:33:13] dollars, I'm talking about 2012 to 2014. And we had the best outcome of them. Because what we

[00:33:19] did is we're not going to create 20 different things. We're going to do the tech right,

[00:33:23] we're going to solve one problem and we're going to deliver performance.

[00:33:27] We want to be the tech backbone that can be the best partner for agencies. We want to be

[00:33:33] the partner for a job board that can trust and say they will not take sides. Honestly speaking,

[00:33:40] between a programmatic and an agency, there is a relationship, a symbiotic relationship of

[00:33:44] checks and balances. We have to have that. So that is the philosophy. And I come from a

[00:33:49] small middle class family in a small town in India. When I came to the US as a migrant,

[00:33:55] I don't think any amount of money will ever try me to do anything.

[00:33:59] The last six, seven years, I take 96 cents as a salary and that's how I do.

[00:34:04] So I want to keep my motives very clear and clean. I'm trying to solve a problem. I want

[00:34:09] to be honest to the clients that I have and we will build it slowly and steadily, but we'll do

[00:34:14] it right. Get driven by trying to pick every shiny penny that we see out there. Let's solve

[00:34:21] the problem. The world will reward you for that automatically. That is so insightful and

[00:34:27] interesting to get the perspective where your head is at with Jovio and how you fit in the

[00:34:31] market. I think it's smart. I think it's really smart if you look at what your competitors are

[00:34:36] doing and the movement in the space. So kudos, great work on that. I'm going to leave you with

[00:34:42] this last question. We're almost halfway through the year. What's your prediction for the next

[00:34:47] little while? What do you expect to happen in this industry that is going to kind of be what

[00:34:54] we're talking about? You're talking about the macroeconomic and how we think this is going to

[00:34:59] change. So trust me, my wife is a lead economist in the world bank. I ask this

[00:35:03] question to her every single day. I meet her from her office and I say, please, for God's sake,

[00:35:08] people from IMF, from Quartine, from IFC, please tell me what's going to happen.

[00:35:13] There's got to be an advantage to being married.

[00:35:17] Guys, do this for a living. You are on PhDs and then like the Stanford Howard book.

[00:35:22] People, please tell them people like me. And it is anybody's guess. I can say what I can

[00:35:27] hope for. I can say where I can see if I think across principles, something's got to get.

[00:35:33] There cannot be a sustained run of high unemployment, consumer spending going up,

[00:35:38] companies beating Wall Street forecasts all the time. All these things happening at the same

[00:35:42] time. I think what I feel is a lot of these strategic decisions are driven by sentiment.

[00:35:49] What's happening around the world is not conducive to the sentiment that allows for

[00:35:54] business leaders to want to invest in expanding the business. They want to pull back.

[00:35:59] These are the decisions that are happening at the CEO levels of Fortune 100, 500 companies.

[00:36:04] I think the future of our industry is in the hand of politicians coming down the world. The

[00:36:11] breadbasket of the world is Ukraine. About 60% or 50% of goods in the world

[00:36:15] flow through those seas where there's a lot of dispute happening in China and Taiwan.

[00:36:19] There's something happening in the Middle East where you go to Suez Canal and then every

[00:36:23] ship is being hacked or at least at the threat of being hacked. Address all of that. Calm the

[00:36:29] world down. Bring peace. I think business will prosper. Business always prospers when there's

[00:36:34] peace. Thank you. Thank you for that insight. I didn't put two and two together when you first

[00:36:40] mentioned at the start that yes, your wife would probably have a better concept of what's

[00:36:44] going on in the world than any of us. Is she in the house? Can she come in? We'd love

[00:36:49] to ask her some questions. She looks at macroeconomic indicators, micro indicators, data sets which are

[00:36:55] massive and put at the same time every single day. She says none of these indicators are

[00:37:01] making sense to us. Interesting. I'm so glad you joined us. We should have done this 200

[00:37:07] episodes ago because your insights are incredible. I love the way you think. I love the way you

[00:37:11] are giving us a different perspective of the narrative in some ways. Thank you. I do want to

[00:37:17] make sure that anyone that is looking for you can find you. Your name is Shetij Jain

[00:37:24] and you can be found on LinkedIn. I'll spell it out for you. K-S-I-T-I-J, then last name

[00:37:32] J-A-I-N. Obviously if they want to find out about jilvio.com, I'm assuming you get the

[00:37:38] .com. Perfect. Thank you so much for joining us. This was such a pleasure to meet you and

[00:37:43] have you come on the recruitment flex. Thank you very much, Sergeant Shelley. I'm very excited

[00:37:48] about meeting you guys in Unleash a couple of weeks. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

[00:37:53] Yes, perfect. Thank you. Au revoir.

[00:38:04] Shelley, let's face it, texting candidates is the easiest way to hire quicker today,

[00:38:10] but your cell phone doesn't connect to your ATS. You're sharing your personal number with strangers.

[00:38:15] It's pretty scary, right, Shelley? And it's not even legally compliant.

[00:38:20] This is where our friends at Rectex come in. They've created simple yet powerful

[00:38:24] text recruiting software that works with your ATS. Plus, it's designed by recruiters

[00:38:30] for recruiters so you know it works. To learn more and book a demo, visit www.rectxt.com,

[00:38:41] mention the recruitment flex, and get 10% off annual plans.

[00:38:46] Imagine how fast we could solve the world's biggest problems if more SaaS startups would

[00:38:51] gain traction sooner. Welcome to the Tech Entrepreneur on the Mission podcast.

[00:38:55] This podcast is dedicated to sharing experiences from B2B SaaS CEOs who are going above and

[00:39:01] beyond to deliver change that is noticed. You will hear their secrets and learn what is

[00:39:07] required to build a SaaS business that the world starts talking about, and keeps talking

[00:39:11] about, and how to overcome the roadblocks to do so.