The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 155: Unlocking AI-Driven Talent Sourcing with Juicebox CEO David Paffenholz
James Mackey and Elijah Elkins speak with David Paffenholz, CEO of Juicebox, about their AI-powered talent sourcing platform.
David shares how Juicebox significantly improves sourcing and hiring outcomes, enables collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers, and provides real-time talent insights to hone in on sourcing criteria. With over 500 customers across agency and in-house recruiting teams, Juicebox is shaping the future of talent acquisition.
David was kind enough to share a 15% discount code for our audience! BRKTHRU15
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Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Mackey. I got my co-host with me today, elijah, how's it going? Doing well? How are you, james? Good. And today we have David Paffenhals with us today, david, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. David is the CEO of Juicebox. David, I think you started the company what a couple years ago at this point.
Speaker 2:That's right Two years ago and launched our product one year ago.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. So looking forward to learning all about your product and what you're up to. Before we get into that, I'd love to just learn a little bit about you. Where are you dialing in from today? I'm in San Francisco. Okay, cool, nice. And what were you up to before you started Juicebox?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So both my co-founder and I started the company right out of college. I had just graduated and my co-founder dropped out of college to start the business. We had this mutual thesis that was largely stemmed from us going through a number of hiring processes where we thought, hey, it's essentially a matching problem of matching the right talent for the right roles. And from the applicant perspective, we felt that it was not being solved in the best way possible and at the same time we realized we wanted to build something that sells to the business side. And so we've had that problem statement in mind and that framework, and that's where we got started with the business over two years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love it, love it. And I was actually able to take a look at the demo on your website. I like the very like short one, a couple minutes long, so I had a chance to take a look at that. But yeah, I mean I guess, just to start us off, could tell us let's dive into your product a little bit more. Tell us about the problem you're solving today, how it's, maybe about how the product has advanced since over the last couple years, and how you're thinking about the space and to take the product to the next level, what your customers are thinking wherever you really want to start.
Speaker 2:Just more context would be great. Yeah, for sure. So we're an AI-powered talent sourcing platform.
Speaker 2:That means we help go from initial search setup, reviewing and assessing profiles to engaging them, typically via email sequences, and then we have a bunch of data and analytics on top, so ranging from talent insights to sequence tracking and more, all built into the platform. Overall, our vision is to be able to build both software and automations to help recruiters or sourcers using the platform in that workflow, and so ultimately, we think there's a lot of potential to go more in-depth, to do better sourcing than what is possible right now by using that technology. And that's done one through driving efficiency in the existing sourcing, but then two, providing the capabilities to go deeper. So how much more data is there on companies, how much data can we infer about people, and how can we have AI assist us in doing that review and that search?
Speaker 1:And so that's what we're building at Juicebox and what we've built the product for Awesome. And, elijah, do you have any initial questions? Just based off the primary value, prop and the product.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, I'd love to dive a little bit in to yeah, where you see your guys, your product positioning in the market. I'm really familiar with sourcing tools. I've used FireEasy, hiretool back in the day, seekout, lots of different sourcing platforms. I actually had the pleasure of using Juicebox as well, so great product. I'm just curious as you were entering the market, where did you see Juicebox fitting in with the existing players, and were there any gaps in the market that you saw that you really wanted to make the most of?
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. So I think the and you mentioned a few examples of all of the existing sourcing solutions. I think there's the existing approach, and which has been refined over the past years of one. You have a data set of profiles, and you put a lot of work into making sure the best data possible, and you maybe aggregate some additional data sources and then let the user essentially search through that data, and so typically that's done through filtering, and be that searching by keyword, job title, some really good machine learning algorithms that help rank the profiles, all based on those initial keywords.
Speaker 2:In the end, though, that's still what it is it's filtering essentially a resume database or profile database, and then reviewing those. We have that same functionality, so we have the same filtering and search piece, but then we try to go one step further, and that's where we think the future is heading is not just in filtering and showing them to you, but then actually assessing those profiles and saying, hey, this profile matches your criteria for these reasons or is missing this specific part of your criteria. I'm going through all of those profiles, and so that's the next step that we take, which is typically work done currently manually by the recruiter or by the sourcer of reviewing those profiles and what existing solutions don't do. Another way to think about that is existing solutions maximize for the amount of time spent on the platform. We try to automate as much of that time as possible so you get straight to the results rather than having to spend that time on the platform.
Speaker 3:And what do you do with, let's say, a profile that doesn't have a lot of data available? What does the platform do in cases where there just isn't?
Speaker 2:that much data on a candidate, yeah, so I guess overall we try to minimize those cases as much as we can, but in the end that's often going to be the case, and will always be the case in the future too, is that there's some profiles where there's just not sufficient information out there, and so, on the first level, there's some things that we can do in terms of drawing inferences.
Speaker 2:For example, if a criteria is someone who has done B2B SaaS sales and we know that they worked at a B2B SaaS company, we can infer that based on the company name perhaps their investors, their funding, et cetera and then infer that they likely have B2B SaaS sales experience based on where they worked. Now, in other cases that might not be possible. Let's say we want someone who led a team of 20, but we don't have any data on how large their team was, or we can't reasonably infer that. In that case, what our model currently does is it basically tells that to the user. In our middle score it says potential fit, but not sufficient information, at which point we encourage either going deeper on that on an initial phone screen or doing some additional research beyond that.
Speaker 3:Cool and how have you seen? I'm curious, like internal teams right, let's say they're using LinkedIn Recruiter, because many of them are have you seen Juicebox changing their workflow of like, where they're sourcing the candidates, and or are you seeing them like finding the candidates on LinkedIn Recruiter and then maybe moving them into Juicebox to do an email drip campaign? I'm curious how you see that workflow changing for people using Juicebox that are already on something like LinkedIn Recruiter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, our goal is to own that search process end to end, so we want to be the best place to start your search and the best place to engage candidates all the way through to getting that first call with them scheduled.
Speaker 2:The way, or what we have to do in order to achieve that, is just provide undoubtedly the best search experience, and so that's kind of the bar that we hold ourselves against, too, and also what we measure internally. So one of the key metrics that we look at is, of our customers, how many use the platform daily, or how many start their searches with us every day, and so those are like, typically, metrics that more like consumer product founders or even like social app founders would look at. We track that quite closely because we think that's representative of what the user habit is and are we actually delivering the best product experience? And so right now, of our customers who use us, 30% use us every single day, and that's a number that we want to continue benchmarking off of to ensure that not only are we providing the best search experience, but also the best place to start your search.
Speaker 3:Nice. Yeah, that's probably one of the biggest challenges I've seen when I was trying to implement different sourcing tools. When the search was intended to not be done on LinkedIn Recruiter right, and that's what they were most familiar with they tended to not use the tool as much, right? I'm not saying those search experiences were amazing, I'm just saying it's hard to break that workflow. The tools that we found working, at least at the time right, because Juicebox didn't exist was to have something that ran alongside of LinkedIn recruiter right, so the search experience was done on LinkedIn recruiter right, so the search experience was done on LinkedIn recruiter and then candidates were moved into campaign tools, where the tools were geared more for the campaign experience. So it sounds like juice boxes focus more on amazing search experience, like owning the search experience, and then forgive me if I'm wrong, but the sequencing is actually still being built out more like there's more features you want to add on the engagement and the outreach experience. Is that right?
Speaker 2:That is right. Yeah, the sequencing is one of our newer features. We launched the first version in June. Since then, we've added a ton of stuff, so we have AI personalization in the sequence steps we have sent on behalf of and more, but there's also more features coming soon. Sequencing can continue to be more advanced in order to reflect that kind of full flow that we want to help bring our users through. It's also the kind of advantage of starting with the first step in the process, of starting with the search and trying to hold that workflow, is it very naturally funnels into the next step, so when you're searching, it becomes very easy to just one click add someone into an email sequence, and that's the behavior that we want to encourage as well, because it's what drives a lot of the efficiency.
Speaker 3:Have you noticed any challenges with email deliverability or anything? Because I noticed a lot of sourcing platforms don't seem to touch that to the same level that a sales outreach platform might. Right, like Limlist or any of those that are more sales oriented. Right, they have, like email inbox, warmup periods and deliverability rates. The sourcing tools that are doing email outreach seem to have not touched that as much, at least in the products that I've used.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's very true. I've noticed the same thing and I think the kind of in many ways, especially like the CRM and engagement side. It seems that recruiting is often like a step behind sales in terms of the tech used and like how the tech has developed. And then it's almost like you can kind of see into the future of recruiting tech by seeing what sales tech is doing right now. And I think a lot of those things of email warmups, deliverability maximization, et cetera, is going to come into the recruiting space sooner rather than later. In fact, we're working on many of those things right now and want to be able to continue to bring some of those things to our customers. And yeah, I think overall that is representative of where it will go.
Speaker 2:Now. The one nuance is that in sales there is no such thing as too much volume. You always want more leads. You always want more qualified leads to reach out to. In recruiting, there's more nuance to it. If you have a higher response rate and even a smaller set of candidates, but they're extremely qualified and they're extremely well-matched to the search, that's probably a better outcome than having a huge top of funnel volume but poor response rates and perhaps not very qualified candidates, which then results in poor pass-through rates as well, and so I think that's like one of the reasons perhaps why we haven't seen as much focus on that in the recruiting side, because typically the volume is a bit lower too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that makes sense. As James knows, I can geek out on this all day, so let me pass it back over to you, james, so you can get some information.
Speaker 1:Well, actually I think you have a lot more experience working with sourcing technology so you can get some information. Well, actually, I think you have a lot more experience working with sourcing technology, so I'm hoping to take more of the backseat here. I'll chime in with questions as they come up. But yeah, elijah, just based on your experience and the research you're doing, putting together the company list for the series and everything else where does your head go next? And I'll jump in if I have to. But I'm still going to take the backseat for now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. One thing I've thought a lot about over the past six to 12 months and would love both of your feedback on is the use of target company lists in sourcing platforms. So there's almost no company that does it well outside. There's sales platforms right they do it really well where you can build out your ICP and kind of create a target company list, like Apollo and others. But sourcers right internal sourcing teams. I've led sourcing teams of 10 people, recruiting teams of 20 people and we love to use target company lists right. Building a list of SaaS companies and I've noticed you have a little bit of that flavor in the platform already, which is brilliant. Right, with the AI, find another. I think I did one where I had like eight to 10 target companies and it's sourcing through those. I'm curious do you see that being used a lot, or do you have any thoughts on building that out more for companies who actually would prefer to take that target company list approach?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's almost like you have our product roadmap on paper. Yes, the companies are super popular Right now. We have some of that AI suggested companies or find similar companies and they're quite powerful, but there's perhaps also some more control that we could give to the user in terms of being able to customize that further or set a target number of companies to source through, etc. Of companies to source through, et cetera, and so there's some things we have in the work there.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing that I found pretty interesting, that we see being used more and more, is like saving those company lists and sharing those company internally, and so both with in-house recruiting teams, but also with agency recruiting teams really popular in terms of hey, this is our target list of dev tool companies, as an example, or this is our target list of consumer marketplace companies and being able to build on those lists, save them and then use them in searches recurringly.
Speaker 2:One, it's a behavior that just makes a lot of sense, but two, it's also something that hopefully we'll be able to provide more technology on in order to do that more and more make sure those lists are fully comprehensive, and I think the kind of final step to that is, it's almost goes in the direction of executive search and kind of bringing even deeper level of searches into regular sourcing processes. Think about like an executive search process often starts off by mapping all competitive companies in the space or like what could be adjacent, and then going backwards from there and finding the relevant targets. In my opinion, almost all sourcing in the future is going to look closer to what executive search looks like today, where you have that level of depth and the level of time that you can spend on each role.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I completely agree. I've seen internal sourcing teams. They have that list of companies, right, but some of the bigger ones that have more than, let's say, one to two sourcers, they're actually creating tiers, right. So you have, let's say, the top tier is very general, so let's say it's like B2B SaaS companies right Under 5,000 or 2,000 employees, and then they're going, let's say, okay for our sales org, actually we want them to have sold to enterprise, so like they're then finding all the companies within that larger list that have actually sold to enterprise, that where the product is sold to enterprise, then maybe they have for their R&D team there's some other requirements. So they almost have different tiers or target company lists that like overlap but are different.
Speaker 3:So that's one piece of what I've seen. That's super interesting. The other thing that's been fascinating is seeing sourcing teams and recruitment teams actually tracking layoffs and like tracking events kind of real time and updating that on. Usually it's some sort of spreadsheet right, like all these target company lists and events that are happening are all being tracked together in a spreadsheet. But it'd be fascinating to see how that plays out in a platform like Juicebox, as your product velocity just seems to be a lot faster than some of your competitors to be transparent.
Speaker 1:Elijah, I'm really happy I'm not talking right now. This is good stuff. I'm going to keep myself on mute a little bit longer. You guys are crushing it.
Speaker 3:I just love this stuff. So, yeah, I'm geeking out here. No, I think.
Speaker 2:I circle back a little bit on, like the company tiers of less sourcing. I fully agree and I think actually that same approach is not only applicable to like company lists but everything in the search. So the same with job titles we're hiring like an AE, maybe. Job titles we're hiring like an AE. Maybe we want to prioritize someone who's actually been an enterprise AE. We'll also look at other AEs, but that kind of puts them in another tier in that sourcing.
Speaker 2:And I think that level of sophistication and depth that's where, in my mind, the future of sourcing is going to go and what lets you actually build really sophisticated and really well mapped out target lists. And I think the one thing that is often forgotten is that it feels like, oh, we're spending so much time on the sourcing and that means we're not spending that time actually engaging with the candidates. But what's often lost in that is that the engagement afterwards becomes so much more efficient and so much higher ROI, because we're being extremely thoughtful about who we want to reach out to and who we want to engage. So we're going to see higher response rates, we're going to see better pass-through afterwards, the client's going to be happier, everything becomes a lot more targeted and a lot more nuanced in that too. Yeah, I'm really excited for that, and our goal is to be able to build out the functionality to support that as much as we can.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's great how much demand.
Speaker 1:Oh, I have one.
Speaker 1:No, go ahead Don't worry, I'll make it quick. I'll make it quick, hopefully it's interesting. How much demand are you seeing on the Talent Insights functionality? I know it's like you're putting together searches and whatnot and populating a ton of data which already is very insightful in and of itself just like doing searches and seeing what comes up. But you have this whole Talent Insights aspect to the product. How exactly is it being leveraged? Is it being leveraged the way that you thought it would? What product requests are you getting when it comes to insights? How's that evolving? Just curious to learn more about that function or feature.
Speaker 2:And I think then, for teams that do use Talent Insights, often they use it as a beginning exercise Okay, here's the market map and maybe aligning with the hiring manager and configuring the initial search. Our take is that is useful, but there's actually a lot being left on the table with that and that kind of then also fed into how we designed our Talent Insights features. So in many products, Talent Insights is like completely separate or a different tab. In our case it's within the search tab, and so you actually first configure your search and then you get to see the Talent Insights. And that's intentional, because we want you to use the Talent Insights in crafting your shortlist, in searching through profiles, and so what does that mean product-wise?
Speaker 2:Our Talent Insights are actually interactive. You can click every row in the chart. You can open up new searches based on the Talent insights and use those as part of your sourcing. And so, for example, if, going back to that target company list example, we notice our talent pool is mostly employed at the three companies that we were targeting, but actually there's a really common past employer across all of them. Maybe that past employer is a really high value signal and we can look at that past employer instead and add that to our company list, or even do a whole nother search strategy focused on that, and so I think those are the types of insights or data points that we hope to get out of the time insights and how we hope to use it in those searches too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really cool. So that actually shows up. So it's okay, because on the screen right now on your website, which I've been doing some digging around while you guys were talking so I see the current employers spot. So what you're saying is there's another section that shows past employers.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, if you're in the product, it's basically right below it. So we have current employers and we have current plus past.
Speaker 1:Nice, that's awesome. Yeah, and I like how the Talent Insights populates after a search and it's integrated into the search feature. It populates after a search and it's integrated into the search feature. I know, honestly, I haven't looked at this feature from. I suppose it might be considered a different product at LinkedIn Talent Insights. Yeah, it's been a few years because, quite honestly, it seems pretty expensive. I didn't know 15K. Starting and that's like startup price, so I'm assuming it's much more for larger orgs, right?
Speaker 3:I'm not sure for larger orgs, but I know it was a 15K for kind of the whole company. Then LinkedIn said that they were going to make it either free or integrated into something else, but I don't think that's ever happened. I think it's still around 15K.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know. So it seems like this is similar to that, but it's just integrated into your product and it's not an additional I don't know what. But if you have it segmented as an upsell package or whatever else, we don't have to get into all that. You don't want to. But yeah, it's just. It's cool to see that in your product because it does feel like it takes a little bit of power away from LinkedIn, which I love. I built a business around LinkedIn, but at the same time, it's nice to have some other players adding some value when it comes to Talent Insights and whatnot. Right?
Speaker 2:For sure. Yeah, and to clarify for us, there's no upsell on the Talent Insights. It's integrated as part of the search and I think that's also like the main differentiator with linkedin's talent insights product is it's not interactive, it's like designed to give you an overview. It's very much meant for that kicking off the search or even planning where to hire process, which is important but, in our view, leaves a lot on the table yeah, I think like one of the things it's.
Speaker 1:I know the way that we do it for our customers as an rpo company. When we're looking at talent insights, it can be a lot more sophisticated than it is. It's essentially we look at. Typically, we're looking at talent insights quite honestly when we need to expand our candidate pool. It's usually not sometimes it's proactive, but a lot of the times it's customer has a very clear view in mind and so, whether it's at the beginning of the search we need to show them data to expand or it's further along in the search, a few weeks into it, where we show look, we've saturated this entire candidate pool, we need to expand.
Speaker 1:But it's typically a result of okay, let's find out two to three different ways they could expand the search.
Speaker 1:We get a pulse on what they feel is most important.
Speaker 1:They're willing this is a must-have, this is a nice-to-have, and so you provide okay if we open this up and this is a must have, this is a nice to have, and so you provide okay if we open this up and this is what it does to our talent pool. We open this up, this is what it does and providing different insights there, but it's like way that we do. It is just it's pretty basic where we're just looking at changing the search criteria a little bit with LinkedIn, seeing how many more candidates populate. That's like that's literally it and then we're just basically looking at that data and then making estimates right the estimation on what to do with that. It would be cool to have something a little bit more sophisticated, right, that's a little bit more interactive and also package. This also looks I don't know if it's in a reporting package or whatnot but even just the presentation on the product itself would be something that'd be really nice to show hiring managers to help sway them in the direction of making important shifts to their sourcing strategy.
Speaker 2:For sure, and I think the I think hiring manager like collaboration is also historically been something that's been pretty difficult to do with like different tech tools out there.
Speaker 2:We have a little bit of that, so you can share a search, even for people who don't have an account like not even a free account they can even access it, and then we do have like free trial available too for hiring managers who want to get involved. One thing we've started seeing with different companies that I'd be curious if it's a trend that's expanding is hiring managers actually getting involved in some of the sourcing too, and so a few of the tech companies we work with they purchase seats not only for the recruiters but also for parts of their hiring manager teams, and so in those cases, with hiring managers getting involved, iterating on search strategies, reviewing candidates together and looking at those insights together too a really interesting area I'm like I don't think every organization will do that or want to go in that direction, but for the ones that do, I think it can be a cool superpower to being able to have that collaboration and then be even more on target with their searches.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been giving that a lot of thought to like how is particularly AI technology going to impact the amount of time or point of impact of hiring managers? I think a lot of the conversation is how it's going to impact recruiters, but I don't know how much we really stopped to think about how it's going to impact hiring managers. So that's a brilliant point you brought up and we could probably I may be just like dial in on that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I've been thinking a lot about that too. I'm wondering it's like no matter how efficient the technology comes, you know, I don't know if hiring managers are going to try to push more of the top of funnel to the recruiting team.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure. I mean, you're right, if there's automation and there's AI technology that's able to put together short lists of talent that are more relevant, then it's less time I think they need to spend. Of course, if they didn't have the support, then it would take way too much time to source. I mean, sourcing is a full-time job, right? Yeah, I'm curious if you have any more thoughts on that. Elijah, anybody who wants to, maybe david first. I would be really curious to get your thoughts if you do have any other thoughts on, like how a higher manager role is going to change? Uh, given ai technology and their point of impact?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the biggest piece on the hiring manager, recruiter or sourcer relationship is communication, and I think that's like traditionally where a lot of the perhaps there's a hidden criteria or things that they are assessing for unconsciously, that they don't realize or that they don't communicate to the recruiter or sourcer. And so I think being able to be more hands-on in those processes like actually seeing the talent pool live together, being able to align on that and confine it while still in that alignment and collaboration phase, will make that communication a lot better and, I think, also lead to like faster cycles on the sourcing and recruiting front. And so I think the technology can be a huge assistant to that, in the sense that it's rather than describing what you're looking for, you can actually look for that person together and go through those criteria hand in hand and side by side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. I see this as a tool that I call. I have this process which I don't have a recruiter out there called it. It's a kickoff, a calibration meeting. I don't know if that's like a term that everybody uses. That's what we call it. Is that what you guys call it?
Speaker 3:I probably started calling it that because you called it that when we worked together. Yeah, that's what I call it All right.
Speaker 1:I guess, just to define what we're talking about, is I usually, two days after kicking off the search, I pull together, our team typically pulls together 10 LinkedIn profiles of candidates and does a share screen and walks the hiring manager through those profiles and gets our feedback live Like hey, what do you think of this person, why? And gets our feedback live Like hey, what do you think of this person, why? And I think that this is just a further essentially iteration of that. In an extent, it's basically being able to manipulate the search. Showing the live impact on talent insights would actually be really cool to do upfront, now that I'm thinking about it, because I could see us, like, on a kickoff, going like all right, based on the search criteria that you currently have, punching it into your product like all right, this is what we got. So it's opposed to this manual motion of offline recruiters trying to crunch data on how certain search criteria would change the candidate pool and whatnot, the difficulty of the search and all those types of things. You're right, this could be done live with the hiring managers. I'm of the mindset, david, just to touch on where we think hiring managers should be involved. They should be very involved. It's their team.
Speaker 1:I would think that hiring managers would want to be involved with every stage of the process. I think the best ones are across the board. Every great leader I've known is very hands-on with talent acquisition. But I'm wondering. It's like from a product standpoint. It's like we know that there's more value there for hiring managers to be more hands-on, but I wonder if they're at scale. I don't know. I still think it's like talent acquisition for recruiters driving this. I see this as definitely a tool to jump on and tell me if I'm wrong, but I would assume like, more often than not, it's the recruiters sourcers and to the extent that it's really, I'd say, the majority of the time, I would assume when hiring managers are interacting, at least at the beginning of the searches, it's like a share screen situation, uh, in which the recruiters are walking through. That's really how I would leverage it. Um, that kind of align with what you're saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. And I think also what you mentioned in terms of the best hiring managers are more involved. I agree with that. I think it really shows that they're engaged in it. And then on the flip side too, on the recruiter and sourcer side, the best recruiters and sourcers are not only excellent at finding the right candidates, they're also excellent at project managing the hiring manager in terms of how you think about the search, what you're looking for, being able to pass through those candidates like your calibration meeting being a great example of that, it's like not only can that be one meeting, but that can be an ongoing process too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, which are the whole sourcing aspect, but the talent insights aspect, which, particularly when you start to get to larger companies, you need data in order to sway hiring teams to make better decisions, and this is a great way to do that. And a lot of the times there's different parts of the funnel where you need to be able to try to explain to them why changes need to occur. But often the most challenging stage is when it comes to role profile and some of the aspects around requirements. It's in my experience it's been a little easier to change down funnel behavior or process, but people get really attached to a certain aspect of their search criteria and I try to use the talent insights, the manual way that my team does it. That's not nearly as sophisticated as your product can do, but we'll try to explain the reasoning and the strategy behind why an aspect maybe it's a requirement, like any requirement. I guess one could be industry experience. That comes up in a lot of go-to-market SaaS companies where sometimes companies will require very specific industry experience, like not just HR tech but something very hyper specific, for instance, right, like within that space, and it's like, based on working with 200 companies over the past decade I've learned a thing or two. It's just not what drives results 99% of the time. Let's say 95%, let's just give them. Maybe 5% of the time they're right, but the majority of the time it's just not the biggest factor to determine success. And so we'll do those types of conversations.
Speaker 1:But alongside of that we have this whole data argument of, look, this isn't the right thing for you guys to be doing. Here are the reasons. We might walk them through all the explanations, but then we'll also say look, you have gone through X amount of screening. Calls this that your hiring team has dedicated X amount of hours. Right, we've saturated the talent pool in this market for this industry experience. You've gone through source of 200 people. You've passed on all of them. We've dedicated this much time and we let you know for X, y and Z reasons, this isn't even the primary thing that's going to drive success, right, it's not nearly as important as so many other things. And here's the data. You're out of candidates. So clearly this isn't a model for success. You say this is the most important, but you've spoken to everybody and this isn't a model for success. You say this is the most important, but you've spoken to everybody, and obviously they're not making the cut. So we have the data plus the explanation and everything else.
Speaker 1:We put that qualitative, quantitative and then putting that together and packaging and positioning to the customer is a much more effective argument, and if you put that in front of a smart executive or a smart hiring team, when you show them the data, if they don't change after that, that's unusual to an extent. If you do a good job, positioning that, unless they accept, this is a really just hard to fill role. We just got to keep it open. If they have that expectation, then I'm a little more okay with it To an extent. The problem with that, though, is if it takes seven months to fill a role and then that person leaves three months later, you're screwed. So it's like you're too highly leveraged on one candidate, but that's anyways. That's one higher. That's a different conversation, though.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, interesting stuff. Yeah, I would almost imagine, because I know, david, you guys have some new features coming out with the scoring right where you can put different weightings in right. I would imagine, james, like you're saying, you could actually go into that intake call or the weekly sync change the weights, change the scoring criteria, show them the talent pool that's going to give them, even show them. Hey, your top three candidates that we talked about in the beginning mentioned a few people you knew that you like their profiles. They're actually not matching up with that criteria that we have, and here's the outcome. So I think that's interesting, right, being able to dial in on the intake call with the insights and the scorecard, essentially, that they build at Juicebox I think.
Speaker 3:The other interesting piece I'd love to know more about, david, is are you guys pulling any comp data in? Because that's always something like companies are asking like oh, do you guys have any comp benchmarking data? And then I go manually pull right like all these comp benchmarks from across the web. How are you all thinking about comp benchmarking related to Talent Insights? Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:So just before I hop into the comp piece, would love to add one more thing on the discussion with the hiring manager line. I think another way to think about it in the hiring process is like the hiring manager often has stated preferences or like what they think their preferences are in the beginning, but then another set of revealed preferences that we only see once we start showing candidates. And it's like what process or steps do we have to go through to get those revealed preferences as fast as possible so that we have calibrated the search as efficiently as possible? And I think in the end the answer to that is like showing profiles together and looking at them together, and that often brings so much more data than one can find out, or maybe even more data than the hiring manager thought about in the beginning as well. And sorry, further distracted there, go to the comp benchmarking piece.
Speaker 2:We don't have the data yet I'd love for us to have that data. It's something we're very interested in. I think it would be hugely valuable in a lot of ways, both in terms of the direct way of being able to search by that, but then also to get a feeling like where's the market going, how competitive are these roles and more? And so the tricky bit with comp data is, one, it's hard to get overall, and then, two, it's even harder to get accurate data, and so, yeah, we've been looking at a few different potential paths for that. I can't make any promises, but it's something that I'd be very keen on too. Yeah, yeah, that is a challenging one thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a good for sure. I know a lot of people are using pave radford. Right, there's all these comp tools that companies as they grow in place. But until then, I think most of us are looking on glassdoor and built-in. If you're working with tech startups and you just try to find a rough range that you then share the hiring manager with some data points, but, yeah, it could be really helpful at some point to have that for sure, as long as it's accurate and not, yeah, just a massive, unhelpful range.
Speaker 1:So I would be curious to dive a little bit more into the weighting aspect of candidates. Where you start to. I don't know if we consider that Is that getting into like evaluation territory where AI is making decisions on who to move forward with? I still sometimes struggle. There's like a spectrum, right, of course you're putting in search criteria and, based off that, results are coming in, but then are we getting? Would we consider this getting more so into a valuation, or no?
Speaker 2:Hmm, applicants, david. Sorry, I didn't catch that.
Speaker 3:Well, I was just going to say they're not applicants, right? So they're, yeah, they haven't actually applied. So you're just helping, you're just doing better filtering Right.
Speaker 1:Almost what you're doing in your mind as your source.
Speaker 3:you're just helping do better filtering right Almost what you're doing in your mind as your source. Yeah, what do you think, David? That's my guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's like the legal piece and the practical piece. In terms of the legal piece, the clear answer is no, because they're not applicants. Yet You're not evaluating them because they aren't applicants.
Speaker 2:And that's usually all the laws are based on too, but then in the practical piece, I also think the answer is no, and the reason why I think that is that, at least in our case, what the criteria assessment does is it basically does the same thing a human would do. When looking at it, it's ultimately a yes, maybe or no answer, and the maybe is typically we don't have enough information. And so does this person have four years of experience working with Python? It's an objective, yes or no. Either they have that or they don't, and that's actually the case for the majority of criteria, even the ones that are more fuzzy.
Speaker 2:A black person has managed a sales team of more than 20 people or has brought in more than a million dollars in revenue? There are answers, in the end, that either a recruiter would come to or now, a lot of that AI technology is able to do as well. I think the part where it then goes into evaluation, which is what we don't do, is this candidate is a better candidate for these reasons. So we won't do an explicit thing of hey, person A would be a better fit for the role than person B. All we can tell you is person A matches criteria one, two and three and candidate B matches criteria one and three, and so that's the data that we provide. The decision making or the evaluation after that is still the next step and kind of the recruiter or the sourcer does in that case.
Speaker 1:That makes a lot of sense. Like I said, yeah, it's different, because I was just thinking about our episode with Brainerd co-founders of Brainerd.
Speaker 1:And they're doing it's like AI driven resume matching doing it's like ai driven resume matching. So it's actually and it's a lot more sophisticated than I don't know. I honestly initially would have assumed for a resume matching, which was really cool, really enjoyed that episode and learned a lot. But yeah, I mean it was like that is inbound applicants and then they're matching based on that and weighing that, and I feel like that starts to get into evaluation territory because it's inbound. So that would be the important distinction when it's outbound, it's they're not applying for the job, versus inbound they are, which I think makes things a little bit more complicated, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's no laws, right as far as I know, who you can or can't reach out to. You legally have to, because there's all these DE&I initiatives that are actually pushing you to reach out to candidates based on a factor that you're not legally allowed to consider when they're inbound standard disclaimer.
Speaker 2:I'm not a lawyer but, to my best understanding, the way we think about things is we're thinking about who to reach out to, we're thinking about who to invite to apply for a position, and so how can we make sure that the people we reach out to match the criteria that we're setting for this job? And so that's ultimately what our platform is designed to do, and I think, in generally, what we want to do. And I guess the two distinctions there, like one that we already touched on, is like are they an applicant or are they inbound or are they outbound? And then two are you directly comparing them against another profile or are you directly doing that comparison using AI? And so I'd say those are like the two things that are my gut checks of whether something's using that evaluation in a hiring process.
Speaker 1:Do you guys, do you see yourself getting involved with re-engaging with candidates that are in the CRM of your customers, going down that path for enterprise customers, folks that have large databases of applicants and folks that have interviewed with the team before, that kind of thing?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, we have started deploying that with some of our customers.
Speaker 2:It basically integrates right into the regular search and then it'll give some additional weighting to people you have an existing relationship with and it'll show you like a quick tag alongside the view in ATS.
Speaker 2:I think it's pretty powerful. I think the most important piece of that functionality is that it's still integrated into the regular recruiter search flow, because if it's a separate process, if it's a separate step, it ends up being the thing that one wants to do or thinks is interesting, but then never actually goes through the time of doing that, and so that's kind of we've thought about that so far, and the other thing that goes in that direction that I'm really excited about we're actually launching this week is that you can import not only your own LinkedIn connections, but you can also invite other people to import their LinkedIn connections, and so you can actually import all of that data and then use that as a similar sourcing field, just like you would with past applicants. And so, example if you're doing an engineering search and you invite the existing engineering team to upload their connections, can be a really cool, powerful, additional search filter to surface some candidates.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like that a lot. That's really cool, so we got a few minutes left here. David, is there anything else you want to touch on related to your product roadmap, or just important insights for future current customers that are tuning in? Anything that you really want to drive home? I have a couple more ideas of stuff we can cover, but I'd love for you if there's anything specific that you want to discuss. Let's focus on that first.
Speaker 2:Nothing super specific, I think.
Speaker 2:Overall, I guess the thing that I'm most excited about for the future of recruiting, and particularly the future of sourcing, is, with all the new technologies in place and all the new capabilities that we have, how can our processes evolve too? How can we get even better at doing what we do and identifying right candidates, reaching out to them, engaging them and I think that's what a lot of that happens organically already. Like we just have some additional time to be able to spend on a role, we're able to do some additional mapping or think about the additional company that we could source from. But a lot of that also needs like a conscious effort of the recruiting team going and saying, hey, we have these new capabilities or we have this extra time that we saved. How do we deploy that? Like, how do we go one step further beyond what we do right now, and what does that actually look like? And so I think that's the thing we spend a lot of time talking with our customers about. And also that I like to think about in general is, like we think, three, four years down the line, what will a great sourcing or recruiting process look like, and how's that different from what we have today cool, awesome.
Speaker 2:Love it. Love it, elijah. How?
Speaker 1:about you any final thoughts look like? And how's that different from what we have today? Cool, awesome, love it. Love it, elijah. How about you? Any final thoughts on today?
Speaker 3:Yeah, two quick questions before we wrap up. One is so when you're speaking to, let's say, a talent acquisition leader, they've got a team of sourcers. They're like deeply embedded in LinkedIn recruiter. Maybe they're looking for additional tools. I think the big question is always around response rate. Right, like most of us are still getting more traction with in-mails, even though we hate paying so much money. Right, we're still getting more traction with in-mails than we are with, like, personal emails. Even if you use GIFs or whatever and memes and all the creative things you can use best object lines, etc. We still seem to get more traction with in-mails. What, what you know? What do you say about how juicebox is currently performing in that area versus in-mail response rates, or what you think you'll see in the future that would enable someone to maybe even not have LinkedIn recruiter corporate and just go all in on a platform like Juicebox for their sourcing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the setting first off what you mentioned in terms of some folks seeing higher response rates on email definitely resonates Like we have some customers who get better response rates on emails, but also many customers who get better response rates on emails, and that's a part of it.
Speaker 2:I think, ultimately, the best response rate is going to be through a blended approach of using both emails and InMails, potentially also other channels, depending on that being said, in the future, I guess the reason why do InMails get better response rates and there's no absolute data on this.
Speaker 2:My personal thesis is that LinkedIn makes it very easy to give credibility to the person reaching out because you can just click their profile, you see their profile, you see their company, and so how can one recreate that outside of LinkedIn? How can one also create that credibility for the person reaching out, give some additional data to them, make it clear that, hey, this is not a spam message or like a message going out to tens of thousands of people, but actually something very curated, very personal, to why they could be a good fit for that role. And so I think, as we think about more of the credibility of that email outreach and then to also the content in there. I think long-term, that's what's going to get us the best response rates, and long-term also should be channel agnostic, whether that's LinkedIn, whether that's email, whether that's a combination of the two.
Speaker 3:So you guys may actually play in the lag growth machine limbless, multi-channel, dripify type space at some point automating in-mail outreach, potentially not asking you to commit, just curious.
Speaker 2:It's something we're curious about. It's also something that LinkedIn's terms of service are quite strict on, and I want to be careful that we don't create any violations there and so that's something that we have to look at and see what's feasible. Cool yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Actually, one question that just came to my mind is where are you seeing the most traction in your customer base? What industry, what size company?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's pretty diverse. So we just crossed the 500 customer mark, which also means that we have quite a wide range of customers now. So roughly 40% of them are agencies, 60% are in-house teams and 90% of them are larger teams, and so that really ranges. Initially it was a lot of tech. We're a lot of tech recruiting. Nowadays we're seeing more and more interest from non-tech firms as well, especially sourcing teams that are being newly created at large enterprises, like especially a lot of big corporates that didn't have a sourcing function and are now building that out all the way to agencies that are really looking to drive efficiency or working with a wide number of different clients, and so I know it's not a great response, but the answer is it's pretty distributed now yeah, it's been.
Speaker 1:Interesting is that a lot of the podcasts we've done for the series thus far is there's a somewhat significant portion of a lot of the product customers are staffing seeing that.
Speaker 3:It's a big risk too, though, right to get pulled in that direction that was actually going to be. My next question was like how do you build a product for two similar but pretty different use cases and candidate experience?
Speaker 1:focus. It makes it before you dive into that. It makes sense, though, right, because staffing companies are always hiring if they always have that turned on. So it's like you're not getting into those customers that are like stop, start, stop, start, yeah it's an interesting one.
Speaker 2:So staffing is, I think, going to be an important part of the market but at the same time, just like other parts of the market be it executive search, be it in-house teams, be it technical recruiting teams and more is one specialization that we have to be able to serve. And so, if you look at, like TotalMap actually recently pulled this data based on our own talent insights feature, there's roughly 150K agency or staffing recruiters in the US and there's roughly 700,000 in-house recruiters, and so I think that also goes a little bit in the direction of like hey, it's quite large distribution, but in the end, it's a specialization within it and a specialization that our product has to be able to serve, just like other specializations that we want to be able to support.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Hey, david, this has been a really fun episode. I definitely learned a lot. Elijah, thanks for all the great questions and, between the two of you guys, a ton of value on this episode. So, david, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me, this was fun. Yeah, it's a great time. Everyone thanks so much for joining us and we will see you next time.
