The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 157: Candidate and Sales Automation for the Staffing and Recruiting Industry with Julian D’Angelo, Founder and CEO of Talin
James Mackey and Elijah Elkins speak with Julian D’Angelo, Founder and CEO of Talin, about their AI-powered candidate and sales automation product. They dive into the tech stack inefficiencies that SMB Staffing and Recruiting companies have. Julian shares how he’s leveraging his growth background to build Talin and help SMB Staffing and Recruiting companies grow faster through accelerating candidate and sales pipelines.
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Hey everyone, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host. James Mackey Got my co-host here today, elijah. What's up, man? How are you Doing well? Doing well, awesome. And we also have Julian, the founder and CEO of Talon, on the show today. What's going on, julian? How are you?
Speaker 3:Hey, james, I'm doing well. Thank you for having me and I'm excited to dive in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, let's do this. So I guess, before we jump into all the technical stuff and what you're doing in hiring, I would love to just get a sense for who you are as a person Are you calling us or joining us today from Toronto or where are you right now?
Speaker 3:Yep, based in Toronto right now, out of the DMZ. Our incubator that we're a part of here is one of the larger incubators in Canada. And yeah, born and raised here in Toronto and yeah, been in the downtown core basically most of my life now.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's awesome, and so your team is part of an incubator. Which incubator are you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're in the middle of the DMZ's 18-month incubator program. Yeah, some it's produced a number of pretty prominent. A good chunk of the Canadian startups that you'll hear about have come out of DMZ BorrowWell companies like Majuri, so on. There's collectively raised like $2 billion in funding. Since Incubator is about 10 years old, yeah, and it's just been steadily growing and help and is a really important resource. Here we don't have anywhere near as much funding opportunities and and general resources as you do in the US, obviously, so this has been a huge kind of cornerstone for Toronto tech scene for a long time and it's only getting better. So we've been here for about six months now.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool, nice. So did you start the company six months ago, or when did you found the company?
Speaker 3:No. So we we had various it was part-time for a while like well over, like over a year of just I'll go, actually I'll just go to the very beginning because that sort of leads into that. But my background, interestingly enough, is not in in recruiting, which I so far has been actually a bit of an advantage, I think, and it brings a different lens to thinking about some of the problems in recruiting. But my background is in growth. So I was a growth marketer, user acquisition, demand gen guy in venture backed B2B SaaS. Most of my career was there and I got to the point where I was consulting independently, doing fractional head of growth work for a few different YC companies and that was where I essentially get as many kind of do from what I learned in the industry got pulled into recruiting where I had these clients of mine who essentially said, hey, we need help building out our marketing teams, our sales teams and so on, and they actually asked me to help with some of their recruiting functions internally and so on. And they actually asked me to help with some of their recruiting functions internally and I started doing that and then ended up spinning off an arm of my consultancy as just being a recruiting arm that specialized in growth hires, just taking my niche and leveraging that in that way. And that's where I started to get to understand the industry, get to know other recruiters, other recruiting firms, tech stacks, workflows and obviously the problems that exist in the industry. And I'm like an outsider. I'm already pretty established in my career and I have a craft which is obviously not recruiting right, that I'm whatever an expert at. And that's when my jaw just hits the floor, what the tech stacks look like for recruiters compared to the tech stacks that I'm used to. And now growth is known for getting the newest, shiniest toys right.
Speaker 3:The first, the most complex automation, just a lot of tools that you need to be a good like growth marketer, like most people in most other industries, just simply wouldn't know how to operate it. It's like being like a having a being, like everyone drives a car and you drive like a forklift and someone getting into a forklift for the same time like trying to operate it. And then this like problem surfaces in recruiting that I said, everything is completely manual compared to my workflows that I built that were heavily automated in a lot of ways. And so that's when that light bulb goes off. We just start tinkering with prototypes, looking at different parts of the recruiting workflow what's the lowest hanging fruit, where you spend the most time doing manual, tedious work and that was the inception for talent.
Speaker 3:And we built some really early prototypes that that did some really simple automations and we were able to sell it and they weren't really good, so that was like they were bad it. And they weren't really good, so that was like they were bad. Early on. It was exactly as most kind of V1s or prototypes are and they should be right and you're testing and you're iterating, and.
Speaker 3:But then we were still able to sell them and that, to me, was the market pull or the validation that I needed to say, hey, there's something here. And I think the recruiting market is bigger than I think people realize. Based Based on our research, you got 200,000 agencies globally that are less than 50 employees. It's a pretty massive market. And then not a lot of companies build specifically for agencies. A lot of them build for just recruiting use case in general, and the ones that do build specifically for agencies, we didn't think their tech was all that impressive. So those were all the ingredients and a very long winded way of saying yeah. Then we went all. In January of 23 is when my CTO co-founder joined me and we went full time and started bootstrapping, basically up until up until we recently just raised some money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, that's awesome man.
Speaker 3:I was your CTO doing the hands-on engineering at first or still, or, yeah, we had like third-party contractors before that when I was like part-time, just basically paid folks like build out that v1, which obviously comes with its own set of challenges, and then we quickly realized we need a serious cto and and that's where I found so trevor is my c. He was engineer number four at Lupio, which is a pretty prominent Canadian startup. They grew to 500 employees. He grew that team to 80 engineers Really top tier guy. So I was really excited and lucky to bring him on. He's rebuilt the whole thing and then a lot more on top of that since then over the last year and three quarters. Yeah, oh, that's awesome, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:I since then, over the last year and three quarters yeah, oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. I'm looking at the Talon website right now and the main thing I'm seeing here is spend less time on your ATS and spend more time on people, and you're talking about like task automation. So is this a tool that's heavily integrated with the different applicant tracking systems within staffing and recruiting? Or I'd be curious to get a better sense for the workflow and how your product potentially integrates or just works alongside an applicant tracking system?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. Yes, we integrate with most of the major ATSs that you'll find in recruiting agencies, especially Crelate, recruiter, flow Recruit, crm, bullhorn, like all of them. Right, we didn't want to build an ATS. There's a lot of ATSs. The vast majority of ATSs are basically systems of record. The apps that exist in those ATSs above and beyond what they do are unfortunately not that great. That's most CRMs.
Speaker 3:It took HubSpot a long time to become more than just a system of record. It's a really hard thing to do to build a system of record business CRM, business, ats, business, whatever and then build really good apps over top. That's why my thesis is they're not going to be good all in ones. They simply won't, because we focus on all of the functions outside of that, essentially in two areas. There's only two things we really care about. One is growing your recruitment, business sales automation and candidate automation, engagement, data enrichment, outreach, etc. And today and in the future, this might, might change.
Speaker 3:It's all very focused on a very outbound perspective. Right, the classic hunting with a spearfish. As opposed, we don't do a lot job posting integrations we don't do we. I think job posting as a whole have their place. You talk to any recruiting business. They're built on the backbone of kind of outreach right and building out their own network. That obviously has a ton of value, just having their own set of database of people they know that trust their firm and so on. So it's really outbound technology. That is all of the different pieces you need, whether that's multi-channel outreach, data enrichment. We have the best personal email coverage of any company. It's better than Zoom Info's personal email coverage. We spent the last year and a half building that out and then now we're starting to really incorporate a lot of the AI functions to take that level of automation and make that outbound as effective as humanly possible and take it beyond the status quo.
Speaker 1:Got it Okay. So it's multi-channel outreach for sales and candidates dialed into staffing agencies sub 50 employees, Is that?
Speaker 3:Bingo yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, got it, cool, got it, and you're currently incorporating AI. I'd be curious about it. Doesn't even necessarily have to be like what you're currently doing, but I guess there's a few ways to dial into this question. You could talk about how you're currently implementing it. You can talk about customer conversations, right. What do they want? What's the feedback they're giving you, based on what you have or what you're thinking about building, and then in the future, where you see your product going, and implementing AI.
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course, no great question. So I'll talk to you about. We had this major release last week, actually, so very recently, and the problem, this specific problem and it's interesting because there's a bunch of interesting use cases and so right now everyone is trying to figure out how do we prioritize them, what's the most impactful, et cetera. So one that we did just because it was it felt like really low hanging fruit and it impacts a problem that we've been really vocal about since we basically started our company was copywriting specifically in our messaging, in that outreach messaging to both candidates and then on the sales side as well.
Speaker 3:Let's be honest, a lot of recruiters are not good copywriters and it's not by any fault of their own. As a recruiter, you have to juggle a lot of different hats. You're wearing more hats, I'd argue, as a recruiter than you are as a salesperson Because, especially an agency recruiter, you're as like a salesperson because, especially an agency recruiter, right, you're juggling your sales process, getting new clients and you have to actually service those clients and you think of all the different workflows and processes that are in that it's. You're doing a lot of different things. So, naturally, like you're not, there's no copywriting training for recruiters. Typically you don't see. I'm seeing a lot more of it now because it's incredibly important, but you don't see a ton of it. So you see that's like problem A. And then problem B we saw is we just met a lot of recruiters that were personalizing their messaging, that's going out to candidates on a very one-by-one basis. It takes a ton of time and, as we've been, we're obviously power users internally of AI ourselves, with not just ChatGPT but all of the. We're using all of the main LLMs to understand, like where they sit in the stack and where they kind of excel.
Speaker 3:We started to see an opportunity to have that, to build over top of those LLMs and train them to personalize candidate outreach. We're not the only ones doing this. A bunch of companies are trying this. But again, you look at like our background in growth, our background in growth and we're pretty strong copywriters internally. We have an edge there, in my opinion, because we know what we do Canada campaigns we still do our own recruiting. We do recruiting for clients too.
Speaker 3:On the services side, we try to dog food our own product as much as we humanly can and we do outreach campaigns that get 60% reply rates from candidates and we're building out those data sets internally of what's working at a really high level and we're training those LLMs on what's really working. And that's proprietary right. You can't just easily copy that. And, yeah, we're enabling and essentially in Talon, the idea is you can go build your sort of base template, of which we provide you a lot of like really good templates and then you can essentially say, hey, we ingest the full LinkedIn profile, especially like your LinkedIn bio, right, the description of your current company, your own personal description of your time at those companies.
Speaker 3:Those are those really data rich points where you get good personalization. And we ingest all of that data and we've essentially trained the model to take that data and apply it to your base template and change up the copy or inject that personalization in a very subtle way with the goal of creating relevancy and because the problem with personalization today is a lot of it is shallow personalization that doesn't matter, the candidate doesn't care, a candidate doesn't care.
Speaker 1:It's like awkward too. I hate the personalization that I sometimes I'll get like a sales email. I don't know why this bothers me, like I listened to your podcast episode where you're speaking to so and you were discussing this and I really liked this and it's three paragraphs and then hey, by the way, I'm going to pitch you on something. There's a relevant way to personalize too. I'd be curious, like on the personalization front, how much of it is like the nuance of understanding the customer versus understanding the staffing agency, versus understanding the individual you're reaching out to or like maybe because there's a balancing act. You can personalize based on what the staffing agency specialization is with the specialization or what the customer does that they're representing, or personalization based on the candidate background. So there's like multiple ways to think about personalization. So how do you, are you balancing those things, or is it primarily dialed into a candidate's background and experience?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question.
Speaker 3:So the goal is to and we know this kind of from our own data the more relevant you can make the draw that parallel between the role itself that you're hiring for and then the candidates crown.
Speaker 3:Uh, you need to make the candidate feel like you have essentially sourced them specifically for this role and you have reason to believe that they would obviously be a good fit for that role and like the reason why so. I'll give you like an example of like how we've this is a common personal for that role and the reason why so. I'll give you an example of how we've this is a common personalization that our RAI will do based on how we trained it. Let's say you are hiring for a sales role and in the sales role, you've mentioned in your template that they're looking for someone with experience selling into SMB, for example. We will if we can find anything about that person's LinkedIn profile that suggests they have had experience. Let's say they got promoted three times and they sold into SMB before. The ad personalization would spit out something like hey, james, congrats on getting, or not even congrats, that's it. By the way, we trained it to not use a lot of corny lines that you'll see in the personalization.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like a lot of kind of fluff words that you see in a lot of.
Speaker 3:Remove it right. We've trained it to be as clear, concise and talk like you speak Sorry, rather to write like you speak as much as humanly possible. That's the foundation of good copywriting, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It would say something like hey, james really liked your background at like company X, thought you got promoted there quite a few times. Client of mine is looking for someone who's got experience like yourself selling into SMB. Right, that does not sound like a template, right, I have an observation. Right, really good outbound has an observation and then some kind of like value statement, problem statement, value statement, something like that's tied to the observation and that's the formula of how you create relevancy, right? Personalization hey, notice we went to the same school. No one cares. Hey, notice, also own a German shepherd, or something like that. Nobody cares. That's not relevant to me. That's, you're just mentioning facts, right.
Speaker 3:So that's the and it's really hard to do to create relevancy at scale for like a hundred candidates that I have in a campaign that's going to go out and be able to do that all at once. And we obviously have like error rates, like we're not hitting it a hundred percent of the time. Nobody's hitting it a hundred percent of the time. So now we have to build into the UX a very smart way for the user to approve the messages so they could say, hey, I like these set of messages, these ones can discard these and just use the original template. So these are all these kind of small problems and nuances that have to go into building this feature that are very specific to, obviously, the recruiting use case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, Elijah. Do you have any thoughts you want to jump in on this topic? Oh, for sure, Elijah. Do you have any thoughts you want to jump in on this topic?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm just curious with the way that you're approaching the market. So, as you mentioned, like there's a huge market globally, but are you trying to focus in on kind of Canada first, maybe because there's, I'm assuming, less competition there for tools like this or similar use cases. Then there might be in, like I don't know, like the UK or the US, obviously like those are huge markets where there's a lot of people like trying to build products really quickly. Are you trying to almost dominate the Canada market to then be able to get a wave of like customers and that momentum, or are you trying to go multiple places at one time? I'm just curious.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know. So 80% of our customer base is in the US and we purposefully did that, obviously reason being for in terms of raising capital. If you have all Canadian customers, that's a massive negative, like right off the bat to VCs and investors. They want to know that you can win the US market. If you win the US market, you will become a unicorn, right? So that was very purposeful, purpose and strategic, like early on. Also, we knew just like by virtue of being in Toronto and obviously we spoke a couple weeks ago we spoke at a pretty big Toronto like tech conference, stuff like that like we'll get natural word of mouth in Toronto, whereas the US we're gonna have to put in the work to actually build that foundation there. So we'll take the easy wins in Canada, like when we can get them, but we need to win in, we need to win the US, we need to win in the UK. We need to build really good distribution channels, like in those places, in order to get in there.
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I think the approach for agency of doing both like the business development side and the sourcing side on the outbound is very logical. A lot of companies, right, jim, they would have the outbound use case really solid for, like corporate, but then you wouldn't really use it much on the BD side, right. But then there's other platforms, like SourceWhale in the UK, who've done a really good job building for the business development side in recruiting, right. So that's like kind of a category. Then you've got all these sales tools like Limlist, right, like all these sales tools who they say, oh, you can use this for recruiting. But when you look at the workflows, you look at the email contact info, they're pulling, they're pulling mostly business emails right, like they're not set up for the personal emails.
Speaker 2:So I just find it interesting like that approach of doing both and focusing in on staffing and recruiting, helping them with both use cases. I think it would go really well for you having that focus, because I've seen Sourcewell's growth in the UK from doing BD and sourcing at the same time and it seems to have gotten them good traction in the agency market in the UK specifically.
Speaker 1:I'm just wondering though, because you're like targeting the SMB segment, so I'm wondering too, like just for SMB software companies or SMB companies in general, I can see this being a good fit for them too, potentially for doing both. If they're not looking to onboard like a massive CRM sequencing tool that's going to be more expensive potentially than just like a one kind of product that can basically just fit the needs of putting together like a target account list for outreach probably not, as it's not like a HubSpot per se, but or but it's or it's not like a tool where you have to integrate a CRM with a sequencing tool. So I could see like in the SMB market in general, it being like attractive even as an internal tool. I'm just curious do you have any customers that are using it internally for recruiting, or is it like are you guys 100% in staffing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we've. It's funny We've actually naturally, yeah, we've had a few like internal recruiters just hear about us and sign up yeah, we're, and we didn't. We decided not to target internal recruiting because I do feel like that market is like very saturated with some very well funded companies. I think that, honestly, the one that I'm hearing that's that I think is going to probably dominate seems like Ashby is that's the one that I'm hearing has the most robust workflows. I think they're going to I don't know, probably.
Speaker 3:It sounds to me like, based on some of the functionality I've seen, it's seeming like looking better than gem in some ways. Hard to tell, but like point being. Point being is that knew that these problems existed right In that are very unique to agencies and agencies have their own unique workflow. That is totally different from an internal recruiters standpoint and there wasn't enough people working on that problem and the market was huge and we just said hey again, if we win a fraction of that, this is going to be a very successful company. And not only that. We feel like we can. Based on what we're seeing from competition and the pace at which they move, I'm pretty confident we can dominate this market. So we wanted to try and go be big fish in a small pond.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and, as you say, staffing isn't necessarily a small pond either. It's a massive addressable market and it's also, in a sense, niche, which is cool. You can be highly targeted in your product development and your go-to-market strategy and also have a massive addressable market, which is a really cool combination of things. And I'd say, Elijah, I don't know if this is spot on, but probably half of the founder CEOs we've had on for this series have at least a pretty large customer segment of staffing which I don't know what. I guess I just hadn't really thought about it, but the more I think about it makes a lot of sense. Remember, we had a Priora on the show and CEO sorry, I'm just blanking on his name. Let me get it real fast. It was.
Speaker 2:James.
Speaker 3:Was it or Aaron? Aaron, there you go.
Speaker 1:Aaron, yeah, so he really smart guy and a Priora. They're focused, dialed in on a lot of staffing companies. It's like an AI voice agent. So people like apply inbound and then their AI voice agent actually immediately calls the candidate to do the screening. It's pretty cool and they raised like what should they raise? I think they raised like a couple million or something like that. So it's just interesting.
Speaker 1:They're getting a lot of traction in staffing and recruiting and the way that they explained it was it made a lot of sense. They staffing and recruiting agencies have a lot of high volume right. So just from a volume perspective, they need a lot more support and it makes sense. That's why a lot of these products, too, are addressing top of funnel. It's higher volume. Staffing and recruiting is higher volume. Essentially, if a staffing recruiting company is in business, they're hiring, they're always hiring, so it's like consistency too. And then he was talking about like margins, like as services companies, like traditionally, a lot of staffing companies actually have like pretty crappy margins and even at scale, like when you see enterprise companies like they still don't really have great margins a lot of the time. So it's there's that emphasis or like desire and need to find ways to cut costs, bring costs down. So it's a combination of high volume, lower margin business that is ripe for automation and AI solutions in terms of the products that we're seeing coming out, so it's pretty cool.
Speaker 3:And those investments. Ideally, a firm is looking at something like Talon, they should be able to wrap their head around it as an ROI, positive investment, like our primary pitch. Like when I'm on demos with customers and stuff like that, I go hey, listen, if you're a good fit, if you look at this and you think that I can get you eight to 10 hours back in your week, you'll churn in three months. And the calculation I do, let me go. How many hires or how many hours does it take you? Let's assume that you have the business, and if you don't, by the way, talent can help you get that business. But let's assume that you do and that you have the ability to take on more pipe.
Speaker 3:How many hours does it take one of your recruiters to make a placement? Depends on the industry. They might say, yeah, about 50 hours of labor when we'll be able to make a placement. What's the value on that? Yeah, that's probably in the net. It's about 35K in revenue for this type of hire that we do quite a bit. Okay, great, extrapolate that out. I'm going to give each of your recruiters back 300 hours a year in manual labor. That's six additional hires per recruiter across the board. What's that worth to you on a dollar figure right? The staffing industry has the luxury of, I think, being able to think that way, because they get paid the more they hire, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. As you see, the focus is on ROI versus, and it's a revenue generating function versus a cost function within an internal company. So that's also a very important point that I hadn't considered too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is why I think staying focused on staffing is probably the best bet, right? Like you see, a lot of companies they try to do both and build for the internal use case and build for staffing, but the workflows are so different. The value of candidate experience, if we're honest, is very different. They're just completely different workflows and even values that they're delivering. That I think it's really I've just seen very few do it well where they genuinely build for both use cases, Usually they end up starting to lose a little in one area or the other. But I think you guys are really smart and going after both the BD side and the sourcing side and staffing just makes. Yeah, I think it makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, like you have exceptions like LinkedIn, recruiter and, I think, potentially tools like Gem. Actually, I think Gem is making a bigger push into staffing right now. I think, at least on the LinkedIn side there's a different pricing for staffing agencies because it's like higher volume, so they actually bring down the cost of LinkedIn recruiter seats, and I think I don't know exactly but I think there's some other players, like in the sourcing, outbound sourcing space, that are taking like a similar approach. So I think more companies are identifying like a market opportunity in staffing and recruiting that are on the internal side. Again, I think this is a newer motion for Jim, but yeah, it's interesting to see that evolution.
Speaker 1:I think you're right, though, dialing in on staffing and recruiting. There's already so much business to be won in that space. You really don't need Unless it's just as easy to sign up customers. Obviously, the technology could work for in-house in terms of the outbound sourcing cadences. That's valuable to anyone, but just from a go-to-market perspective too, it's just adding that kind of clarity and specialization. I'm sure that gives you a lift too, just saying, hey, we specifically build for SMB staff and recruiting right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and on the BD side, we get into some really interesting use cases that can then lend themselves to build highly targeted, highly segmented and very personalized outbound campaigns. Right, you look at job change data Like, we have a client we're working with where they know that a certain type of role when it changes about three to four months, into that person starting their role, they're probably rejigging their team and so we're able to automate, like that sequence in this really timely way which is, by the way, this is the outbound that works today. Right, taking a template, blasting it to 5,000 people doesn't work anymore. But using that formula, taking intent data in the form of a trigger, right, something happens, that is, whether it's a LinkedIn post or a judging, whatever. We can take those use cases that are very unique to agencies, build that data, build those data pipelines into our product and that then creates these really successful outbound campaigns.
Speaker 3:And we've you got, we got clients for the first time. They, like, they see a five to 10% reply rate on a BD campaign which is novel to them. Right there, that's unheard of for them. So it's and again we'll get back to this theme of if you to do that as an agency, you need someone on the team who's an outbound expert and you do not find a whole lot of outbound experts in recruiting agencies, unless they purposefully go find one, and there's not a lot of outbound experts in general on the market as a whole. So it's like how do we productize that expertise so that they can plug in and essentially have go from a three out of 10 outbound motion to an eight out of 10 outbound motion with virtually no additional acumen needed to make that happen?
Speaker 2:I think the sub 50 makes a lot of sense too right, because sometimes larger firms start to specialize more and then the recruiters aren't like doing 360, like they're not doing their BD and outbound for their own roles, and then it's not that the value goes down. But then if someone's just doing BD for staffing, say they're at a 150 person firm they may be saying do I want Talon or do I want Apollo?
Speaker 2:or whatever, you're in a different category. But for the 360 ones they're thinking I don't want two different tools, that's a waste of time, it's a waste of money, it's a waste of time and for them this can be that tool, that's their one tool where they can say, let's say, they're doing mondays and tuesdays, they're doing some bd. I'm sure it doesn't work that way, but if it's that clean for them mondays and tuesdays and then three days of sourcing.
Speaker 2:They just check their campaign. Yeah, I think that one tool approach for the 360 recruiters is, yeah, spot on.
Speaker 3:We know that for a fact. They hate having more tools. We know they're bound to LinkedIn, recruiter which, by the way or CRM, or I mean we see people with both who literally are doing like Bullhorn and HubSpot at the same time to then stack two, three, four tools on top of that to have BD and candidate functions for outbound or whatever is. We do not want to be doing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so spot on A quick question about like product roadmap Do you see yourself going more in a CRM direction where it's like there's a talent engagement for passive talent or people that are already in your ATS that you're trying to target in the future? Is there any kind of organization behind that? What are your thoughts on just the evolution of the product from that perspective?
Speaker 3:your thoughts on, just like the evolution of the product from that perspective. Yeah, for sure I think it'll be a lot easier to stay differentiated and beat competitors if we go the other way, whereas if we focus more and go more and more top of funnel, we focus on the intent data we bring in. Right now we're built over top of, like recruiter, like sales nav, bringing in GitHub, indeed, going like truly like multi data source. So any type of recruiting firm, does not matter who they are, can use us that intent data. Just making, at the end of the day, like, if you look at, what do recruiting firms need to excel at to grow their business?
Speaker 3:It's. I got to get clients and I got to place candidates. So as long as we stay very, we are always on the cutting edge of those, and I think obviously you're seeing the tech that's coming out today and obviously every six months we get another LLM that's like a magnitude better than the previous LLM. I don't know if you guys have played with O1 at all on ChatGPT, but for math and coding it's like mind boggling.
Speaker 1:When did that one come out?
Speaker 3:The preview came out a month ago.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And I think they rolled out API used to tier five users, but it'll eventually become I'm sure within the next one to two months it'll probably replace 4.0 as their premium, expensive model. But, point being, as soon as you go down the path of system of record, we're now just building table stakes, functions that other people have, and the play is for talent to become more of an all-in-one, which there's value of all-in-one. And the thing that's maybe working against us is to elijah's point like smb, they like all-in-ones, but if we do a really good job of unlocking, like novel functionality that takes the sourcing process and takes it from 10 hours a week to two, we're talking about changing their workflow in a pretty dramatic way versus having them just cut another tool out of their tech stack. To me, the former is where the huge value on lock is going forward.
Speaker 2:There aren't a ton of all-in-ones on the staffing side for firms of that size, other than maybe like loxo right, but they've stuffed so many things into their all-in-one that it's a it's confusing from like a pricing perspective. And yeah, I just I've wanted to use it a few times and I've heard a few other people using it, but it's like do people like them?
Speaker 1:Like I wonder how they're around for a while.
Speaker 3:I'll give them. I'll give them this Cause we've talked to lock. So they've done a good job of go to market, cause it's the most common ATS that we integrate with and the ones that we see yeah, we see it the most, I would say, of like right now. So they did a good job of go to market. When we first started about two years ago it was just plain disdain for them. Like I would honestly say, out of like our first 20 integrations, maybe one person said they actually liked them. It was, they had adoption problems and it was convoluted and it was basically a system of record. They've I and it was convoluted and it was basically a system of record.
Speaker 3:I saw some key hires they made. They hired a couple of interesting people that I knew in the industry, who I knew were legit, and I think I'm hearing less of that kind of disdain on them. I think they're moving in a positive direction but, that said, I think the product is probably overly complex. It's confusing to your point on like pricing. They also and this is we win a lot of contract.
Speaker 3:We're month to month, we're PLG month to month. You can hop in and start a free trial on talent in five minutes and Locktoe is still on, like annual contracts, which I know is great for cashflow, but again, your sub 50 recruiting do not like them and that's why our sales cycle is three weeks two to three weeks from meeting to them, just putting in their credit card and the billings completely automated right with Stripe. So, yeah, it's an interesting one and again, I think, if they're a direct competitor of ours at this point, but we also integrate with them, so in some ways, in some ways no, but I know for a fact if we're focused on the use cases, we're focused on, loxo will just not be able to keep up building those things.
Speaker 2:And they're one of the only ones, though, julian. There's not a lot of other all-in-ones for staffing other than Loxo that touch top of funnel the way that you all are. Not that I'm aware of. At least Bullhorn, no Averture, no Salesforce. No People are using Salesforce for that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, you're right. You could make the argument that Bullhorn uses its marketplace to try to be more of an all-in-one, but I think a lot of the apps in their marketplace are ghost apps. I know a bunch of apps that do outbound in their marketplace that I've never Our Bullhorn integration is like very robust, that's like that. Them and loxo are two most common. I've never met a single bullhorn user. That is like effectively using their marketplace and so we're just.
Speaker 3:One of our plays is to become a really de facto make bullhorn decent, uh-huh, yeah, okay, we are. It's, oh, it still is, but automated. We automated a ton of the data entry in Bullhorn because it is like switching off of Bullhorn, for especially if you go 50 plus, even, I'd say, once you get 20, 30 plus, that's where you start to see a lot more Bullhorn versus your five to 10 person.
Speaker 1:I don't see why if you're not enterprise, why you would get Bullhorn. It's like why, if you're like a sas company, you get salesforce under 10 million ar, like I. I try to like for my agency, try to implement salesforce. It was I just wasted so much money when all I really needed was hubspot sales professional. Yeah, like anyways. Yeah different topic but I think it's like why are you paying? I don't know. I had such an awful experience. We used Bullhorn back in 2018, 17 at SecureVision and it was just a massive waste of time. I hated it. It was probably the worst experience I've had with an ATS on the staffing side.
Speaker 2:Let's not put that on the YouTube clip.
Speaker 1:Oh, I think we're actually. I think we're actually. I'm going to be inviting on the CEO from there.
Speaker 2:Hopefully you won't listen to this episode yeah, they were not on our target list of company.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna do outreach to all of the big ats providers, like all of them. Not necessary, I don't know if it'll be for the series per se, but trying to get all of them on there, but anyways cool, very cool, yeah, yeah, I, I hear you, I hear you on that what about your thesis? Like your thesis for a few minutes left. I'm just just curious to get your thoughts on LinkedIn recruiter.
Speaker 3:You said you have an interesting perspective on that right, someone who clearly wants to sign up early, innovator right, they sign up for the latest and greatest stuff. Especially a company like ours is going to attract that kind of person. And like ai sourcing or companies that give like their own database, let's say even like whatever searchable database for candidates and say and try to there's companies trying to replace linkedin recruiter right one that comes to mind is better lead like.
Speaker 2:I've been following them for a while yeah, I actually used to use them for a few months are they on our?
Speaker 1:are they on our list? Okay?
Speaker 2:I think so, yeah, yeah okay.
Speaker 3:So I'm very curious on your experience with better leap, because I have a few anecdotes from them it was.
Speaker 2:yeah, it was solid I struggled little bit with. So let me say their unlimited credits was great, like that was nice that I wasn't having to worry about credit usage. The pricing was I think it was like $333 a month, pretty sure, per license for a staffing company to have that unlimited on the credit side. Have that unlimited on the credit side. And then the AI sourcing where they would AI recommend candidates, was decent, actually not too bad. Like I was impressed compared to other AI tools I'd used before. Though not blown away, it did the job for what I needed. It was just sequencing. I didn't keep it. I used it for one contract with a customer, actually James, the one that we worked on together. Yeah, just I used it with them. But yeah, I didn't feel like it was worth the $333 a month to keep it active after that point.
Speaker 2:And you can use it for BD? Very well, I don't think.
Speaker 1:They got looks like $13 million in funding last year. Anderson Horowitz and listen, I'm looking at the same one. Let me just drop this in the chat real fast.
Speaker 2:That's a good, their brand right. Their branding's good. I don't know, julian. You've seen their website. It's a solid looking brand.
Speaker 1:For sure this is the right website, the one I dropped in the, the zoom chat or there is like their linkedin page. I want to make sure we're talking about, because on the website too it also it has. It's now branded toward health care really they may have discovered a new opportunity, that's a different logo too.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, did they rebrand and move out of yes?
Speaker 1:is that company?
Speaker 3:first wow they pivoted. Wow, they pivoted.
Speaker 2:That's their second pivot because I talked to one of their early on people a few months ago and I think he had helped them pivot from some marketplace for recruiters into what it was previously and now they're niching in on healthcare.
Speaker 3:Well, look at, like here's the thing like you raise the amount of money that they did and I think they had, I remember I think they had a flat round. I think they raised two rounds a couple of years apart at the exact same valuation. Like they may not be in control of their board anymore or have at least given away some board seats. They got VCs. They are forced now to grow at a pace where if something's not working, they are going to do whatever they possibly can to grow at absolute breakneck speed. And so my anecdotes with them is hey, the AI sourcing was like interesting, but it wasn't enough of a magnitude of improvement to justify it. And then we're talking about sourcing. It's the most time consuming thing in my opinion in the staffing business. One of them at least. If you're sourcing like one by one candidates, like you have, let's say, you have a campaign of 50 candidates, a decent size campaign that's going to go out, most recruiters are making sure all 50 of those people are relevant. That takes a lot of time to do manually. So there's an opportunity there in my opinion. If you do it well, you should be providing a ton of value. So I heard this like a bunch of places, and then this is how it comes.
Speaker 3:Let's tie this back to my thesis with LinkedIn Recruiter. Linkedin is like the primary data source. Only 85% of all LinkedIn profiles are actually scrapable via like open web right, so indexed on Google, meaning they're scrapable. Any external database is missing 15% of the entire talent pool on LinkedIn. There is nothing they can do to get that talent pool Absolutely nothing. Linkedin will never sell it to you. You cannot get it unless you illegally scrape and then LinkedIn will sue you.
Speaker 1:Platform, and then you're yeah.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. As a result, if you're saying, hey, I'm going to replace LinkedIn recruiter, your end user has to be cool with missing 15% of their base of potential candidates. Guess what, if I hire let's say I hire for finance they are all on LinkedIn. That is my number one data source. You're saying to me okay, so I look at, I placed up 200 candidates this year across my entire firm. You're telling me 20,. 25 of them would not be available to me if I only use something like Better Leap and didn't use LinkedIn Recruiter. Good luck with that sell.
Speaker 3:In my opinion, I think we need to use LinkedIn as a primary data source. We pull data from it, etc. You build over top of it, you use multi-data source. I'm a believer in a world where we are pulling in data from lots of sources, building our own databases, not saying, hey, I've built you one database. That is the be all, end, all for everything you need. Now I think with healthcare, better leak might be able to do it. That's where and that's maybe one of the reasons that they pivoted.
Speaker 1:But anyways, that's my go a little bit more. Niche Healthcare is another area like staffing and recruiting, where it's like a massive addressable market. But it's also a niche that makes sense. A lot of healthcare companies are going to want to see folks that are dialed into that space.
Speaker 3:And lots of data in healthcare that is not on LinkedIn. Also high volume.
Speaker 1:Very high volume.
Speaker 3:The pivot makes complete sense to me. I'm happy they did it. One less competitor for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I was about to say I'm very happy they did that. They're at 13 million and competed a different direction.
Speaker 2:I think if LinkedIn would just allow more monthly pricing and reasonable pricing for smaller companies on LinkedIn Recruiter I just allow monthly right and it's a couple hundred bucks a month they would actually cut out the need for people to look outside the platform for like replacement solutions. Like you were saying, julian, it would be more just like, oh, an augmented thing, and you wouldn't be that play of replacing which higher ez was pitching for quite a while. Oh, you don't need linkedin if you have us, and most people ended up still having both, like you said, because of the missing profile if linkedin would just stop being so greedy and they would just allow like monthly pricing, couple hundred bucks.
Speaker 2:They make a ton of money off it yeah, like you're, yeah, like a monopoly business.
Speaker 1:They're not going to hurt to do that. They're not going to bend at all.
Speaker 2:I know you got LinkedIn stories, James.
Speaker 1:You cannot negotiate with them and it pisses me off when it's particularly when there's like a market correction and it's like I got this long ass contract with LinkedIn. God, yeah, I built my company around LinkedIn, so I really shouldn't be complaining too much. All my sales candidates. Linkedin made it possible for me to grow my business the way I did. But, yeah, there's zero flexibility you get what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:It's always a love-hate thing with LinkedIn man. It changed the game. It made stuff scalable. You're coughing up $6.50 a month, or whatever it is, for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. Hey, man, I think we're coming up on time here. This has been a really great episode. I've really enjoyed this cool talking shop about staffing, recruiting, your approach. I think it makes a lot of sense dialing in top of funnel. For a lot of reasons, I don't think we even got to get to everything, but that's the sign of a good episode. Julia, thank you so much for joining Elijah and me today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you guys both. I had a lot of fun today and, yeah, hopefully I get to do it again sometime.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, for sure, man, and you can always reach out to us if you want to come on the show again or you got a big like feature release or something like that. Just let us know All right, I'm down Sweet.
Speaker 1:Cool. Well, everybody else tuning in. Thank you for joining us. We got a lot of great episodes on AI for Hiring that we've already published, so make sure to of Greenhouse, Jim Workable, BrightHire, Pillar, a lot of other companies, so we're going to give you a good mix of large established players, early stage startups and everything in between, so that you get a solid pulse on how different companies are thinking about solving issues in talent acquisition with new LLM technology and whatnot. Be sure to continue to tune in. Thank you for joining us today. Take care.
