The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
Welcome to The Breakthrough Hiring Show! We are on a mission to help leaders make hiring a competitive advantage.
Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
You will learn how to:
- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
- Leverage data, process, and technology to achieve hiring success.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 160: How to take skill tests and assessments to the next level with Test Gorilla’s Founder and CEO, Wouter Durville.
Wouter Durville, Founder and CEO of Test Gorilla, joins hosts James Mackey and Elijah Elkins to discuss the evolution of skills tests and assessments.
He shares the latest on how Test Gorilla is helping customers screen talent more thoroughly and talks to our hosts about impactful upcoming product releases.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
#1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, James Mackey. Welcome back. We're really happy to be here with you. I'm here with Elijah, our co-host. Elijah, how you doing.
Speaker 2:Doing well. Doing well, James, Thanks for having me here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great to have you back on the series AF for Hiring, and we also have Walter Derville. Walter is the founder and CEO of Test Gorilla. Walter, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great, great to be on the show. Thank you, james.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm pumped. I think most people in the industry have heard of Test Gorilla very successful company and I'm really excited to learn more about you. I think just off the bat, like just from the top, let's just I'd love to learn about you, where you're based, a little bit about yourself, and then we can get a little bit into your founding story too. But I saw on LinkedIn are you in Spain? Is that right? Or where are you based out of?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I am Dutch, as you can probably hear from the accent, but I've been here in Barcelona for over a decade. So I moved here with my then girlfriend. When we had a remote company starting to grow a little bit, we were like, hey, we can work anywhere. This was way before COVID. Fantastic choice for us. So when you started, tess- Grilla you were working remote, just traveling.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, I was a fan of another company and that was very international and that started to grow a bit. So we're like hey, wait a minute, we don't have to be in rainy Amsterdam, we can be anywhere. We picked Barcelona.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny, when I started Secure Vision I was actually working remote and it was I had a corporate job that I worked really hard to get really hard. And then I got there and I was like I think I need to do this entrepreneurship thing. I was getting a little bit, I was grateful, but I was also getting bored and I remember I quit my job, started Secure Vision and started traveling and for the first like two to three years I think closer to three years I was essentially traveling. I'd lived in like nine different countries and travel. And then the company was growing and so it started to settle down a little bit and opened an office and these types of things. But the remote work I started doing that before COVID as well and it was a little bit trickier because it's harder to find places with good internet. But really what opened that up was Airbnb, for me at least, and that was incredible because I wouldn't have been able to afford traveling to just staying in hotels or anything.
Speaker 3:No, way, no. And when did you start SecureVision?
Speaker 1:Technically 2015. I went full-time in 2016. I think like February 2016.
Speaker 3:Nice yeah. So way before COVID, yeah a little bit.
Speaker 1:Airbnb was out. I don't know how long it had been out at that point, but it was definitely and I don't know if I've been able to start the business honestly if I didn't have Airbnb, because there's times where I found a room in a townhome in Belgrade for $200 a month, but at the time I didn't have money saved up, so I don't know how I would have been able to do it. But so, anyway, something more about your travels, like where did you guys try? Did you go straight to Barcelona or did you go to a bunch of different places?
Speaker 3:Actually, my favorite country in the world is Colombia, in South America. So we went to Colombia for a month together with my girlfriend, and then also a month to Barcelona. Which city did we pick? We love the culture and the nature and everything in colombia. I'm not sure if you've ever been, but it's a what a country. But it's just. Yeah, it's a bit far away, right from family. It's a bit less secure, of course it's. And now, with kids I have three young kids I'm very happy that we picked barcelona, but we were in doubt between those two yeah, and then how?
Speaker 1:so how did that come about with the test gorilla? I'd love to learn more about how you had that idea and decided to take the leap of faith and start the company yeah, yeah, of course.
Speaker 3:Yes, I've basically been an entrepreneur my whole life, since I was 10, I think. I said in candy and organizing parties and god knows what, like all kinds of startups for profit, not for profit, and some of them are very serious, right, like with a business plan and everything. But the last company I had before, test girl, I was not like that. It was a company that I started together my wife wife, a social enterprise selling handmade carpets or rugs online and they were made by women in developing countries and this idea was really born out of the night with a glass of wine and, hey, it would be so nice to have these rugs and that like really organic. And it just kept on growing.
Speaker 3:It was still a relatively small company. It was a nice lifestyle business, I'd say, but we would always have huge numbers of applicants if we would have a vacancy, but literally up to a few thousand, and that's really a lot, right If you're a small company without even a recruiter on the payroll. So we'd get all these resumes from around the world and we would really struggle with it. And I think it attracted so many people because it was like design and social enterprise and remote. So there's a lot of things to think for people. So we got all these resumes and we'd be like, oh my God, like how on earth do we find the best person? First of all, out of self-interest, we just want to hire the best. But also, how do we make it a fair process? Like we were social enterprise? We want to give everyone a fair chance, not only the people with these Chinese brands on their CV that we, or CV that we, or resume that we recognize. And also, how do we make it efficient? If you spend 30 seconds on every resume, it's like days. So we were really struggling with that. Like CVs clearly didn't work for us, or resumes, as you say, in the US.
Speaker 3:So we started thinking like, hey, but there must be something else. Then we introduced like little tests that we basically stole I wouldn't say copy, but basically stealing on the internet, like from other places so to have a little bit of a filter at the beginning, like at the top of the recruitment funnel, let's say. And that really worked. So we're like, hey, wow, this really works. But it's just a lot of work and this is not our profession, like we don't know what we're doing really actually.
Speaker 3:So then I started looking as a potential customer for what Test Girl has become right the talent assessment with different types of tests, video questions, you name it. We can talk about it more, maybe later, but I started searching for the product. Hey, where is this product? My intention was not to start that company. It was like I just want to buy it to have a better way of filtering my and creating a shortlist for my candidates, like in a data-driven way that predicts job success. And it just wasn't there, and that's how the idea was born. It's a disaster. It clearly doesn't work. Really, has no one developed this product yet? So that's how the idea was born, and that was already. When was this? Like 2016,. I think we launched Tesco Relay in 2020.
Speaker 3:So that was a couple of years before that, and this was, I think, many entrepreneurs. You might recognize this. You always have these ideas, right, they have like little notebooks and you make notes and they're from the craziest weird ideas that are mostly very bad, but sometimes, sometimes, you have a better idea. This one really stuck. Every time I was on a holiday or something, I was just like oh my god, like thinking it through and all the things I'd learned also as an entrepreneur, like it ticked all the boxes in terms of scalability, solving a real problem, having positive social impact, being for profit and you name it like a whole list of things that you like learned that I thought were important for to set up a new business in the future. So I just kept being so excited and I spoke with otto, my friend, long-term friend and co-founder about this idea and he was still a partner at bane the bane and company, the consulting firm, and he's wow.
Speaker 3:I love it so much he got like super excited as well, and then, like on the plane back, he was leaving Amsterdam. He's like writing me emails of more ideas and then we took it from there. So that's how the idea was born and that's how we decided to go for it. That was 2019.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, and I was looking on LinkedIn. I didn't realize that your team raised a $70 million series A that's a large series a yeah, yeah, that's probably one of the largest in europe, yeah a lot of money
Speaker 3:but there's also huge potential right, for it's not just desk gorilla, but it's a bit bigger than that. It's skills-based hiring. Right. There's a big move away from cv or resume based hiring towards skills-based hiring and it's accelerating fast. During covid, but also post-COVID, you really see more and more companies adopting it. Many companies still finding it out, finding out how to do this, but it's a big wave and I think these investors also recognize that. They're like hey, there will be some winners in this mega shift and yeah, that's how we managed to raise so much money.
Speaker 3:And it's a very fortunate position to be in, so we still have a lot of cash and it allows us to hire amazing people scientists, you name it to build product to fail, also, to try stuff fail try again, it's a very fortunate position to be in to be so well-funded.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's an incredible success story and you've developed a very strong brand as well in a short amount of time in the industry, which is really cool. I would love to learn a little bit more about the nuance of the product and what you can offer to customers. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Let's get a little more product detail on what you offer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So we see Tasker as a talent discovery platform, right. So we help organizations just to hire better, hire faster and hire without bias through skills-based hiring. Now, the first product we launched is a talent assessment. It's our talent assessment, right.
Speaker 3:So what you can do is in our product, you can create an assessment and then you can add up to five different tests. So we have a very big library of over 400 scientifically validated tests in all kinds of categories, like from cognitive ability to coding tests, to personality tests you name it. So you can add up to five different tests in an assessment and then add your own questions to it. For example, hey, why do you want to work for our company? With a video response? Or here's a customer email. How would you respond with an essay response? So you can be quite creative there, and I would recommend making it a real life task based. Right, you can actually see a little bit of work from talent.
Speaker 3:So then you have created your assessment and then there's different ways that you can invite candidates for your assessment. So you can either invite them by email in bulk, or one by one, or you can even put a link on your vacancy right On the job post. You know, hey, this is a job post, blah, blah, blah. Instead of, like in the past, people would say, hey, if you're interested, email us. We say no, if you're interested, take the assessment right, and then you just people could take the assessment and then, as a customer, you log in to TestGorilla and you see all your candidates ranked automatically from the highest scoring to the lowest scoring, and then you can click on them, you can see their video responses or other types of questions and maybe you can take a look at their CV and resume and then take it from there.
Speaker 3:But what you end up doing is you spend your time on the best candidates and what we really recommend, or preach almost, is to do a top of funnel to give every candidate a fair chance to stand out and remove that bias, Because it's really hard to take out bias. I think most or if not almost, every recruiter almost no recruiter, let's say wants to be biased, but you are. It's really hard to judge people on stuff that you've never heard of universities or companies, et cetera, and you may just make it much more data-driven this way and you give everyone a fair chance and you find those hidden gems right Like you've got some amazing talent you would surely have missed otherwise and save a lot of time, of course. So that's in a nutshell how that talent assessment product works.
Speaker 3:And I think two, if I may like, two things that are a little different from how the industry traditionally functioned, because assessments obviously are not new, right, they've been around for a century or so, I think, in the Second World War or something. They got really big in the army or something like that. They've been around forever, but they were typically used quite late in the process, right. They're like oh, we have done this whole funnel recruitment funnel, right, interviewed people with three candidates left and we sent them to an assessment center or something like that. We say, hey, let's turn that around. Let's first see if people are have the skills that you need for the job and then invest time in people that do so. We flipped it around. That was quite different.
Speaker 3:And the other big difference is the that I briefly touched upon already is like the very big library of tests, over 400 different tests. And we're doing that for a reason because there's academic research that you might be familiar with that actually shows that the most predictive thing for job predictiveness is multi-measure testing. So that's a very complicated word, but it basically says test for different skills in assessment, not just one thing like only a psychrometric test or only coding skills or something, but actually combine different things and that makes it very predictive and in's. In a way, it's very similar to what you do in a job interview, right? If you're hiring a programmer, let's say like, okay, of course do you want to know, does this person have the JavaScript skills or whatever coding skills? But if that person has it, it's not. Oh, check, bam, you're hired. No, of course not. You're like okay, you're a team, so I also want to see your management skills or your communication skills and your culture, your culture at or culture fit with the company.
Speaker 1:So you're also looking for these different things and that we're mimicking in our talent assessment. Yeah, it's like very comprehensive right, and that's that's exciting too. This work as well for folks in technology as, as well as healthcare, manufacturing anything in between, or is it dialed into specific industries or types of roles like what does that look like?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, good question. So it's very broad.
Speaker 1:So our because of that huge library, you can create very relevant assessments for a very large range of jobs, but our focus is on white collar jobs, right, so it's less focused on manufacturing or those kind of yeah, so I was curious about my assumption was more so on the white collar space, but I was wondering because I know, just in terms of expanding and whatnot and all these different, I was just wondering, yeah, there's like where do you typically see the most demand?
Speaker 3:so, yeah, no, definitely in, in in white collar, but then it's a one-stop shop and that's also very consciously there's been our positioning and strategy, right, right, so for a typical white collar company, tech company, whatever, they can use a test controller for almost any role, right Like, from the programmers to customer success, to admin, finance. You name it by combining different tests.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome, and I would be curious to get your thoughts on how your company is thinking about AI right now. I think all of us in this space and talent acquisition are thinking about how do we actually implement AI in a meaningful way. That's really improving things for our customers, right, and it's challenging, right, it's challenging sometimes to find those use cases that are truly compelling, that are moving businesses forward, and I'm curious to learn more about the conversations that you might be having with the leaders within your organization and other industry leaders and investors or customers and I don't know if you're currently implementing things or you're thinking about it, or I'd just love to get a sense for where your head's at on this topic right now for our industry.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I find it super exciting, I think it's fantastic for our industry also, but, yeah, it's clearly changing. It's changing the way we work and therefore changing the way we hire, I would say so. I would say, in terms of recruiting, first of all, the resume and cover letters are dead right, like these days. It must be terrible to be a recruiter, right? You get like all these perfect chat, gpt letters or resume. That clearly doesn't work anymore. So I think that is another push towards skills-based hiring, very clearly. But then, within the skills that you're looking for, I think what we hear from customers and what we actually see in our data, we have around 700,000 candidates per month now. That's over 7 million years. So we have a lot of data and we're starting to see those shifts. I think away from and that goes very slowly, I must say, but I just subtly see it happening away from hard skills and towards more soft skills. For example, right, so, the typical stuff like, let's say, translating or basic accounting or data entry.
Speaker 3:So many things can be done by the AI, right, but there's still a lot of human skills, right, in terms of leadership and planning and you name it. Right so, communication, there's so many that are just ever more important. You could say. So that's one thing we see. Another thing we see is that it's just demand for AI tests. So we have a lot of AI tests now in the library a deep learning test or a machine learning test or a very specific one like Keras or PyTorch. There's all kinds of specific software tests language do you call it Language tests almost for AI. So there's a lot of demand for those things as well. Right, but you want people who are efficient, who can use those new ways of working and use AI tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah. And so I'm curious on the for assessments. Right now, we're talking with CEOs that are implementing different solutions at different parts of the talent acquisition funnel from everything from sourcing to screening, interviewing, to assessments and whatnot and I'm curious from feedback from customers or when you're thinking about the next 12 to 18 months, whether it be in your own product or maybe just in talent acquisition holistically. Whatever you want to think through, when do you see the most disruption or the biggest changes occurring in terms of implementing AI? Do you see anything specific or does anything stand out to you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, if I focus on our own product. So we're now really starting to implement AI inside the product. So one exciting thing we just launched is an AI recommender. Right, we have this big library of tests, as I said, but then people are drowning a little bit sometimes, right, oh, which test to use? And I'm not the expert, right, and fair enough, right, so we can help them manually with our team.
Speaker 3:But we now have built like an ai recommender that, based on all the experience and scientific knowledge that we have, helps you with a push of the button you can upload a job description and bang it gives you a recommendation for the best assessment. So those kind of things are very exciting. I think they really helped improve the our product but therefore also improve hiring processes, I think, and then I think, in the future, the other thing for us that where I see a lot of potential for ai is in really matching those candidates directly with jobs. Right, really find from the mega database of millions of candidates, but now sort of tens of thousands of jobs, like to say, hey, these are the best match based on all the data points that we have. That's very exciting for us as well.
Speaker 1:Do you see your team ever going in the direction of actually doing more of the potentially like AI interviewing? I know it's like you're doing a lot of the tests and assessments. We're seeing some companies going in that direction too, where there's even like some products where it's like the AI video interviewing. I know you said there's also an element to some of your tests where correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you said like people are responding via video. Do you see yourself incorporating AI into those types of tests where candidates are responsive, to have more of like an interactive experience there, or do you feel like that's really a different product? That's not where you play, like you're going to stay laser focused on more so just the testing and eval versus the AI interviewing. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's not our immediate focus but it's definitely something that we're discussing and looking at Because indeed, like you said, we call it custom questions, so you can add these custom also video questions to your assessment and we have a big question bank for that as well. To help customers Say, hey, you're hiring for a front-end developer, here's a set of questions that you can really help to do in a skills-based kind of way ask questions to your candidates. Analyzing those responses would be a very logical thing. To put ai on top of that. Say, here's an automatic kind of rating of those responses, something we're not offering now. So now it's the customer who's watching those responses. But this would be a very kind of logical thing, right where to apply ai to, and then the next step could be to just have an ai bot there right to do that those questions to answer, to ask and answer those questions or have the conversation with with candidates yeah, there's.
Speaker 1:there's a lot of money being poured into into the space right now. I know there's a company called Mercor, based out of I think they're out of San Francisco now series. They just raised a series A for 30 million and it's really. It's really based around like AI, video interviewing, yeah, assessment. So I think they're actually connecting like engineering talent to companies based in Silicon Valley or primarily like that tech hyper growth scene, and essentially, like the candidates are proactive. It's a different business model than what you're doing. But I'm just saying, like, in that space of like cancer, going on doing interviews and then getting linked up to different companies, so different kind of variations of that business model, we're seeing a lot of money get poured into right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's just it's a wild time and I yeah, so I think it's just it's an interesting use case and it's yeah, it's uh, kind of it's definitely not what you're doing. It's like adjacent or it's like similar in a sense, because it's like the eval in a sense, but it's just from a different angle. But I don't think they're investing in like the testing or anything like that. It's nothing like that. It's more of just, I assume, matching role requirements that are provided by a hiring team and giving the AI instructions on hey, figure this stuff out. I want you to ask questions about this stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but yeah it's hard, I think the investors are pouring in a lot and I would do the same. I guess they're just spraying money a little bit to see, like, what's going to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't have an opinion on this particular company, but I think it's a lot. Of them are a little bit feature-based right, like smaller features in the product. It's hard to more like a feature almost inside the platform and a big standalone company.
Speaker 1:But maybe I'm wrong, oh yeah, for sure, and it's interesting too, and I think too, it's like some of the more like well-established companies that are like a holistic product which, at this point, tuscarora is definitely evolving so fast.
Speaker 1:Right, it's almost like being an early adopter, of implementing this type of stuff into your product isn't necessarily the idea of just being first. It is not always ideal, because I'm thinking about just like some of the I've been talking with different uh founders and and ceos of uh like ai hiring products and it's they're telling me the way that we're building our product now is completely different than we, how we were thinking about building it like three months ago. It's like things are just moving so fast and I think it's some of our more established CEOs that I speak with Greenhouse's CEO and Steve Bartel over at Gem and how they're thinking about AI, they're implementing, they're doing things, but it's a little bit more reserved where they're just sitting back and watching. They're like, okay, we have this great product and solution, we're delivering, but we're not going to jump the gun and just overcommit in one area and really sit back and say, okay, what are the use cases that are actually really driving business forward and looking at what other people are doing a little more yeah.
Speaker 3:And you want to prevent introducing bias also in your product and in our space. It's so sensitive, right like with ai, and there's been quite a few cases where it went wrong, so we definitely want to be on the sensitive side and that yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's an interesting one I'm still waiting to. I know we brought up on the show a couple times workday class action lawsuit we're. I don't know if you've heard of that one. Yeah, well, yeah yeah, so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Workday is getting. It's like a class action lawsuit. They're getting sued for potentially their AI talent acquisition assistant discriminating on candidates based on race and age and whatnot. So it's yet to be seen what's actually happening there, like what will happen and how valid the claims are and whatnot. But it'll be interesting too, because it also set a precedent for the industry on, I think, a lot of the laws and regulations yeah, yeah, very much yeah.
Speaker 3:And then a bit longer ago we had higher views. Well, they also had, like with the video interviewing, quite a few issues, I think with bias and that creeped in oh really, which one was?
Speaker 1:yeah, I know higher view. I'm trying to think.
Speaker 3:I think that was how many five, six ago, maybe a higher view oh yeah.
Speaker 2:I think what you mentioned earlier about there is super interesting and isn't only specific to the TA space of what things are going to be like an AI powered feature within a true solution and a true platform, versus all of these, what might be called like tools that are being money is being thrown at them by VC firms but they don't actually have a clear vision of how they're going to become a platform right, like they're a little tool that has taken chat, gpt or maybe some other LLMs and they're doing just a little bit more than what you could maybe do on your own right With the standard version of GPT.
Speaker 2:Maybe they have some proprietary data sources, et cetera. I think it's the ones who, in my personal opinion, who will win are the ones who can build true solutions where you have a true platform right that is bringing a solution and solving a problem and are using AI really well and can continue architect the platform in a way where, as AI develops further, you can continue to develop your product right, so the product is very like AI-centric moving forward versus platforms where the AI is only a feature or where it's an AI tool startup that has no path to become a platform. Does that make sense at all?
Speaker 3:Yeah, 100%. That's a more eloquent way of putting it. That's exactly my point. I very much agree with that. So I think that's also something we internally always look at. Ai is really a means to an end. Right, it's not the end, it's not. Oh, we have AI. No, this is a very useful tool really to indeed do stuff better, to recommend better tests, to match people better. Those are fantastic applications, but it is a way to get there, literally. We had a conversation earlier this week for a new product. We're building around talent sourcing and it's like I don't really care, and it sounds really bad. There was people like machine learning experts and all these fantastic people in our team. We're like I don't really care how you do it, I just want to see great results, and if it's AI, fantastic. If it's Algolia or whatever other tool, it's also great. I just want to as.
Speaker 1:No, I don't think you do yeah, I don't think so. I also think it's like this concept of I don't know to me it's every company is essentially going to become. This idea of an AI company is very quickly going to become obsolete. It's just going to be part of how tech stacks are built.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like cloud right AWS. Who's talking about? We have AWS.
Speaker 1:We are a cloud company, yeah like we're a cloud company.
Speaker 2:Nobody's saying that anymore right, it's funny.
Speaker 1:My buddy was like it's like saying you have a refrigerator in the house, you're not a refrigerator company or house. Yeah, yeah, that's like stuff you have in a house. Yes, obviously, yeah, and so it's. I think it's it's like the concept of the tech industry. I feel like the concept of the tech industry is going to disappear. Every industry is going to be the tech industry. Every company, every doesn't matter industry is going to be tech.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if I look at our venture capital, we've got quite a few venture capital firms on our cap table, but they only invest in tech, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Insured tech. You just throw tech on whatever industry and that concept is gonna.
Speaker 1:I think it's cool and it's interesting because I think some of the we're already seeing a lot of the startups that maybe names that we that you got investment a couple years ago like you just don't hear of them anymore. I think a lot of them have probably gone out of business. I think a lot of them have probably gone out of business. I think a lot of companies started Elijah Tell me if I'm wrong, you probably know more about this than I do but a lot of the co-pilot stuff and like help helping with content generation. There's just so many tools that kind of popped up initially around those and I actually don't see quite as many of those anymore. I don't think I don't come across as I wonder if they just already gone out of business, but I think so probably right.
Speaker 2:They have to get, yeah, traction and as soon as some of the bigger players, like Canva, for example, in content creation, if you had this little again tool where you could generate, let's say, videos, or you can make some slides, and that was like their tool, and then canvas, like, made it a feature right, one of their many features all of a sudden, boom, you're done. So I think that's the big risk. Sometimes, right, with these, what's more of an AI tool than a true platform is. The bigger players are going to figure it out pretty quickly. If you're a one trick pony, if you will, and that's the main thing and then they integrate that. Maybe they have more scale right their pricing. You're already paying for it and they add it for the marginal increase. Let's say, you pay $5 more a month, but the standalone tools like 60 bucks a month, like you're, it's like a no brainer. You're going to use canva's new feature for five bucks versus that ai slide creation tool for. So, yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 3:I think they're falling by the wayside as these bigger companies add more ai powered features yeah, 100, and I think the other thing is like there's a lot of these ai stars. What I hear from these venture capital firms is they have quite a bit of traction, initially right, because every cto or cmo or you name it has budget. Do I hear ai here's budget?
Speaker 3:right so there's a lot of initial traction, which is fantastic to be in, right, as a startup, but then to keep those customers right, there's a lot of churn. If I look at myself, I'm churning a lot like I've tried quite a few things and I out, out, out and I go, yeah, it's brutal, right, so you have to open and, with these new models coming out and indeed bigger companies adopting them themselves or buying them, buying these companies and incorporating them, it's, it's brutal. It's not easy to build like a standalone company.
Speaker 1:I think yeah, I know definitely, but yeah, it has to be, like I think, centered around the solving the problem. Like, elijah, what you said, like not looking at ai is like an end-all be-all. Like we're here to to solve a problem and to add as business, as executives over here, to for opportunity and to create value. Yeah, we're solving the right problem that will create that type of opportunity, that market opportunity for investors, if that's the plan, I think, having that vision too, james.
Speaker 2:So maybe you start with this one tool and a lot of companies I think that's the end of it they almost see that as the end goal instead of, let's say, you start with, I don't know, ai interviewing or maybe it's AI powered testing or an AI powered ATS something. But your vision is to like become, let's say, an AI powered greenhouse or AI agent powered workday like. You've got this kind of like a bigger vision of where it can go and what it can become, even if you're only starting with one tool and I'm just not sure enough of the founders are, you know, getting further ahead than that where they can pitch to the investors and their customers and even their own team. We're not just creating this one tool like we see the future of hiring in 10 years being, you know x and the ai is going to be helping with all these different things, and we're building for that day. We're not building for six months from now. Only if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:I don't know, it's just my opinion that's the issue with, I think, a lot of the the co-pilot stuff and the content creation stuff is it's like what, where do you really build from from there? It's like there's no logical like why is that company well positioned to build in any? Why would we back these founders? Like these founders, there's no compelling story like in terms of because your customer feedback is on product roadmap is just going to be so dispersed because it's just such a big general little feature versus solving really dialing in and solving like one one important I leverage problem, like some of the use cases that we're seeing, whether it's a gorilla or some of the AI interviewing, which I think is a very valuable use case. It's like that, if you like, I love AI interviewing right. That's a space that I'm really excited about right now and to me, it's. I like the idea of some of those companies I think will be. I think a fair amount of them will be very successful because it's also very logical. It's like you identify a niche customer base, like ideally, some of them are sprayed wide. Very logical. It's like you identify like a niche customer base like ideally, some of them are identified your customer base. They're going to give you product feedback that will logically build out more of a holistic product and it's you're going to get pulled in a more specific direction and, like some of those initial ai products were just like these vague kind of note takers.
Speaker 1:Are you like, what are you going to do? You're going to go like into crm space. That sounds like that's a huge undertaking. What are you going to do? You're gonna go like into crm space. That sounds like that's a huge undertaking. What are you gonna do? You're gonna go into, like, sales enablement, like it's just so. It is like a very small feature and it's also it's not hard to build. Like some of these things too. It's you get, I don't know, like a full-time, mid junior level engineer can get pretty far on on some of this stuff. Like it's like literally that simple. Like somebody who knows a little bit of Python can do an open AI plugin like API. It's just not that hard to do some of this stuff. It's just that's not a, that's not a product.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I completely agree with that. For, speaking about test career, we see ourselves as a talent discovery platform. We have seen ourselves from the beginning right Starting with these tests, but only expanding towards talent assessment right and much way more tests, more sophisticated tests, more science-backed adding like these video questions et cetera and AI video is a very logical one for the future as well and then expanding to talent sourcing right, but it's like a much bigger vision in it, I think that's a good way to go.
Speaker 1:It's awesome and it's also cool to see. I think we're seeing some of the most successful recruiting tech products, like expanding into a lot more product lines, which has been a huge push over the last year or two. Specifically, we had the CEO, nikos of Workable and there seems, geez, they have a product for everything. And then you see, like Gem right, they started out as like outbound sourcing cadences for candidate outreach, email data, that kind of thing, and now they have a CRM, they have the applicant tracking system. There's other products too and they're expanding within that, and so I was actually really curious to learn a little more. We got a few more minutes here. You're expanding within that, and so I was actually really curious to learn a little more. We've got a few more minutes here. You're expanding into sourcing. Could you tell me, could you tell us a little bit about what went into that decision strategically to expand your product offering into sourcing technology?
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely yeah. So it goes back a little to our mission and vision. So our mission is to democratize opportunity for talent from all walks of life with a vision of a billion people in dream jobs. So it's a kind of an ambitious vision, you could say. And this ties into it very well. So with our assessment product, of course, anyone has all of a sudden a chance to stand out right and be noticed and picked up by recruiters, and not just only people who have a fantastic CV.
Speaker 3:And then the next step basically, I'm looking at our own databases. You could say, on the one hand, you have these millions of candidates who are now taking these assessments, right, so we have all that data about these people who are looking for their dream job. On the other hand, we have these tens of thousands of jobs, right, and they're looking for amazing talent and we're sitting on both and our mission is like the vision of a billion people in dream jobs mission is like to the vision of a billion people in dream jobs and we're. It's like connecting two databases. So for us it was so logical and in line with what we're doing to start connecting those.
Speaker 3:But it's a little bit chicken and egg, right, if you start with, that's really hard, right, if you have zero, zero candidates, zero jobs, like it's a bad place to start. So we started from the assessment. But now that we have, yeah, quite a bit of traction and so many jobs and people, we feel it's a very logical next step to say, hey, we connected to and also there's just so much waste in recruitment. You guys know very well, I think, for every job we have like hundreds of candidates or depending on the company of course, but only one get hired, gets hired, and all these other candidates have invested so much in that process as well. So I think it's also very candidate friendly. They kind of say, hey, are there ways we can still match them without opportunities?
Speaker 1:so is that like essentially, if a candidate completes a test for one organization, are they able to use that assessment or test that they completed to submit to other jobs? Is that essentially how it would? Yeah that's right.
Speaker 3:So they can reuse their scores. It's their scores, right. It's not a company. The company doesn't own it. If you look at, privacy laws and everything. It's your cognitive ability, your personality. So, yeah, the idea is that they can reuse that right To say, hey, maybe this was not a great match, but hey, did you think about these? Roles Like these would be fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's okay. So then can will the view be, a company can put in search criteria for a certain skill set and then basically the profiles with people with completed assessments they can click through and then set up like an interview with or or how does that?
Speaker 3:that's right yeah that's right, so indeed can in the future, the customers will be able to. It's basically, you could say, close to linkedin. Linkedin is the biggest uh database of resumes in the world, but we are taking a different approach. It's skills based. So this will be we're creating a huge database of skills. So if you're saying, hey, I look for someone who speaks Dutch and I'm Dutch and knows really well JavaScript and a great fit with our culture, and we know who those people are, we have tested them. So we have all that data on people, so we can tell you, hey, look at these people and invite them to your what is?
Speaker 1:that Some platforms like that, like you think about, it's like limited right, where it's you're hiring people on a project basis or something, where it's like it has to flow through the platform so people don't go around it. Is it going to be like a structured, a little bit like one of those types of marketplaces, or is it going to be like okay, this is for W2, full-time employment hires. What does that motion look like? So, as a company, I'm going through, I'm clicking on a profile. Okay, I want to work with Sally.
Speaker 3:What happens from there right now. It's closer to linkedin and of course you can find people for any type of role, but I would say it's for permanent roles just like people are using our or can, or companies are using our platform now, use it to find permanent employees, but now you can also source them.
Speaker 3:So, because, at this moment, like, people bring their own or they post their own links and vacancies everywhere, but now we can say, hey, here, actually, our skills tested candidates are ready so you can actually have access to that database and invite them for your jobs. That's the and their skill sets. That's the big difference, right with existing platforms so how does that?
Speaker 1:can we get into whatever you're comfortable sharing in terms of pricing for that, like how companies will engage in the pricing model to source candidates through your product.
Speaker 3:I can't, because we don't. It's not live yet.
Speaker 1:So we're building it as we speak. We don't have the pricing yet.
Speaker 3:There will be a price, but I guess it will be something similar to something around the number of people that you invite or something. That's probably the way we price it.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, that's a cool idea, like I always because in those business models, that's like always where my head goes Okay, like how do you structure that aspect of when folks actually engage? Like I'm thinking like from the business perspective, from your perspective too, but yeah, that's like a ton of value because, you're right, you're already sitting on these databases, so it's like a very it's not like you, yeah, yeah, but I think companies, there's like more interesting applications happening right now and I honest I find the test grill application a lot more interesting because the evaluations you're doing are a lot more thorough than the assessments and whatnot. And then also it's there's some of these other platforms too that are doing this marketplace ish. I don't know if that's the right, if we could call it a marketplace, but yeah, I just don't think it's.
Speaker 1:There's also limitations in terms of how folks can engage with those talent.
Speaker 1:So if you think about something like an Upwork which I know is not a great analogy because it's this is way different and better in my opinion, but like still like the concept of companies searching for profiles, it's like very limited in scope, like you can't really put somebody through a full interview process, like you can't talk to them outside of the platform.
Speaker 1:You're not hiring them as a w-2 right in the us, it's not. So it's it's very limited and then you only are typically, at least in my experience working with the tool. I might be I don't know, maybe I don't know everything about it, but it's just limited and like limits this project scope. But there isn't. I haven't seen a tool that's like really effectively doing that, like on the W2 side, like full time with this level of like vetting and assessment that's taking place. And again, this is a lot, I think, a lot more valuable than what AI is doing currently. It's different but like still there's a lot more value in all these deep technical assessments and tests than, I think, just AI screening for role requirements.
Speaker 2:It's a different, it's a for role requirements.
Speaker 1:It's a different. It's a totally different. It's a different use case. But I guess what I'm saying is I see a ton of value in that and I could see the sourcing piece being like this product being like huge right, like I think pulling off that correctly and just like with the data you have, like that could be a massive product.
Speaker 3:Yeah that that's what I think too. It's a lot of work to get it right, but, yeah, we're in a very unique position to have all that data, like you said, to have those millions of candidates and then to have all that data, and then you can apply AI to it. So to say to indeed find the best way of matching jobs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's exciting. For sure it's a massive undertaking, though Do you have any kind of timeline on when your team is thinking about going live with this product, or is it still in?
Speaker 3:For sure next year, so in 2025, we'll go live. The exact month I can't tell you. I don't know. We're still working very hard, but a lot of work has been done already, so it's getting close.
Speaker 1:That's awesome when you're about to go live or when you're ready. When you want to, you should come back on the show and we can talk about it. I would love to learn about the product when it's ready to go live and continue the conversation.
Speaker 3:I would love that. Yeah, thanks, james.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Look, we're coming up on time. That was a flu. Bias was a lot of fun. Walter, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights. I know people are going to get a lot of value out of this conversation, so thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 3:Great, I love being here. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Awesome, all right. Thanks for tuning in everyone. We'll talk to you soon, take care.
