Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:00)
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:06)
Richie. Really good to meet you. Thanks for coming along today.
Speaker 1 (00:10)
Hi, Steven. How are you? Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (00:11)
No problem. Let's start with the first question. What's your startup called?
Speaker 1 (00:17)
I'm the founder for a startup called Refermyjobs. We are developing a job advertising platform which helps connect companies with the passive audience out there. By passive audience, I mean that's the people who are sitting at work who would move for the right job, who are not necessarily actively seeking a job, but if they see something then yes, I would stop the conversation going.
Speaker 2 (00:38)
Cool, thanks. How would you say your startup changes the status quo, changes the way the world works at the moment? Would it be that passive aspect?
Speaker 1 (00:48)
I think so. I mean, what companies need to understand is when they're putting a job advert out there through the existing job boards, only really 2% of the people that apply actually get selected for interviews. Now, if you compare that with probably about 70% of the workforce, I said 70%, they're the ones that would actually move and potentially make better candidates because they know what they want in their next job search. We've built a platform that actually targets those people to really start the whole conversation going about seeing what other options are out there. That's what I was about to.
Speaker 2 (01:21)
That's all good. Thanks. The main difference then, the way you're changing the status quo is that you're focusing more on the passive job seekers and inverted commas than the active ones?
Speaker 1 (01:36)
Yes, our platform still allows people to apply for jobs because we don't want to alienate them as well. But really what we feel that the power is the 70 % of people that are out there that are looking for a move. They're not sitting on job boards. So how we actually get through to them is through a third party. It's almost like a referral, a community driven. So what we've got is we once we're fully on running, anyone from the general public can get involved, free to create a profile. We give you the Pinterest of job boards. You create whatever jobs you want, share that on social media, and it's really there for your network to see.
Speaker 2 (02:15)
An example would be I'm on LinkedIn and someone else in my network, for example, could point me towards a job via your technology.
Speaker 1 (02:22)
It's not so much they're actively going to do the introduction. The value is showing you the types of job that's out there. If you like the job that you see, you then click into their Pinterest job board and then you still apply yourself. But we're just really getting the visibility for the jobs out there rather than these people being recruiting consultants. That's not what we're about, it's about sharing jobs to the wider community.
Speaker 2 (02:47)
Yeah, so it could come from your friends.
Speaker 1 (02:49)
Yes, it has.
Speaker 2 (02:50)
Okay, cool. Got you. What excites you most about the space you're in? Maybe, Gael, give a little bit about your background.
Speaker 1 (02:58)
Yes, I've been in the recruitment industry for 13 years now. I've got to say, not much has changed within the 13 years. What really got me going was it was the same objections. When I speak to clients from day one to year 13, it was the same issues that seemed to be cropping up when it comes to finding staff. They are a bit frustrated with some of the job boards, they pay money upfront. Sooner or later, it will happen where they post a job advert and they won't get the candidate through and then they're put back to day one. As a thank you, they've also paid money upfront for that luxury. On the other end is if they want to go down the recruitment agency model, recruitment agencies are great at what they do, but not everyone can afford the fees. What we've done is we've really taken the best of both worlds and created a process where it's cheaper for them to recruit, it's more inclusive and it's fair, and ultimately, it unlocks the wider audience as in the passive candidates, the people are sitting at work, we get through to them via the referrals.
Speaker 2 (03:59)
Okay, cool. Would you then say that you're building a tool that captures the spirit of the time in a way that the existing tools don't really do?
Speaker 1 (04:11)
Yes, I believe so. I think with this day and age, social media is massive. You look at the TikToks, Instagrams, all the social media out there, what we're doing is we are really playing on the back of that. Our value really comes from our users. Just creating their own little job board and then sharing that to their network. At the moment, no other job board really does that in terms of the traditional job boards. We have noticed over in Silicon Valley, change is happening. It's happening within the tech community through there. But those job boards and those tech referral communities are very exclusive. You're only allowed to get in there if you work in tech. What our platform tries to do is open the doors because we believe anyone can really get involved with sharing jobs and the value isn't everyone's individual network. We just want to capture as many people to get involved with that job sharing element as possible.
Speaker 2 (05:10)
Got you. The incentive for people behaving that way is helping their friends, but they also get some payout.
Speaker 1 (05:17)
Yeah, there's lots of different ways. First and foremost, job search is very lonely. It's very difficult. If you know people in your network are potentially looking, they may be a bit too proud to come and ask for help. What we're doing is we're reversing that model. We're basically saying, Hey, I know you're looking for a job. I'm just going to put it out there. Here's a job you might be interested in, just to really get it in front of the right person. But we do incentivize as well because we're developing a point system. For every job shared, you get a point. For every click you receive, you get a point, and then you convert that into free rewards like coffees, cinema tickets, something we're working on. And ultimately, if somebody clicks through your link, you can get paid up to 500 pound just by sharing jobs to your network.
Speaker 2 (06:06)
Cool. Something I'm always obsessed with is how large the term? How large is the total addressable market for this idea?
Speaker 1 (06:15)
The recruitment market is absolutely massive. I mean, for UK, first and foremost, it's looking at about 43 billion pounds in the UK alone. Globally, you're looking at closer to 400 billion dollars. These are rough stats, obviously, that just shows you the total size of it. In terms of what we're building, we want to capture as big a market as we can because we really believe that the change is happening and we're building a platform which caters for current demand. But in a realistic point of view, we have to break that down into smaller segments. Our first goal is really to help the startup community within Scotland. Startups making their first commercial hires, they struggle. They don't have the recruitment knowledge, maybe they don't have the resources or the time and expertise. Our platform lends itself to referring people from the tech world, sales and marketing. Historically, these candidates at the middle management upwards, they're not actively seeking for a job, but they're the ones that we know would move for the right opportunity because they've reached a point in their career where it's time for a change. What's going to instigate that is if somebody in a network is sharing the right job at the right time to really get the process going.
Speaker 2 (07:34)
It's almost like being a job finder instead of a job seeker in a weird way.
Speaker 1 (07:39)
Yes, it's I think the change as well. I think it's been quite a few years where I last saw a CV of somebody that's been an employer for 5, 10, 15 years. Laterally, people do tend to move every two or three years, and that's just the way that time has evolved. Lots of things have spurred on from COVID, more remote working opportunities, more choice on the market there. People do tend to move to progress their own career after 2-3 years.
Speaker 2 (08:10)
Yeah. That would be the overriding themes you're going to see in your market?
Speaker 1 (08:18)
Yes, absolutely. I think it's when I first started recruitment, if you see somebody with two or three years experience and then moving on, they would be classed as a job hopper. But then over the times, that job hopper title really has disappeared into the background because what we need to be aware of is we need to understand the person, the candidate behind each move. As a recruitment consultant, it was up to us to figure out what made that move. With the contracting world, taking a big step forward, more accepting opportunities, fixed term positions, that really has changed how sales look.
Speaker 2 (08:55)
Got you. Now it's really interesting, actually, really interesting. Who would your idealto where we're being at?
Speaker 1 (09:01)
We want to work with small companies or small businesses and people with maybe less than 20 employees who haven't got the internal HR or recruitment teams, who lack the knowledge on how to recruit. We've really built a process to help them through the whole recruitment journey from start to finish. And more importantly, the way our business model is set up as you would only pay for the job ad for if you get hired. So that's going to massively reduce their spend on advertising. First and foremost, we really want to champion them finding the right person and creating a fair billing process.
Speaker 2 (09:37)
Cool, thank you. Do you think you've got a product market fit?
Speaker 1 (09:42)
We're getting closer, yes. I think with our first marketing campaign, we've got our early adopters up and running. They're using our system, they're giving us feedback. But in terms of proof of concept and product market fit, we've spoken with about 500 small businesses over the last 12 months, pitched to them what we're doing. And then through that feedback, we've really refined our process. We believe that we're building something that the small business marketplace would like.
Speaker 2 (10:11)
Exciting. It's really good to hear you're being so methodical about this. It's really great. If there was one big thing, if that even exists, is there one big thing that would really help you the most?
Speaker 1 (10:25)
I think scaling our operations would be a huge support. We've already touched on the size of the global recruitment market. We want to get a big piece of that marketplace for ourselves. But in order to get there, we would maybe need a bit of support in terms of the right steps, the right building blocks to work a way up to that. We do have our milestones in place for the next two years of even captured 0.5% of the UK market that would generate £11 million revenue. That's only just a start for us. We need a bit of support to get there and then we don't want to stop at 0.5%. We want to take a bigger piece of the UK market and hopefully that would lead to global market and take a big piece of that, which I think we can do, then yeah, it would be a very profitable scale-up. But in order to get there, we do need a bit of support from our advisors to help us get there.
Speaker 2 (11:22)
In five years' time, you're growing, you've outgrown Scotland. How many people work in your company? If everything goes well, I know these numbers are always crazy to ask, but just what's in your head?
Speaker 1 (11:38)
We were quite open to it, I think, from a comfort level. It's almost like fantasy land to say that we're going to have hundreds and thousands of employees. As much as we would love to do that, we need to take it quite methodical. If we're doing the UK market, we would maybe need 15, 20 core staff to help us through the operations. As we start to hopefully do it, grow the UK, that'd be great to say that, then yes, we would need to recruit more staff. Really, we want to recruit as lean a team as possible to help deliver what it is that we're building. The value really is in the tech that we're building. We feel that companies are able to use our tech to post the jobs. Once we've made some fine-tuning for the referrer side and job sharing, most of the legboard is in the tech that we build. But of course we need the right team to support everything that goes on behind the scenes.
Speaker 2 (12:34)
Rich, on that topic, what would you say the main bottlenecks are for you? What are the main constraints?
Speaker 1 (12:42)
I would probably say knowledge. I'm a first time founder. My co-founder is a first time founder as well. We are exploring this startup landscape as we go. Of course, there's great resources from the likes of Techscaler and listening to other founders. I think listening to other founders has been amazing, just finding out how they do things. But what we need to do is take all that information and adapt it to ourselves. We really want to make a big dent in the recruitment space. I suppose some of the knowledge out there and how to do that and help us deliver it is really the big bottleneck for us at the moment.
Speaker 2 (13:21)
Cool. Thanks. That's a very good answer, actually. Okay, we're going to get to some of those startup cultures or specific questions. What would you say is your favourite thing about the startup culture?
Speaker 1 (13:36)
The support, I think I just touched on it there. I think when you speak with other startups, other founders, it's a very welcoming space. As much as we're all developing their own little startups, even the ones that I've managed to build relationships in the recruitment space, the market is big enough for both of us and there's a lot of support helping each other through this crazy startup journey. Most technically on paper you get classes as competitors. We don't see it that way. From start-up to start-up, we talk about collaboration more than anything else. Even just last week, there was somebody that operates in the employee marketplace. They do something a bit different in the recruitment space. But between the two of us, we can capture more of the market. We're already building a lot of APIs and a lot of tech to help signpost customers to one another. That really is a theme when you speak to other start-ups. Everyone speaks in solutions with a founder. You don't see a problem. You don't just talk about the problem, you talk about how to start fixing it. That's what's really exciting, is when you speak to founders of any background, there's just so much, it's a very warm, welcoming environment.
Speaker 2 (14:49)
Cool. That's good to hear. Having said all that, are there any things that you would say your least favourite things about being this start-up journey?
Speaker 1 (14:59)
It's not least favourite, it's very much an unknown journey. We had the concepts, we worked on the concepts, we developed our MVP, we then developed our beta product. We're now ready to go to market. We don't really know what happens next. We've got a rough idea of the start of journey, but we don't really see that as an obstacle. We know it's something that we need to tackle, but it's quite exciting figuring it out. If we can't figure it out ourselves, what do we do? We then speak to other founders to ask them, Hey, we've got X problem. How do we get over that? If they can't help, which most of the time, nine times out of 10, they can help from their own experience. We've then got resources like Techscaler. We've got so many mentors that we can get access to. And these are mentors, again, who have successfully exited their startup. You're never really alone. I wouldn't really class individual obstacles. You've got different hurdles that you come across. But when you get there, you either figure it out yourself or you ask the community and the mentors, people that have been there and done that, they will get you over the hurdles.
Speaker 2 (16:03)
Okay, cool. Any bits of advice you'd like to pass on to other founders?
Speaker 1 (16:11)
Just go for it. If you've got an idea, don't be scared. Just get it started. Don't think about things that might happen in a couple of years' time. Think about the first step that you need to take. If you've got an idea, just explore it. Start speaking to people. I think for the first couple of years of my journey whilst we were building the tech, we spoke to so many people from hiring companies to candidates, to even people that we think might start sharing jobs. We spoke to all of them, told them what we were doing, started to get a bit of proof of concept. And as we speak to them, it helps us refine what our process is. So my advice is if you've got something and you think that sounds like a cool idea for a start-up, I would just go for it. Start speaking to people, start piecing it together, start figuring out your process. And then if you are really stuck, just look up start-up community, start-up founders, start-up events. If you start going to all these events and speak to other founders, they will really will help you go from an idea to actually getting something that users can start using.
Speaker 2 (17:18)
Thanks so much. Richie, that's it. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much. All right. Bye. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (17:24)
Bye.
