How to start your own recruitment agency | Paraform Webinar #1

Welcome. Thanks for making the time this morning or evening, wherever you're calling from. Yeah, I mean, like on the chat, like if everyone can hear us okay, you know, maybe you can drop a note. Great.

Okay, awesome.

So it works well.

Cool.

And I believe like the host for today, Christina, who leads marketing at Paraform. Oh, there you go. Where's everyone joining from? Yeah, that'd be an interesting thing to look at. Like, you know, Obviously Paraform, we're based here in San Francisco and a lot of our recruiters are based in the US, but also a lot in the UK, Canada. Oh, wow.

Okay.

Seattle, Austin. I think I see a few familiar faces too. Kimberly. Great. Oh, Narveen as well. Welcome. Awesome. Yeah, our head of marketing, Christina, she's also in London at the moment. So we actually might host something in London. I don't know if I can give a teaser, Christina, but basically an in-person thing. Yeah, what we realized is we don't have a good answer as to why, but there's so many recruiters in the UK. And if you look at like a lot of the recruiters who sort of, you know, do well and like come here and become top billers, they're all from the UKs. And Christina and I were trying to figure out why, but yeah, there's a lot of users in the UK from Paraform. So we might host something. Just had a UK market is poor compared to the US comment. So I suppose that's why a lot of UK agencies like recruit for US-based startups. But yeah, I think it's good to maybe kick things off. I see a lot of people, you know, close to 100 folks in the audience now. So I think, yeah, we can just get started. Christina, what do you think? Okay, cool. Well, since everything is recording, you know, I'll just kick us off with like a quick intro about the webinar and like us, and then we'll go from there. Okay, cool. So yeah, let me just pull up this screen. Yep. So welcome everyone. Thanks for making time to join Paraform's actually first ever webinar, you know, that features some of the best recruiters in the industry. We're very lucky to have Miko from ScaleYou. He started this company before and repping his merch and yeah, we've known each other for a while now through Paraform and you know, I'll also let him give his intro. But yeah, very, very honored to have our very first guest and the topic I think is very fitting as well. So yeah, to give you a brief intro about this webinar today is yeah, we invite some of the best recruiters in the industry and go over topics for other recruiters, you know, that they're curious about. And today we want to go over this topic around starting your own recruiting agency and, you know, how do you get your first clients and all a lot of actionable tips on how to like do well, because I think starting a company, whether it's a software company like Paraform or recruiting agency, it's not easy, right? So I think it's good to have someone who knows how to do that and scale it to a certain scale. And to give you a quick intro about, you know, Paraform, I'll keep mine brief. I'm one of the founders of Paraform. We started this, launched this 2 years ago, and now we're scaling, you know, if the company's growing quite fast. Paraform is essentially a marketplace, a platform where on one side there are recruiters like Miko. And when I say recruiters, right, this is, you know, folks like you in the audience, right? So like independent recruiters who's thinking of starting their own business and going independent, leaving the in-house role. It can be like boutique agencies who already is running their business. So that's on one side we have recruiters and on the other side we have some of the fastest growing companies in, in the United States hiring. So we have companies like Ramp, the business card company that's exploding in growth, all the way to enterprise companies like Palantir, and also a lot of early stage startups like seed to series B, you know, that are recruiting and need help. So we connect them and basically our approach is recruiters do what they do best, companies know what they want, and if we can do a good job connecting them, putting onto a platform and build this ecosystem, we think, you know, we can, we can change a lot of what the industry does in a good way. So that's a bit about Paraform. And yeah, so basically Miko, I'll sort of hand it over to you in a second, but I want to quickly mention that the first part, we want to learn a little bit more about yourself, your background, you know, how did you even start recruiting, right? And then how did you decide to start your own agency? So if you can give us a quick intro about yourself, ScaleYou, and like that story, that'd be awesome.

Yeah. Cool. Again, thanks, John. Thanks everyone for watching. Like John said, I'm Miko. I actually started my career in recruiting around 2014. I graduated around that time. I did agency recruiting for about 3 years. Was doing more, more or less on the biotech space. I was an agency recruiter, biotech space, also did some accounting and finance. I actually met one of the founding partners of Scale-U here, Justin. Uh, he was actually my first recruiter. I became a recruiting lead at that point. He became my first recruiter. I ended up working with him. We talked about potentially starting our own thing down the line, but you know, we were just kids out of school. That was like 2 years out of school. And at that time, tech was booming. A lot of in-house recruiters that were being hired in different tech companies. So I ended up going to Meta around 2017, and then Justin followed at Meta around 2018. And then we, we worked there. I worked there for about 5 years, almost 5 and a half years, um, until the layoffs happened. And eventually that's when we started my own— I, I started my own thing, which is ScaleU. Justin, uh, one of the founding partners here, had left Meta even before the layoffs. He worked for a Series B startup. And eventually him and I, we, we reconnected. I, I actually moved to New York for, um, for— because I wanted to try something new. I was living in SF at that time. but we, we were still in touch. He's been a good friend of mine and I asked him like, hey, would you wanna start this agency with me? And he did. Uh, and now that's where we are.

Awesome. Yeah, I think there were a couple things there. I wanted to like dive a little bit deeper into like what you like maybe like learned as, uh, starting at like a sort of recruiting firm. Um, and also, yeah, like touching on the topic of like layoffs, I think that, that was like a big catalyst in 2022 and 2023. Where, you know, just, yeah, I think companies, this is a big part of the topic, but I think companies, you know, they can't really predict how much they will hire yet. The way they hire recruiters is very, you know, it's static, right? It's just let's hire them full-time or not hire them. And so what, what ends up happening is, you know, it's, it's just like recruiters are almost recruiting themselves out of their role. If they, if they, if they do too well, it's almost like you're recruiting yourself out of your job. And I always thought the incentives were misaligned. So I think that makes sense why you started, but I'm curious, like, you know, in that first 3 years out of college as an agency, what do you, what are some of the skills and foundations you learned that help you now? Yeah.

I think one of the things being an agency was it's a good bootcamp for anyone who's right out of school because nobody really goes to school for recruiting, right? There's no major for it. It was a good bootcamp just to learn really on like how to build pipelines. How to be confident going and working with clients, because at agency you're working with all different clients. Sometimes there's misalignment in terms of what priorities are. So working with different personalities, that was a great thing. Building pipelines. And the most important thing was like urgency. There's a lot of talk about, you know, AI, all these new technology that's coming along, but even 10 years in recruiting, sure, the technology has gotten better. But there's still that urgency to always like work on building your pipeline and really getting that a high number of outreaches and all that, which has never changed. It's become easier, but it's never changed from when I started all the way till now. So that's a good fundamental for somebody who's getting into recruiting is to, you know, I would say join an agency first or have some agency experience first before you end up going to like in-house recruiting. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's a good point. I think there's a lot of debate around agency and in-house, and of course they serve sort of very different purposes. But I think, you know, since the topic today is about sort of external recruiting, I think like it's really, you learn a lot of important skills. I think like, you know, it's sort of this environment, like maybe a little bit of sink or swim environment, right? You have to get your own clients, you have to go build pipeline. It's really attached to sort of your compensation. So I think It's a good bootcamp for sure. I guess when you first started, so when you met Justin in New York and the ideas were brewing and you guys started the company, in the first year, what are some challenges you faced? Like, you know, I think even a business you start, it's always optimistic. You're like, let's do this. And then you sort of have a plan until you get punched in the face, right? Like, so what are some challenges you faced in the first year and how did you overcome them?

Well, there were two main challenges that we had at that time. Number one was because we had a pretty extensive career in recruiting, we didn't know what direction to go because we were even considering going back to biotech recruiting. Do we do contract staffing? Because we did that before as well, contract staffing, or do we go direct placement, full-time hires? So that was one major question that we had. The second one was, the second one was like, which, how do we, how would you start? Like, do we have a client or, Where do, what do we focus on? Like, do we cut it down by region or do we cut it down by skillset? Those were the two things that we had, the biggest questions that we had, like starting this off. And yeah, that was it.

Yeah. And, and I mean, how did you answer those questions? I mean, did you just kind of figure it out? Like you just did, or was there a mentor? I don't know. Yeah.

So when you start your own thing, right, you guys have to keep in mind like your own personal runway. So we're talking about our own personal runway, like how quick do we need to shift if something doesn't work out? And initially what we just did was we reached out to a lot of our contacts in, in the different industries that we worked in. A lot of it is going to be a lot of grunt work at the very start, figure out which direction you wanted to go, a lot of long hours and hard work for that. And then eventually When we realized there's a certain direction that we want to go, which was still continuing tech. Again, you could still cut that in multiple ways, right? Do we go contract recruiting or do we go full-time? And one of the things that we had greatly affected our mindset at that time, or for at least me, was I was seeing a lot of these postings online for engineers for different startups here in New York and also in SF. And at that time, there were a lot of layoffs that were going on in big tech. But what I kind of thought in my mind was, despite all these layoffs, because these startups are venture-backed, for as long as there's VCs, even if the market is slow, they still have to somehow allocate that money. And if they're allocating that money, there's going to be some startups that are going to be put up. Whether the market is slow or not. And it could be, you know, it could be slower than before, but for as long as money needs to be allocated, there's going to be startups that are going to be funded and they're going to hire. So I was kind of thinking to myself, if big tech or being an in-house recruiter, you're going to get— there's a possibility for you to get laid off at a certain point because the company has matured in terms of size. Or there's just no need for growth. Maybe we could insulate ourselves from that danger by working with earlier stage startups, because there's always, there seems like there's always going to be a market for recruiting in that space. And so that's how we ended up at early stage startups. And then there's just a lot of different questions that we had to get answered as well. Once you get to that, like what skillset there, what industry, or even do we, do we do contract or full-time? And eventually we got those questions answered. But my advice is think about your own personal runway and for every recruiter, it's going to be different, right? I don't, I don't really know the backgrounds of all the recruiters here. They probably come from different recruiting for different industries. So figure out what works for you and figure it out quick. And then just once, once you have some flow there, just keep pulling at that, keep going at that direction, but really look at your internal or your personal timeline, your personal runway of starting your own business, and then just go quickly towards that direction which you think is working or keep going in that momentum once you figure something out. So that's my advice for folks.

Yeah, it's great advice. And then we talked about sort of like the agency experience a little bit. Mm-hmm. And you mentioned you joined Meta and, you know, did recruiting there. Anything you learned by being in-house and any sort of transferable skills you took to ScaleYou?

I guess for specifically for recruiting on Paraform, what I learned was the bar at Meta at that time, and people could debate this towards the end, you know, I even had my own personal thoughts that I thought maybe like the bar might have been going down, but at the very early stage of being there, like 2016, 2017, For me, like, seeing the, the quality of candidates that were being brought in, it's like, taught me like, this is the bar for, for tech. And because I, I didn't come from a tech recruiting background, again, was biotech and accounting and finance, eventually getting there, that taught me what like good looks like in, in a sense of tech. And also there were connections there for really ambitious like managers who Just working with them, their, their, their long-term goal was to start their own thing down the line. And that led us to some, like working with some of those managers who eventually started their own thing or managers or even top tech talent who eventually, who knew that they wanted to go to a startup, but you know, because they're out of school, they want to try to get experience in something bigger first, but eventually wanted to go to startup. So kind of piecing that network together was. One of the benefits of tech and of all, and of course letting you know what good looks like in terms of a tech setting.

Yeah, I think that's, that's really helpful.

Yeah.

Okay, so you had both that experience and I think, you know, leading up to the agency, starting your own agency was helpful. Yeah, I guess I kind of wanted to like dive maybe a little deeper into, you know, the actionable steps of, you know, starting your own agency, you know, through your experience, right? And I think we had a discussion where I think one of the first steps you recommended was being able to find your own niche and why that's really important. And then you touched up on this, right? Startups. But yeah, is there a way you can maybe tell the audience, why is it so important to pick a niche? Because I think a lot of the times it's easy to go, let's say clients come to you or you just have a bunch of roles that you think you can fill, you can just go after all of it. But like what, yeah, why is it important to have like your own niche?

So if you're, I'm not, I'm just trying to imagine who's in this call. A lot of you are independent recruiters or just on your solo right now. If you just take in any rec or position that comes your way, there are so many differences from different positions that if you try to just work on anything, and we did that, we had that mistake, everybody. Who's starting their own thing usually has that mistake, even though, even though it's pretty common or common knowledge or known to everyone that if you want to start your own thing, you have to find a niche, but which niche works for you right now? Or where is the demand? So somehow you kind of have to try to figure out where the demand is or where you're, you're good at. And then when you have that, when you finally filled something and you have momentum, you keep going that way. But it's very important to find your niche right away is because again, there's so many different positions, there's so many differences in every position that if you're a solo recruiter, you're gonna be just spending your time just chasing different things and building pipelines for so many different skill sets that by the time you get momentum somewhere, if you're doing that, someone's probably already beating you to it who already has that network. If you're gonna go, if someone's gonna go as an independent recruiter or starting their own agency, we're not here in a bubble, right? There's so much competition there that if you're slow to the punch, you're always gonna get beaten out pretty quickly because there are already players in this space who have developed a pipeline in certain areas. So just don't keep chasing everything. That's my recommendation there.

Yeah, I think that's super fair. I've heard that from multiple people as well. I think I saw in some comments like, Someone mentioned like they're like design-focused recruiter, for example, right? Like, and I think, you know, you, you brought up an important point around pipeline. I mean, it's sort of a little bit of a network effect of your own, right? It's sort of, uh, you know, let's say you specialize in like cloud security engineers or maybe in the dev tool space, or maybe your focus is seed to Series A startups. We, we help you hire your first salesperson and first engineer. Then what ends up happening is that pipeline often you know, becomes very like, you know, concentrated and then similar companies that you attract will then go for the same pipeline and the percentage of matchmaking like sort of increases, I think. So I think the pipeline part is very important and I think, you know, just to add, I feel like, you know, branding is really important both from getting your own client's perspective, but also attracting candidates, right? I think like, you know, a lot of candidates I talk to, a lot of my friends I talk to, who are engineers, they're like, oh, if I see a recruiter, you know, work with like the startups or positions that I want, then I'm like more likely to respond. You, you develop your own brand, maybe you can start creating content around it. So I think finding your own niche is, is an important, very important advice. Yeah. So I suppose like, and then, okay, so like let's say you found a niche and I'm sure it's not like one shot, like maybe you can try a few different ones and see Oh, maybe you can try one and then compare it. What about like, you know, building the right foundation, right? Like, you know, was it hard to start like, you know, all the legal requirements, the contracts, and also choosing the right recruiting tools? Like it would be cool to go through your recruiting stack and like, you know, share what you found was good and not. Yeah.

Sure. Let me give you guys some advice that might save you money as well. When we started this, we had another partner who was doing more of the sales side. His name's Richard. Actually, there's 5 of us now. So Richard was actually more of a business guy. So I don't really know much of this, the stuff that goes on, like putting up the LLC, all those legal stuff. He was working on our legal contracts for our first initial customers, our first initial candidates, and also clients. So unfortunately, I can't give too much help there. But it would be great if you guys knew somebody. I'm sure there's a lot of resources now online that would do most of the back office stuff. You guys have to find that out yourself depending on which country you're in. And also depending on which state you're in, there's a lot of different legal requirements. So fortunately I can't help you out there. In terms of the, the stack, in terms of the recruiting stack, there's a lot of different tools there. Like there was Hireezy, there was SeekOut. They all have their pros and cons. But I would recommend if you guys had money, just go with LinkedIn Recruiter. I don't wanna be, I don't wanna, I don't wanna like, like blow their horn too much, or I don't wanna promote them too much, but cuz they are pretty expensive, but they've been pretty good at getting interactions with candidates as opposed to we, we tried other things before and the in-mails are really more effective. Than the emails itself. So yeah, for, for the specific type of people that we're reaching out to for the, the type of skillset that we're in, it's in-mails work better. Now I can't say that for everyone because when we were at the time in their staffing days, it was texting. So it was easier to get that phone number through other means. It really depends on where you as a recruiter, if you're starting your own thing, which industry you're gonna get in. So no, the type of candidates that you're going to reach out to and where they're most likely to respond. But if you're going to go the tech route, more of like, um, I would say white-collar roles, I'd probably stick to LinkedIn Recruiter above anything else.

And is there any other— are there any other tools you use? Like, you know, do you have like an ATS, um, uh, you know, for managing all your candidates that you interacted with? Do you have like email outreach tools or— yeah, like I think one question we had is like there's a lot of AI popping up. Yeah.

Yeah. I would say Ashby's been pretty good. Hoping Ashby and LinkedIn Recruiter give us a discount. They're pretty— publish this out, John, and let them know that Mika sent you guys. Maybe there's a code for us, a referral code or something, but Ashby's pretty affordable. LinkedIn Recruiter again is good for outreach, but Ashby's pretty good. A lot of the standard stuff. Now, as we're growing, we might consider other applicant tracking system, because again, you're getting Ashby for a really good price, but as it scales, there's some things that we wish it had, but we're still trying to look into other ATS systems to figure out which one has it. There's no perfect one. Back when I was at Meta, we had this really good internal tool where it links to LinkedIn Recruiter, where when you do your LinkedIn Recruiter outreach, it also copies it there. So whether it be by phone or by LinkedIn recruiter or connection or in email, it was all there. Like the candidate profile had all the interactions there. That's one thing that I'm seeing lacks from a lot of off-the-shelf applicant tracking systems is it doesn't ingest LinkedIn recruiter messages. I haven't seen anyone that's affordable. So that's, that's one thing that I miss. But yeah, Ashby for now, if you're starting off, but as you start to grow, you might want to consider other things.

I see. And any, uh, email outbound tools, or you're sticking to mostly LinkedIn?

Sure.

Yeah.

Um, Ashby actually has a thing too where you could pull up emails, so you can send— you can use sequences to reach out to people. I think every applicant tracking system now has that. That's pretty common, and they have some sort of functionality to pull up emails. So you could definitely— they're mostly add-ons, so you have to pay for those emails. It just really depends on, on you as a person, which, which applicant tracking system you prefer, or which one is better for your cost, because some emails are more expensive at other applicant tracking systems as opposed to others. But really depends on what your budget is and what works for you.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And, you know, considering sort of kind of how we met and how we even decided to do this webinar, I'd love to hear like your opinion and like how Paraform has fit into your recruiting stack, right? Like, and Justin's of course, you know, like how would, how does Paraform fit into that recruiting stack? If you almost view it as a tool, if you view it as a platform.

Yeah. Yeah. So with Powerform and John, uh, we, we spoke about this earlier. I can tell them where you guys started. Powerform started around the same time we did. So we were looking around other platforms that were, cause we had our own internal clients from our days working at Meta. We had some people who started their own things. They were our first internal clients. And then we wanted to see where else we could potentially work with startups or potentially work with a good client base. And we saw Paraform at that time. Paraform was more of a turn anybody into a recruiter. It was more of a, what you call, a referral thing. Like there were a lot of people that were referring to different roles. So we were playing around with it. And at that time we just didn't see it as, because we were building a brand, a brand name, and it was just so hard to differentiate ourselves in that space when everyone's just like throwing. And some of these clients, we might come across them in our business development, cycle, our own business development, and we just didn't want to get mixed in at that point. But then about 6 to 8 months in of working at, of doing ScaleU, you guys shifted, Powerform shifted to be more recruiter-focused. And so where Powerform is, is because we are building a pipeline for specific clients, there are some, you know, there are some opportunities there where they kind of overlap. And you say, you know, you could potentially work on those two because of the industry that Powerform works in. The candidates are more or less the same because of the cert— because of the stages of companies where companies are at Powerform and where we targeted, they're more or less the same where you just have to really figure out what a candidate's interest is and what space they want to go to next in their next stage of their career. And you could either present them stuff that we're working on where we have these clients, and then also stuff that's on Powerform, right? So there's different positions there and it makes for a good candidate experience that you're presenting them with multiple things. So some of them like that, some of them not so much, but that's where Powerform fits is you're able to present more opportunities for people.

Yeah. Yeah. That, that makes sense. And also speaking of like the stack, you know, I think Christina on our team may added a few comments, but we actually partner with a lot of tools that Nico mentioned. So like whether it be LinkedIn, we have an official partnership with LinkedIn Recruiter. You know, there's a new AI tool called Juicebox and a bunch of other things like, you know, Hireezy, Apollo, right? So you can check that out on our website. You know, there's like a good, uh, sort of deal we got for everyone. And yeah, I think that—

and, and John, just to add to that too, I think if On Paraform as well, if you guys hit a certain requirement or certain performance level there, I know Paraform is able to reimburse like a part of that expense when you guys do buy Hireezy or LinkedIn Recruiter. You just have to meet a certain requirement of successful candidates being submitted and moving forward in the interview process. That's something we actually haven't taken advantage of yet because getting that reimbursement is, you have to show receipts and stuff, but yeah, you could definitely do that on a platform and if you're someone who's starting out, you could take advantage of that too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that's definitely something we do. And I think just like along that line, like we also have our own internal tools. So we have like a sourcing tool internally to Paraform. We have an email sequencing tool. You know, there's like an easy way to manage all your candidates and dynamically tag them. So we're starting to increase the amount of tooling provided to recruiters on top of like the client base that you can get on Paraform. So, um, yeah, and including discounts and, and fun things like top billers going on trips. I'm sure Justin knows about that. So yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of things you can take advantage of there. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about like how, any tips on finding your first clients, right? Maybe anecdotally for you, I'm sure there's like obviously having connections and things help, but yeah, curious if you can help the audience understand how they can find their first clients, you know, any advice?

So again, I don't know the makeup of the people watching this. Some of them have probably had extensive experience in tech, maybe some don't and are still thinking. But for most people here, you're all probably thinking of doing this on your own, being your own independent recruiter. There's two ways that you could go about this is if you already have that experience and you already have those connections, you could just look through them and see if anybody that you know who you worked with successfully would like to take you on as an independent recruiter for like a previous company you worked for, or somebody started their own thing and is in need of recruiting support, you can just go ask your network. But you know what Paraform can do is if you're a successful recruiter, like early in your career or a successful recruiter, but maybe you don't have that network yet, you could try it out. And for all you know, you guys could be very good at filling roles independently here. Cause what Powerform does is, you know, you're taking away the sales aspect of finding your own clients. You guys can just go on the platform, see if there's something that, hey, I've successfully filled roles like this before. I'd like to try my hand at it. And who knows? I've seen stories on LinkedIn too, of people being able to do that. So you could definitely try it. You could look at the platform and see what works for you and see it's a good, it kind of gives you a lower barrier to entry because there's already clients there for you guys to just try to work on and see if you actually have, you know, to be able to successfully do your own thing. So it's a good trial for someone.

Yeah. Yeah. And Miko, to share my personal experience, when I first started Paraform, I think what was surprisingly helpful was almost like hearing how hard it was from other people, right? It's this interesting thing where I guess the analogy is if you're in the trenches together, right?

Yeah.

And I think that was really helpful to know. I knew it was hard, but knowing how hard it was sort of set like a nice bar and something we were like, wow, actually it's doable. I think Steve Jobs said something like your life changes once you realize all the great things created in the world were done by people no smarter than you, right? I think that's a very interesting way to think about it. I mean, I'm curious, like, yeah, how hard was it at the beginning, right? Like, you know, are there stories like, oh, maybe in your first 3 months you made like no placements and you're struggling to kind of grow the business, right? And then now obviously looking in retrospect, it's all fun and stuff, but yeah.

I guess I just wanted to ask like, what specifically are you asking? Like how hard was it during like the start?

How hard was it to find clients? How hard was it to, you know, start the company? Like any stories?

If it wasn't hard, that's fine too, but yeah, it, it was difficult because we were going into a space where we needed to do a lot of research. And again, if you're somebody who's starting out and you're just solo, at that time I was fortunate to have 3 people. We were 3 people in total and one person actually had a sales background who was like researching into different startups and targeting it. Like it was, it was software sales. But it was a little easier at that time to find it because he was fully dedicated to that. But I could imagine someone who's just like, you're solo, you, you, there's a sea of other recruiters out there who's reaching out. It's hard to break through, but one way, if you know, if you're a good recruiter and you want to really break through in this industry, again, this is a very good, like, entry point, like Powerform would be a very good entry point. To see if you actually have what it takes to actually be able to be in this industry, being your own independent recruiter, like actually competing against other recruiters to get the top talent quick enough. So I think it would be a great way for someone to jump into like their own thing using the platform. But fortunately for me, like finding our own clients, we had a really good person who was on the sales side of things. And, you know, me and Justin, I guess we're personable enough to, to be liked by people and I'm here in New York and New York's a very, how would I say this? Very social city. People go out a lot. It's very different from SF. I spent a lot of my time in SF too. You could just network here. So it was a lot easier to network and find these people, find people. But yeah, that's how it was.

Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Next part I wanted to cover is, you know, and, and, you know, you don't have to share everything, right? But I think, you know, a little bit more on the actual recruiting side, right? Like how did you like build build your candidate pool, right? Like any tips and advice on how you source and engage with the top talent? Like any, I don't know, trade secrets, if you will, but yeah.

Yeah. So I wouldn't say, okay, there are really no secrets to this because a lot of candidates, they're being reached out to by different recruiters all the time. And for them, I don't really think it doesn't matter which recruiter gets them there, you know, it really has to do all with your personality because there There are some people that we've spoken to who've been reached out to by other recruiters, but they might be more receptive to you because they probably just like you better. I don't know. It's like, it has to be, just has to do with your personality and how well you communicate with them and also just getting back to them in a timely manner. Because for the most part, not every good candidate is going to work for the first role. But there might be other roles there, but if you treated them pretty poorly during that experience, they might not get back to you in the future. Right? So it's very customer service oriented as well to on the candidate side, because like if, if people like you or if, if the candidates like you, they're more receptive to you sending them more roles in the future than If you're to treat them shitty, you know, like as a recruiter, and sometimes recruiters do get a bad rap because recruiters don't get back to candidates in a timely manner or just ghost. But being in this industry, being your own independent recruiter or starting your own agency, the candidate relationship is very important because you might be able to place these candidates in the future, or they might become your clients in the future. So yeah.

Yeah, I think that's an important point actually. If you're engaging with your top candidates, like it's like a very strong network, right? Like you, they can refer clients to you, they could refer other candidates to you. One tip I heard that was interesting, and Nico, I'm sure you do this. A lot of candidates, I mean recruiting is definitely, there's more nos than yeses, right? Like whether it's replies or actually making a hire, right? Similar to sales. And one thing I heard that was really interesting was Every candidate who says, oh, sorry, I'm not interested, it doesn't hurt to ask for a referral. Like, hey, like, yeah, totally understand. Like, let's stay in touch, but do you have any friends or colleagues that might be a good fit? Right. And then like, that actually like is surprisingly scalable. And you know, like interacting with people, you know, outside the context of just recruiting, I think just always thinking like always be selling, always be networking. I think it's like also another thing I heard as well.

But yeah. Cool. We have a few questions, John. Do you want to go through those too? Like, seems like—

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I guess like, I think a couple questions I saw from folks is that like, you know, like, do you still handle like things like in a more 360 full desk fashion where you, you know, or like, you know, like, do you get the clients and source or do you have more like dedicated folks on your team who just does like recruiting and just does sales? Like, How does that work? Yeah.

So for our business, we do have clients, our own personal clients, where it's the 360, where we're kind of like the internal recruiters for the startups. But on the platform itself, I haven't had that experience. And I think this is like, again, you know, Powerform is a great platform, but it does have some things that it might need to work on. One of the things is When you're submitting candidates on the platform, they tend to like work on, you know, work like handle all the communications from then on. It's more like you do the introduction, but from then on you're kind of in the dark other than, you know, them moving through the different steps of the interview process, but you don't get like, even if it's a positive candidate, like that's moving towards on the, on the process. As a recruiter, you still want to hear some feedback, even constructive or positive ones or negative ones, even if a candidate is moving forward in the next steps in the interview, because it helps you kind of calibrate where you're at. So that's one thing that kind of lacks because it's not like a direct relationship, right? So we have our direct relationship with clients where we do the 360, but on the platform itself, it's more of like you're sourcing and you do follow-ups at time to time. But when it comes to like offers or trying to sell them in, a lot of the founders or a lot of the hiring managers wanna do that themselves on the, on the platform. Yeah.

And another question I got on sourcing is, do you typically share, you know, one candidate to multiple clients based on the fit, of course, or do you, you know, sell like one role really like just heavily and then you go for that? Yeah.

Look, for, for, Screening candidates, we do mostly ask them first about what they're interested in. And as Scale-U, we're not just telling them on everything because what I've noticed and what you, when you guys see on the platform is there's so many different positions there. This is just like a small sample of recruiters that's reaching out to them. If you look outside the platform, there's a lot of different roles. And if your candidate is really good, they're probably being reached out to by a company or by a recruiter that really holds to heart like what they're interested in. So we're not actually trying to sell them into a position. We want to really match them to a position rather than just really selling them. Because even if we sold someone to go in the process, it's just going to be heartbreaking if they get to the offer stage, if they're good enough, you know, they get to the offer stage, but they're going to eventually jump to a different role or take a different offer where in a, in a company that they're actually passionate about and interested in. So not really selling, it's more about connecting them to the right opportunity.

I see. And do you ever like cold call candidates? I know it's in sales, it's common, but just curious.

Actually, we did that before in agency recruiting. Again, this was staffing that was, was okay, but in the roles that we work on, not anymore. We tried to do that and we did, we did get a lot of negative feedback. Justin would even text before out the blue, and I tried that too, and they told us to knock it off. So probably not in this, in this, in this industry, email, LinkedIn, that, that would be the best way.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I also wanted to, you know, I know it's, uh, there's some other questions too. I just wanted to quickly ask you. Maybe some anecdotes, like, do you have the most memorable placement you ever made? Like this candidate that you helped get a job or, yeah, what was like your most memorable placement?

Yeah. Here in my entire career or just doing this by myself?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Most memorable placement, there's been a few that we've had. I guess the most memorable placement was the first one, the first one that we ever got. It was somebody, he was like, ex-Palantir, and then he started to do his own thing. He took a break and then he was just looking to get back into it. And I know he had the founder mentality and he, he, he's just not one of those types of folks that are really loud on LinkedIn, but he actually sold his company like, uh, successfully. And then I reached out to him and it was just perfect time. He was trying to get back into the industry. So I guess it was like timing that was good. So It was great to get him back to working at an early stage startup. So I think that was the most memorable one, the first one, because me and Justin, we were at it. We had a competition then and also Rich, like who gets the first one? I think that was, we had our first placement like 3 months in here. So yeah.

Nice. Did you guys do anything to celebrate the first placement?

We had, okay, we got a trophy. So when Rich made a trophy for us, it was because because Justin's in SF, we don't get to see each other too much. I do when I go out there, he does when he goes out here, but not really. It was just like a small trophy. I won't say what it was titled there because it's not PC, but like we got a trophy.

Nice, nice. That's always fun to hear like stories like that. And what about like a little bit of sort of talk about like how to be successful on like Paraform and making placements fast? Because I do think a lot of the audience, you know, who are thinking about starting, Like any tips, I think at a certain point Paraform started working for you and Justin more effectively, right? So do you have any tips on making, how to be successful and make placements fast?

What made us successful is, well, look, if you guys are starting your own business, you still have to put in the time in, right? Fast could mean different for different people. So you still have to put the time in to actually build a network. And once we started to build a network of what, these type of companies we're looking for, that's when it starts to snowball and starts to become easier. However, you know, Paraform has changed to where there's other positions that are being posted there. I know you guys talked about like, John, like maybe even like healthcare, cuz I was seeing some healthcare positions there and I'm like, okay, a lot of people know Paraform for this specific type of skillset and this specific type of role, but I would just entice everyone, like, if you're gonna start your own thing, explore what's there, cuz what works for us might not necessarily work for you. And there might not, there might be other roles there that are underserved or not being recruited for that might present an opportunity for someone who's looking to build their own thing. So again, it's just in general, figure out what works and then build a pipeline. But what works for someone is gonna be very different from what works for another person.

Yeah, makes sense. Another question we got is, besides the job requirements, what kind of bar do you set when reaching out to potential candidates? Are there specific traits, experience levels, or red flags you look for upfront?

Look, um, because of we are stuck in a, again, we're focused on one specific skillset. I haven't looked into the other roles on Powerform. The, the, the, again, there's like healthcare roles, there's marketing, there's, there's all sorts, there's sales. I, I don't know what bar there is. There, right? But I would say for the engineering ones, other than just skillset, or maybe this could apply in general for, for the type of candidate you're working with. It's not really the skillset that, that matters. It's where it's more like the slope of, in the trajectory of the person that people are looking at on the platform. And when I talk about slope, it's like you could see this person being a founder. Like you could see this person being somebody who starts their own thing later on, like that type of, and it's hard to pick that up. You gotta go through the paces and actually talk to a lot of people, but you'll see it because it's more, more about that person's drive and slope as opposed to what they actually know. And of course there's gotta be a base level of what you know, like the requirements there has to match like the technical requirements. But on the platform and the type of people that we, that Powerform clients hire, just because you meet the basic requirements doesn't mean you're going to get a hire. There's more to it than that. And that when it comes down to it, it's more of the slope and the trajectory of this candidate when all else is equal. So that's how I would recommend.

I think you brought up a good point, like Is this candidate just like, how rare is this candidate? If this candidate you see, it's like this candidate is almost, this candidate could be a founder themselves. They have this incredible trajectory. I think the things that really matter, I think it's not enough to just find someone who can, who has JavaScript on their resume and has like 1 or 2 companies that you recognize. It's more like, I think like another tip maybe I've heard as well is when you're recruiting for a client, you go to, it's very simple. You go to their LinkedIn and then you go to their people page and look at, just randomly select 10 engineers. If you're recruiting for an engineer role, look at what their team looks like. And I think if you can find someone who's like on paper better than that bar, not just like equal or even lower, like for sure, you know, they're gonna get an interview there, right? Obviously easier said than done, but I think. Understanding a company's talent bar and almost like as a recruiter, proactively exceeding that and like helping the client have value add, I think is really, really cool.

Yeah, cool.

I think there was another question here. Okay, this is an interesting one. So when you scale, I think the topic is about scaling your business after being independent. So how did you hire for scale? You, right? I remember you mentioned you have like a little bit of a partner. Partnership structure where everyone sort of, you know, has, but like, I'm curious to hear any like incentive structures or if you did hire a sourcer, like did you put them on a salary? Was it commission? Curious how you like build your team.

Yeah. Cool. So among the partners here in the US, so there's 4 of us right now. Brought on another partner Anya, she's there on the call. So hi Anya. But in terms of scaling this out, we're trying to look at, and we just started doing this was Having like sourcers outsourced, again, this is very early on, so I can't really give you— I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if it's going to work for— it might work for some folks, it might work for others, it might not work for us. But that's how we are looking at scaling. I can't talk really about the internal structure about how we get paid as partners, but you know, for the outsourced ones, we do put them on a salary now. And we do give commissions. Um, again, it's going to be different and I can't go into too much detail because, you know, commissions are going to be different from roles that you fill in Powerform and also the ones that we have internally. So there's no real one-size-fits-all for everyone here. You gotta just do a lot of math on your own and see how it works and see what, what works for you guys.

Yeah, I think that's actually the right answer. I mean, maybe it's like a partnership structure where everyone is incentivized to bring in their own clients and fill them themselves. It could be hiring a sourcer hourly. I think it just very, just much depends on maybe I would think like always like a hybrid is good. I feel like it's good to incentivize with some amount of like base salary and then obviously a lot of like success-based. So I think that's good.

Makes sense. Cool.

Another question from Mohammed. Do you ask candidates to enhance their resumes before submitting them to the client if if they have issues? Oh, interesting question. Yeah.

Okay. So I do, again, going back to the question of like, how do you know what fits? Some of the best candidates that I've spoken to, it's not about their resume. It's about the story of how they got there. Like, like I'll give you guys an example right there. There are some worse resumes there, but if you ask them like, hey, how did you get this internship when you were at school? And then you could see the story behind it. And a lot of times, whether it be internal or Powerform clients, they want to hear a breakdown of why you're submitting this person. And you give them a story of like, hey, this person got this internship because they were actually proactive, like networking, going out here, and then met this founder and stuff like that. Like those traits, those intangibles are what sets them apart because Again, if you're gonna move forward someone, of course they meet the basic job requirements. If you're a good recruiter, you gotta meet the basic job requirements. But what sets them apart is like the story of how this all transpired. Or like, I got this internship because I went to this fellowship, like Kleiner Perkins or whatever. Like it's not all on the resume, but then when you, when you find out, oh, so this person has these traits that make them good for an early stage startup. This is the biggest difference from hiring from an established company as opposed to like the types of clients that Powerform has is the basic requirements have to be met, but to actually get that hire, they look at the person holistically of what trajectory they're going to be in and where they came from. The whole picture is being considered, not just can you code, can you do this? And then, you know. That's it.

Yeah, so true. Like it's table stakes. Can they code? Like having a basic requirement is just table stakes. And on top of that, what is the story? How ambitious are you? How genuine are you? These are things that I think, oh, maybe I think some follow-up question here is any, do you have any favorite like screening questions? I mean, I know it's different for different companies, right? But are there any questions you ask candidates that bring out the real Right? Like the real answer that you want, maybe one or two.

Yeah. Uh, but before we go on to that, so just going back to the resume thing, yes, we ask them to change it if there's of course glaring mistakes there, or like it doesn't add up to their LinkedIn, but what's most important is like telling the story of this person when you submit them to a client, whether that be wherever, if you're working at early stage startups, they care more about the story. Now in terms of questions, is we sometimes ask, and I don't want to give all the questions here, but one good thing is like, how did you get this role? Like, how did you end up here? How did you end up here? And like, what was like the biggest impact that you did here? That's it. And then again, if you guys stay in this industry long enough, you will start to see even in like big companies, like let's say Meta, there are people who have done impact that's like, okay, that's good. But there's people who have like, okay, this is just redefining. You'll, you'll start to see it. So really have to put in the time to actually see what good looks like.

Yeah. Makes sense. Any other questions? I think there were a lot in the chat. Gurmeet. Oh, hey, good to see you. What major trends do you see shaping the recruiting agency in the next 5 years?

How would I say this? I think one trend that's gonna change is because there's a lot of AI that's coming in. I feel like the sourcing might be easier and I'm already starting to see that, like the sourcing might be easier, but one thing that's gonna change is like the relationships with candidates. Has to be a lot better than it was before. Now that there's a lot of different tools where AI could probably mimic what it is like when I'm interacting with people. When, when I was early in my career, you know, the communications were pretty bad cuz like there was just so many recruiters and all of that. But now with all, with AI being able to mimic a lot of the conversations and no responses. There has to be more personalized touch. I think there's gonna be a more hyperfocus on that. And hopefully with AI, you know, you could weed out some of the bad recruiters in this space. But I think that's where it is, or it's gonna be just really relationship-focused or relationship-based. I don't know how that's gonna look or how people are gonna implement that, Because there is, there is a component for recruiting and sourcing that's like outsourced, like, like abroad, whereas here, like I can get coffee with candidates here. They become your friends. One of my partners, Anya, she throws parties with engineers here too. So we just hang out. So it's going to be different and it's going to be more focused on that relationship, on that face-to-face or that personal aspect.

Yeah, no, I think this is a very good question to sort of wrap up, I think, and sort of conclude this webinar. Yeah, I think with AI, a lot of the times, I think a lot of the entry-level jobs will, of course, this is a very debatable thing, but I think will disappear, right? What, you know, if you look at AI tools like HRSA, like with software engineers, with like AI accounting, like, you know, entry-level bookkeepers, I think the world is heading into a direction where, you know, yeah, I think like there's a lot of sort of these sort of entry-level positions being replaced with AI. And I think if you apply that from a recruiting standpoint, I think the harder to fill roles will always exist, right? Like the one that I think the thing that recruiters are really great at is and AI is not, is understanding the nuances, right? It's like, do I like, like this person? Like what are the interpersonal dynamics? What are the culture fit? And so I think your point to like Anya going to hosting events and parties with engineers, really just understanding what they want. I think the human touch will be even more important and the relationships will be even more important. So I think that's a really, really great way to kind of end up, wrap up the webinar. And I think just to sort of wrap up, like everyone who joined, like, thanks so much. Thank you so much for your time. And Miko, of course, you know, I know you're very busy and offering to share your story, I think was incredible. We're going to continue to do these regular sort of webinars with, you know, the best recruiters in the industry. So, you know, if you guys want to give Miko a follow, the Paraform page, you know, you can kind of see up-to-date information about, about all of this. So yeah, thanks everyone for coming. And Miko, it was a pleasure.

Pleasure too, John. Thanks for setting this up and good luck to everyone out there.

Yeah, good luck everyone. See you soon.