The recruiter of choice: How JobMobz helps Silicon Valley companies grow so quickly - The Michael Girdley Show Episode 24

Hey, Michael here. You will now hear some episodes of the Michael Girdley Show that we had branded differently, called Unusual Profits or some such like that. Same show, same person, just me interviewing people and producing content that could be helpful on your journey and mine as well. So with no further ado, here's the episode. Hey, Michael here. Sponsor for today's show is actually a product that I'm a part of called DM Bridge. And what DMBridge is, uh, is a service that we built, uh, to solve the problem that Twitter's direct messaging functionality is a total mess. So we built DMBridge to help you fix that. Um, a lot of the other solutions, uh, do things like requiring you to install a whole nother inbox. We didn't want another inbox, so we created DMBridge. And what it does is it takes all of your Twitter DMs and has them appear inside of your email inbox. So you can reply to them just like it's a regular email. You see them just like it's a regular email. You can search them later like it's one of your regular emails, all just by using DMBridge. So, uh, we're currently live with the product. Uh, would love for you to sign up and become a customer, uh, and check it out. So you can find that at dmbridge.app, uh, and go on there, put in your name, uh, and be either part of the beta or join us as part of the live use of the product. And again, check it out, dmbridge.app. All right. Welcome to another episode of Unusual Profits. I am your host, Michael Girdley. This is my weekly podcast where sometimes I interview people in interesting businesses and sometimes I talk about business ideas that I have. But all in all, trying to produce really interesting content for people that are business people and And today I have somebody that I've gotten to know, um, from Twitter that I'm like really excited to have. And it's Jesse Tensley, who is, well, I guess now out of Sacramento. Jesse, that's where you are?

Yeah. Originally from the Bay. Uh, really excited to be here. And, uh, yeah, just moved from, uh, the Bay Area after spending most of my adult life and, uh, to Sacramento. So happy to be here.

Well, and for those of you just listening via audio, Jesse has like the coolest, like Silicon Valley founder outfit on, like For those of you on video, you can see it. And someday when I'm cool, I will dress like that. So I'm glad, I'm glad you're here helping me with my look as well.

Even though you just got to, you just got to go and buy like 20 of the same shirts. It's, uh, you can ask my team. I'm wearing the same thing every day. So in uniform.

Super cool. Super cool. Well, so today, you know, you're in the recruiting business and this is a space to me that as a business nerd, like I'm, I'm super curious about, um, and want to dig in with you about it. But before we do that, like, I'd love to hear like What does your company do? Where is it located? How old is it? Give me the thumbnail sketch of your business. And it's JobMobs, right? Am I pronouncing that correctly?

That's correct. JobMobs.

Awesome. Yeah.

So tell us about it. I started JobMobs in 2012. I started recruiting much sooner than that at 15 years old. Grew up in Silicon Valley and my mother was head of TA, and so I learned, I did chores and recruiting and sourcing from a young age. I was basically dropped out of college in 2012 and started JobMobs. And from there, basically, we've worked with over 100 different companies, mostly in tech, but a few different segments like Web3, SaaS, health tech, and green tech. And we basically plug into companies and help them scale. So we do recruiting as a service. And yeah, that's kind of the quick overview. Happy to dive into the weeds. There's a lot to unpack, but that's the— HighLevel.

That's great. That's great. So, so you're specifically focused your business on the tech world and specifically Silicon Valley tech. Is that, is that, is that what I understand?

Yeah, definitely. I think Silicon Valley has expanded. It's like in the cloud now, right? It's global. We've been hiring more internationally the last 2 years than ever before. And that's because tech is truly global now. It's not just in San Francisco Bay Area, it's across the entire entire world. So yeah, super cool.

So, okay, so really a focus on that. So, and it— and there's different models in which recruiting firms work, right? So there's direct hire, and then could you kind of walk through those? And then what— which approach do you guys do in particular?

Yeah, so like when you think of like traditional staffing, you probably think of a firm that like helps you hire somebody and you get a placement fee when— or pay a placement fee once you hire that person. Um, another model is like temp staffing where you're hiring somebody on a temp basis and then you can convert them. Our model is much much different. Uh, we look at ourselves less as like a staffing firm and more as a partner with our customers. And so we plug in and actually work with internal teams and help them grow. So an example of this, we've worked with like Coinbase when they were going through hypergrowth, when they're growing from 200 to 1,000 people. And we basically have like recruiting, like SWAT teams that plug in. So you'll have like a recruiting manager and then like 4 or 5 recruiters that actually help you grow. And so this happens a lot when like when companies go and add a lot of hiring to their plate that they didn't otherwise have sourcing for, uh, we can basically come in and help them hit those, those goals, right? Um, because it's hard to hire recruiters even, right? It's one of the hardest things to hire nowadays. And so if you were to go out and hire 50 recruiters internally, that might take you 6 months, whereas us, you can say, hey Jesse, we need 10 recruiters a month from now, and we can help operationalize that and make sure you hit your goals over the next year, right?

Okay, so like if I go hire a recruiter, there's like— well, there's oftentimes for the types of roles you're talking about, there's direct hire where you pay a percentage but only upon completion, or there's like retained search, right, where I may pay a percentage of salary when all is said and done, but I pay a retainer, you know, upfront so they work on it. Where do you kind of fit? So your business model is actually much more of a— like you parachute in a team for a fixed fee, or do they— do they similarly have, you know, rewards for you based on performance?

Yeah. So we've structured— we can structure a few different ways. Like we're less hung up on the pricing model. Main thing that we're like focused on is outcomes. So like, what are your goals? What do you want to achieve? And then let's work, like basically create a plan and work backwards from there. That's more important for us. But most often we work on like a fixed fee. It's pretty pricey, but it ranges anywhere from like $15,000 to $25,000 a month per resource to get like direct numbers. There's sometimes we'll bake in success fees with that. Other times it's just the flat monthly, which is actually really nice from like an accounting and like budgeting perspective. You know exactly like, hey, we're gonna hit 100 hires, it's gonna cost us X. And so, for most companies that's preferable, but we have different models. We're less concerned about the pricing, but just making sure that we can actually deliver the outcomes that companies want.

Yeah. And so how many people do you have today?

We're growing quite, quite quickly internally right now. We're somewhere in the— we just onboarded a bunch of people. I'm not sure the exact number. I think about 35 internally, but growing We'll be growing to about 70 by the end of Q1. And we also just announced we're launching international offices in India and Argentina, which is pretty exciting. We're pumped up about it. It can support a lot of different customers because traditionally, like even at that price point that I shared, $15,000 to $25,000, that's really expensive for a lot of startups, right? Especially with international hiring. And so with these offices, we'll be able to help lower cost of hire, especially in those regions because we'll be actually hiring in those regions for tech companies as well. So excited about it. And then all the new customers we can support with that.

Yeah. And so then that kind of reflects the idea that so many companies, especially Silicon Valley startups, they've tapped out the opportunity of tech talent and folks they can hire out of California. So they're recruiting where the more people are kind of globally. That's, that's the idea there.

Definitely. I think there's, there's plenty of great talent in California, but there's so much more when you just open up the lens, right? Like open up the funnel to a global environment. As opposed to just one state or one region. In fact, of our customers or even bids that we've gotten in the last 6 months, I'd say 95% of them plan on hiring globally as opposed to just in one specific location. There's only a few companies that have really stuck to bringing folks back to an office at some point in the future.

Super interesting. So, so it sounds like your business model compared to most kind of search firms, especially the ones I've kind of dealt with, a lot of them are on kind of that direct hire model where they only eat what they kill. But it sounds like you figured out a way— and I mean that from a lion standpoint— but it seems like you figured out a way to work yourself in as much less of a vendor and more of a partner for people just based on the way you've structured things and the pricing model and the type of services you're doing.

Yeah, there's, there's two things to unpack there. I think One, we look at ourselves as a relationship, building relationships with our customers over a 10-year time horizon. I'm still young in my career and so is a lot of our leadership team in terms of the next 10 years is what we're looking at. And so we want to like be that plug-and-play partner for companies as they scale. An example, like we don't work with them, but just saying like Google, right? Let's say Google needs to help, help hiring 1,000 people. They don't have internal resources. We could plug in for 6 months, help them hit those hiring goals, roll off for 6 months. And then repeat that for years, right? So it allows you to have flex in your hiring. And going back to what you said in regards to like eat what you kill traditional staffing, that's what's nice about our model is like the culture gets really like, it gets pretty toxic in a lot of those companies in regards to a lot of recruiters competing with each other internally. With us, we work at 15+ different customers. Our recruiters can promote on their own merit at each account and it doesn't impact anyone else on our team. And so it creates like a really cohesive recruiting environment for our team where they have a ton of support because we're not just putting resources into these companies. It's a full like plug and play recruiting team, right? You have like HighLevel, you have our head of sourcing helping come up with the sourcing roadmap. You have a recruiting manager helping direct like strategy and implementation, and then you actually have the senior recruiters that are actually executing day to day, fully dedicated to your team and helping you deliver those outcomes.

Yeah. And so how, in terms of kind of the incentive chain, like, how are you tying your people, which it sounds like, you know, there's— you guys are under retainer and you're, you're almost staffed for recruiting, plus you bring your tech, plus you bring your resources. Like, how are you aligning your people to, you know, be financially incented to deliver outcomes for the, the clients?

We do a few different things to align interests with our team. And the big pitch, like value prop of coming here versus other firms or anywhere else for that matter is one, we have better work-life balance. We're all about outcomes. So as I've mentioned earlier a few times, like the results of how we work isn't like, oh, work 50, 60 hours a week. Although we will do that to like stabilize accounts and make sure that they're off on a good foot, like good foot and the right start. But beyond that, if we can get the same results in 30 or 35 hours and hire the people that our customers want, that's the outcome, right? So you can have a better work-life balance. Second to that, we're also doing a lot of— you're going to learn a ton. You're going to learn all these different sectors. Even recruiters on our team that are plugged in at XYZ customer, they will still learn all of our other customers. We do weekly tutorials and intros with our team to teach them about our entire customer base and what they're working on. So those are 2 things that aren't obviously money incentives, but we also do some other things that are pretty interesting, right? One, we pay the same compensation regardless if you're in the Bay Area or New York City or in the middle of Kansas, in fact. So we probably pay like the 90th percentile in like Iowa versus California, we're probably like the 50th percentile. But like, that's nice because anywhere you work, whether it's anywhere US-based, like your compensation is the same, which is really cool. And then we also are very flexible on hours. So like, we don't care if we have a lot of team members that have families and kids, and we basically, part of our ethos is sharing with them that like, you should never miss a kid's soccer game, you should never miss a family event or a birthday or anything like that to work here. Just communicate that you need this time off and we'll make sure that you get it. One of the cool things we do for some recruiters, depending on what account they're on, we'll do crypto airdrops. So we drop our recruiters based off incentives, uh, a certain amount of crypto. It's not trivial amount. So yeah.

So I'd love to dig into that. And we, you know, in the pre-show we talked a bit about— I was really inspired by one of your, one of your tweets about, you know, how you all have specialized in Web3 and crypto. Like, first of all, like, how much of that kind of stuff is your business now in terms of targeting Web3 startups? And then secondarily, like, what was the journey to get to this place? Like, why, why this as opposed to, enterprise SaaS or something like that?

Yeah, I talk about Web3 quite a bit. It's definitely something I'm passionate about just given how I started the company. I was really poor, forced to drop out during the Great Financial Crisis because basically banks failing. So decentralized banking was really interesting to me. We still work in enterprise SaaS, just to be clear. We have some amazing customers across the Web2 sphere of health tech, SaaS, and a bunch of other industries. Although my personal passion is Web3, I'd say it makes up about 50% of our business right now and growing. And we're definitely leaders in that space. How we got into it early, I guess late 2017, we had a few recruiters interested in the space and I've been around crypto for some time, started investing, ended up landing our first big customer in the space, which is Coinbase. And I don't know if they're technically Web3, but they're like Web2.5. So like good intermediary into the space and basically Since then, we've worked with a lot of major players in the space, at least the ones that are scaling very large, so like ConsenSys, Protocol Labs, TrustToken, Stellar Development Foundation, to name a few, and a lot of others as well. And I think the nice thing about our model when you look at Web3 holistically is there's basically like— you're looking at these decentralized autonomous organizations and The nice thing with our model is it actually fits really well into that because these companies want to be distributed and they want like project teams. They don't want like full-time teams and so they don't need full-time recruiters. They might need recruiters for 6, 12 months and then stop hiring. And that's something that our model lends itself very well to. So that's a long-winded way of saying the story of how we got into Web3.

Yeah. Well, so I, in the pre-show we talked a bit about, you asked what my journey was to crypto and then I never asked about your journey into Web3 and You just talked about, you know, how it affected the business. Why, what about that world is, you know, gives you passion? And also you're free to tell everybody that you thought my way to get into the space was BS, but curious about those two things.

No, I think it's great. Anyone that's adopting, like an early adopter, and I still think we're really early. I think you're ahead of the curve in that regard. So I have nothing bad to say about anybody that's at least curious about the space, right? So I think— All right, whatever you think.

Insult that just was. I'm taking offense to it. Keep going.

Yeah, I think the space is going to continue to grow like over the next— especially in our space, the way we look at it from just talking about the business and less so about like Web3. We think that our competitors in what's traditionally called like RPO are in manufacturing and like supply chain and warehouse and banking. We think that those industries are going to decline over the next decade. Whereas Web3, SaaS, health tech, and green tech, where we're focused, are going to basically, especially the Web3 side, we're going to see revenues basically 10x across the board, whereas they'll have declining revenues, and they'll basically put us the leader of this space in the next decade. And so that's kind of where we're focusing our efforts is on those 4 main core competencies. And happy to dive more on the Web3 stuff, but there's a, there's a whole strategy behind it, at least for us internally.

Yeah, I mean, I love picking a wave of an industry that's growing and, and you've been smart. There's a ton of money flowing into Web3 and they need people. So you're an amazing intersection here. So when, you know, you've, you've finished up with the company today really in this RPO model, which the way you describe it is so much better than direct hire or commission-based only or even retained search. Like, so kudos to you because I've seen You know, I've been on, you know, recruiting efforts where we needed to hire somebody. We went out and got 4 direct hire folks. One of them made a ton of money and everybody else made no money. And, you know, so I love that you've ended up at this model now, which sounds like just like a better business than being in the plain old direct hire recruiting. What was the model when you started? And it was probably— was it just you? Is that how the business started? Just you getting clients?

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say though, counterpoint is right now, the last 2 years, we know empirically we probably can make a lot more money doing the direct hire placement model. So it's less about short-term. We're focused on, again, the 10-year plan of supporting customers and building that network and relationships with them as opposed to one-off. We could definitely make more money. I mean, fees right now are 30% of first year's base, and we make hundreds of hires. So you can do the math on that. It'd be much more expensive than the other pricing I quoted, which is $15,000 to $25,000 a month. That said, how I started, I started with direct hire placements. So at 22, I'd reach out to these CEOs and founders and say, hey, I have these amazing engineers. Are you interested in hiring them? It's 20% to hire them, right? It doesn't cost anything if you don't. And so that's kind of how I got started and was kind of off to the races from there. So yeah, that's kind of the high level. And then actually how we found this RPO model was out of happenstance when I started the company, I had no idea what RPO was. It's like no clue. And so we'd hire, or I would hire 2 or 3 engineers and it would cost like, let's say $90,000. And then the companies, they're startups, they're like, oh, we can't work with anymore, recruiting budget's exhausted. So I said, I basically came up with a model in my head. Well, what if over 4 or 5 months I hire the same amount, but I just charge a monthly fee, right? And that's how we fell into this recruiting as a service model, not even having any context what RPO was the time.

So, so you basically stumbled— well, you saw a better way to do your business, which is guaranteed cash flow. And then so you kind of stumbled into revenue.

Definitely a good thing. Yeah. Yeah.

And then later on you just discovered like, oh, like this existed otherwise. I just didn't know. Is that, is that what you said?

Correct. Yes. They call it RPO, we call it RAS. And so a little bit different service delivery model, but very similar. I think most people consider it RPO, but it's really fascinating.

And then so how long did you go until you hired your first, first employee? Yeah.

So going back in time, we didn't really scale a business. So like to give more context there, I started as a firefighter to bootstrap my business. So I literally worked on the weekends. I worked like 7 days a week for like 2 years. I worked 3 days on, 4 days off in firefighting. And so it was a very unique start to things, but we didn't we didn't hire our first employee till 2013, 2014, maybe a year or two after. And then we didn't— I didn't fully— I didn't stop firefighting until 2016, early 2016. And then the business has been full-time effort since then. So yeah. Yeah.

Well, and so you said, you said that you're typically charging, you know, in the RPO model, RAS model, sorry, you're charging $15,000 to $25,000 per dedicated resource per month. Kind of extrapolating from there, you know, especially if you're paying Bay Area wages, that, that's not, you know, it's not the highest of gross margins. So just curious about how you, you think about that in terms of, you know, the business and the value you're bringing to the clients.

Yeah. So we definitely don't pay the most for recruiters. We have a lot of recruiters that join us because we work with the best customers in the world out of any RPO firm, hands down. You can look at our Rolodex of customers and They're all tier 1 tech companies in one way or another, whether it's the 4 industries we've talked about, whether it's Web3 or Web2, health tech. We're working with pretty much everyone that's very, very notable. So for recruiters, the reason they join us again goes back to like learning and opportunity. A lot of our recruiters end up converting with our customers and that's like a natural progression. In fact, we have a transition program where we help folks move into industry and help them negotiate salary. I think one thing actually to note is we had a recruiter convert recently and they're going to make— I won't give the exact number, but somewhere between $500,000 and $750,000 their first year. Wow. Their first year, just because of one year earnings. So that's pretty unheard of and we're the only ones that can do that.

And to make sure I understand, that's conversion. That's where you're letting your clients, upon mutually agreeable, recruit your people out and then pay you a fee. Then I assume they pay you a fee for for that? That's—

Yeah, um, generally speaking, I mean, we actually have a transition program where we, after a certain set of time, like, that you've been at Job Moms, will actually help introduce you to, like, the different VCs that we partner with, or the different tech, like, past or present customers, or just people on our network, and actually help you to give you— it's similar to, like, um, the Bain or McKinsey model where you can have, like, 3 months to basically transition out, and they'll pay you to interview and help you interview, you help interview and make introductions to their network. It's similar to that. And so it's part of our model where we help people go in. So sometimes there's a fee, sometimes there's not. It really just depends on where people are at in their lifecycle here.

So super cool. And you said so 35 people today and then you're taking it to 70 this year in the next 2 months. In the next— oh, well, yes. So I take a whole year for that. So yeah. So what You know, that seems like a pretty quick trajectory to grow 100% in 2 months. Like, what's, what's going on?

Yeah, so based off quality and outcomes for our customers, we have— just to give you an idea, I was talking to one of my colleagues in the RPO space. They're like, yeah, we've had a busy January, we've had 5 leads to put in perspective. And I was like, oh, that's awesome, congrats. They're like, how many have you had? And We've had over 35+ leads to start this month, not including our customers asking for more resources. Those are net new leads. And so we've kind of built a brand around quality and outcomes, and because of which everyone wants to work with us. And furthermore, like, I'd also be concerned about any of our competitors that have capacity right now, because it just speaks more about the lack of quality, or especially right now, we're in the golden era of like recruiting, there should be like, no resources available if you're actually delivering outcomes for your customers. So that's my two cents on it.

Yeah, that's super cool. Well, so that, that definitely kind of ties into where I was hoping we would go next. So, you know, in terms of— you talked about, you know, you've had a great January for leads, so congratulations. Sounds well-deserved. What, you know, what is the typical way that people are finding out about the business? You know, you said you're revising the website. I know you're active on social media. I saw you actually do a bunch on LinkedIn too. So I'd love to dig into that. But how are people typically finding, finding out about the business?

Yeah, a lot of it's word of mouth referrals, um, almost exclusively. Uh, we do partner with different, like, venture capital partners, um, unofficially, but we're trusted by them to help support their portfolio companies, which is a huge source of leads. Other than that, it's, uh, people through either past customers, present customers, or even recruiters' networks. Um, and sometimes just posting on social media. It's always surprising, like, the posts Just this month I posted a few different times and some very large names reached out to us just out of happenstance. So yeah, those are the main channels. It's not like a traditional SaaS model where you're going to have an SDR team, sales team. It's very different. I'm sure you can implement that, but it hasn't been successful in the past as much as just organic growth essentially, which is again what's fueling that 35 to 70— Sorry to cut you off. Yeah, no, go ahead. Feeling the 35 to 70 growth isn't like— it's just organic growth, right? It's not us forcing it. It's literally what's— is there slated ahead for us? And we actually could do more if we could hire more. But I think that's the most thoughtful way to do it while maintaining quality.

Yeah.

Anything faster would be catastrophic, I think.

So, um, well, so I'd love to dig into— so somebody shows up as a lead, um, so they're a referral. And then who— what is the sales process like? Who's doing it? And then how does that person go from lead to signed contract?

Yes, we have a few different practice leads that lead like what each of those individual practices, but mostly split off Web3, Web2. That's where the lead will go to one of our practice leads depending on where it comes from. Sometimes I'll be involved or one of our directors will be involved with that actual sales process. Probably going to open up a lot of people wanting to compete with us, but our sales cycles like and these are like quarter million or half million or million dollar contracts. It's less than 30 days and pretty large contracts when we sign them.

So yeah, and that's just a factor of being, being in this market of startups where they have to move quick and they have the money to do it. Is that, that's just a byproduct?

I think that's a big, yeah, it's a byproduct of that because once they raise like a Series A or B for $20, $50 million, $100 million, they actually deploy that capital yesterday, right? They come to us like, hey, we need to hire all these people like last month. How can you help us? And so the contract process is much, much quicker than like normal enterprise deals.

Yeah. And is that really the sweet spot, this Series A, Series B tech startups, or do you— are you working with companies further down the path as well? This—

the sweet spot is probably like Series B and beyond, up to like post-IPO, like large 10,000, 100,000+ person companies. Because they have such large ongoing hiring needs. It's really nice from a recurring revenue piece. That's not to say we also work with 10-person startups and those are awesome to work with, but their needs are much more comprehensive. It's not just the same as hiring a bunch of engineers. It's like basically you're like sourcing, scheduling, recruiting, and like head of talent all for that one customer with one resource. So just a different dynamic for sure.

Yeah. And then so how are the— I mean, how are the contracts typically structured? So they're monthly retainers. for your people to parachute into the team. You know, what do those contracts look like? Do they engage with you? You know, is it month to month? Is it a, you know, a multi-month or even a year-long thing? What are those contracts?

Minimum 6 months. Average right now is about 12 to 14 months. We do lock in a pretty large amount retained. Again, it's going back to a business like I share with all of our customers. Again, the only reason we're able to scale is because of quality and outcomes. It's like we've never had it happen, but if We weren't— if somebody wasn't happy, like, we're going to do whatever it takes to make them, like, happy to get the outcome that they want. So we basically do very, like, thorough vetting and expectation setting upfront to make sure that when we deliver outcomes, exactly what those folks are looking for.

Yeah. Well, and I love how this is— I mean, this is a dirty word, so please don't get mad at me, but this is basically staff aug for recruiting. Like, I think it's so cool. Like, it's so much better than the Hey, like, let me go hire 4 direct hire folks and then you're still having to run all those processes. You bring those processes into my company and like, that just seems a lot better if I'm just trying to worry about product market fit and a bunch of other stuff. If I'm a Series B+ founder. So definitely, yeah, that was a compliment.

Looking— I appreciate that. Thank you. No, I think it is. It's a lot cleaner and I think it allows founders to spend. So what happens a lot of times we'll talk to founders early stage, they've just raised a lot of money, they need to hire, they've never hired before. And what ends up happening is they spend all of their time on like the administrative tasks of sourcing and scheduling and emailing candidates. Whereas like as a founder, you're now the founder of a $50 or $100 million company. You shouldn't be spending your time there. Like outsource that to us, let us own that. And then you still can interview and like help close candidates. But like where is your time being spent? What's the ROI there? And so that's like a big holdup. It's because a lot of great founders want to be involved in the process. But they don't need to be involved in the minutiae. And that's where we can help support them and help them grow their companies very quickly, like we've done for a lot of notable founders.

Yeah, dig it. So, I mean, when you're engaging with these folks who are maybe relatively inexperienced business leaders, how many of them have like a defined hiring process already put together? How many of them are opinionated in that? Or are you bringing, bringing in, educating them on that, on that process?

Yeah, so I think it depends on the customer and their size. Like, if they're smaller, we'll help them build out best practices. Um, it's really nice, just given our experience working with 100+ companies over the last decade, is we've seen the best and the worst of all recruiting practices. And so we've taken inspiration from a lot of that and reinvented, like, recruiting as we see it in the modern, like, 21st century. And so we're able to help, like, with all of that, right? Come up with a recruiting playbook, come up with a process that works empirically, help you build top of funnel with candidates, and then actually help deliver outcomes like making offers and closing and bringing in people.

So yeah. And so you talked about having 4 different practices, one of which is Web3. Clean tech was another one. Enterprise SaaS was another one. And there was one more that I may have forgotten.

Healthtech. Healthtech.

Healthtech. Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I mean, would I be right in assuming that those practices, like as long as there's venture money pouring into those, those areas, those are going to be appealing for you. Would the— A, is that accurate? And B, if, if that, you know, if the money flowed, it started to flow into a new area, you know, I think is that— would that necessarily tie into a really good target market for you to go after, or am I thinking about it the wrong way?

Oh, definitely. We're, we're— I always try to continue learning about the space. And so as new tech evolves, we're definitely opportunistic and And also furthermore, it's what interests us. Part of the reason I started the business is I want to be at the forefront of tech and work with interesting technologies. Currently, it's not a money thing. I don't care about the money. I've already made decent money and I don't need to worry about that. It's really what excites us every day, excites our team to come to work every day. And we want to work with the companies we work with right now, which is like they're all at the forefront of their spaces, whether it's like a Protocol Labs, a Plaid, like Coinbases, Robinhoods of the world. Like those are exciting technology and like platforms and companies. And that's where we want to be is that intersection of like cutting edge technology and recruiting. And so if there was new spaces that popped up in the next 5, 10 years, we'll definitely be all over it if it's exciting in the future of work.

So yeah, dig it. So I mean, one of the things I've— and you're great on Twitter and that's how we connected. So thank you for being one of the idiots that follows me. I appreciate it.

I may have— I didn't get your sense of humor when I first saw your profile. I muted you for a while, and then I was like, actually, I really like Michael. I'm sorry, confession. I was like, I can't— I could— I didn't understand. It was like— but then I was like, oh, he's actually genuine and really funny.

So that's very kind.

I thought it was like snarky, like shitposting, but it was actually much more less like shitposting and more just like humor. So just being silly.

I don't really— thank you. I appreciate you. I mean, so tell your friends who— please tell your friends who have muted me to consider reconsider their life choices. But this was like—

this was like 2 years ago.

So yeah, yeah, I think I'm a better Twitterer than then, you know, like I, I mean, I do think early on in Twitter there's a danger when you join a community that you let bad influences, you know, reflect what you're going to mirror back to it. And, and since then, I think I've had the realization that being genuine on Twitter is— I'm just, you know, I want to be a nice person on Twitter because I want to be a nice person in life. Like, that's one of my core values.

Like, that's awesome.

And so, so that's why, you know, I, I've seen people talk about it. They're like, I've never seen you like, you know, clap back on somebody. It's because like, I sometimes I want to, don't get me wrong. But like, I just, I've, I just try to be genuine on there and it's paid me back tenfold. So including opportunities like this to talk with you. So, but anyway, on Twitter you talked about the, you know, opportunities you see in the post-COVID market for your, for your model. So love to just kind of dig into that. You know, COVID has pushed everybody remote, pushed globalization of hiring, even, you know, accelerated that like crazy. So what do you see for both your model now and going forward in terms of the evolution of the kind of current COVID world and the post-COVID world?

Yeah, so it's actually a really— it was 2020, it was pretty rough for recruiting as a whole. So our revenue was continually up into the right, definitely down in 2020. Um, and that actually did a lot of things. Um, it cooled the field, so we don't really have any true competitors right now. Um, it's one of the things for like growth, our specific segment After 2020, it changed the landscape quite a bit. A few of them merged with different tech companies that absorbed them. And so it's kind of— it basically opened up a lot of opportunity for us. And so not only that, now that we don't— we previously were doing on-premise recruiting as a service, so all of our recruiters were on site, which was very like constrained in terms of like the amount of folks that we could hire, especially at like Bay Area or New York City salaries. But now that we're able to hire anywhere across the US and now globally, we're able to, I think, expand services pretty rapidly. Like I was sharing, we're going to be 70 people by the end of Q1 and looking to expand by the end of the year to like 100 to 200 people. We'll see kind of where things fall in Q2 and Q3, but it's really opened the door not only for us hiring, but also for our customers, right? Because when you're only fishing in one small pond, it's the San Francisco Bay Area, and you can't afford to pay $300,000 a year for an engineer, it's going to be very hard to hire somebody in San Francisco.

So, I mean, as you're, as you're thinking about hitting multiple hundreds of people by the end of the year, like, if I heard that right, that's— wow, that's super cool. It's a good thing you know something about recruiting. But like, that is rocket ship level growth, right? Growing basically, if my math is right, 10x in a year. Like, how are you thinking about— and I don't use the word scary, but like, that seems kind of scary. Like, how are you thinking about making sure that doesn't all go to poop?

Yeah, so we've thought through structuring our team internally and basically delegated a lot of different things across setting up a really robust operations function across organization that's going to help us scale even further and faster because I personally am terrible at operations. I'm really good at sales, marketing, and talking and tweeting once in a while, but operations like finance and legal and HR and all that stuff is not, not my forte. And so we've put in a really good team in place and I would trust them actually to run the company without me, to be honest. So I think that kind of speaks to their impact and ability to execute.

Yeah. So maybe that transitions— thank you— into the next topic I wanted to get to. So, so we've talked about how you sell, which it sounds like people just call you and then they— you have a meeting and then they sign a contract. Congratulations on that. It sounds like you have great customers and a great service for them. But how is the, you know, how is the team, you know, organized today? You just talked about kind of the key thing for, for succeeding in this kind of hypergrowth you're going through is the right organizational structure and the right people. Like, how is it organized today and how is that going to change this year?

Yeah. So some of our, like, core values are open communication and a flat structure. So our structure is actually pretty flat when you look at it outside looking in. There are some layers internally just for keeping things flowing and people having direct reports and mentoring and training folks. But one of the big things for me, even as we grow from 35 to 100 or 200 or whatever the number is, is just open lines of communication. So you might report to Jane, but Jane, you don't have to go to Jane with questions or anything like that that's going on internally. You could go straight to myself or you can go to anyone else in the org. That's part of our ethos. So there's no Chain of command with communication. I think that helps make sure that everyone's aligned and helps people grow and learn. Because I don't care if you're an intern or first day on the job, like I want to hear people's thoughts and like opinions. And that's how like innovation happens, right? Because we might not, we might be doing something suboptimally. I'd love to hear what you or anybody else has to say about it, right? So like, I'm open to learning. And I think that goes back to like what you were saying earlier, which is like if a new segment opens up, that's like growing, whether, whatever it is, we want to learn about it. And so just always being curious. And so to answer your question overtly though, we basically have a few different practice leads that are like directors for their respective industries, whether it be Web3, Web2, and then like those micro sections within them. And then underneath them we have team leads that basically, that are like recruiting managers, and then they have like 5 or 6 reports underneath them, right? And that's basically how it scales. And then we have a whole other ops team that operationalizes like resources, HR, finance, legal, and that's like its own entity that reports up to myself. So.

Got it. So organized very much like the classical consulting practices, if, if I understand that right. So I think you mentioned PwC and some of those things. Is that how they're organized, right? Or do I have that wrong? You—

I have not studied their organizational structure, so it may be very similar. It may not be. I have no idea.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, it's fresh in the brain. It sounded great when I said it, so let's just go with it then. Yeah. Okay. So I dig that. So that's definitely— so in terms of how you're recruiting new recruiters and team building, you know, how are you approaching that now? How is that scaling?

Yeah. So our process is pretty robust. We're obviously really good at hiring. That's given— that's what we do. So hiring recruiters is actually a lot of fun because recruiters understand recruiting and the process pretty well. So it's actually been surprising. We don't get as much like organic applicants as like our customers, just given like they have much larger brands. But a lot of our hiring actually has come from referrals, but then also me just posting on social media. I posted a few times in the last month or two, couple months, that we have open recruiter roles and we had like probably 50+ people reach out to me, which is pretty amazing. And so we've been, we've been hiring through word of mouth pretty robustly in social media and obviously some people that apply and just outbound sourcing.

Got it. Okay. Well, and so then one thing, one thing that maybe I don't understand, right? So you, you said on social media, like there's a lot of Web3 recruiters making and, you know, making $500,000 a year.

Right.

And I know, I know it's social media, so there's a lacking of nuance. But then you said that your typical business model is selling a team member right at a markup for a standard fee or for a monthly fee of $15,000 to $25,000.

Those numbers don't add up.

Those numbers don't work. So What, what nuance am I missing between the two of those?

Yeah, it's a good question. So when you look at like Web3 companies, so what happens and depends on the company, they'll basically give you a base plus a token package. And that package is usually pretty generous just given the volatile nature of crypto. Same thing with like it could be a Web2 company and they could give you a large base and a large RSU grant. It's very similar. And so that's what I was referencing is like that there's kind of this window in Web3 and I've been shouting it from the rooftop and trying to get a lot of my like colleagues and friends into Web3 recruiting. Cause basically what's gonna happen at some inflection point is you're gonna get legacy HR and comp analysts into the Web3 space.

Mm-hmm.

And what will happen is they will modify that. So we'll say, hey Michael, instead of giving you $500K a year, we know Michael will work for $200K a year. So we'll say we'll give him $150K in base. And cap the tokens at $50K a year, whether the price goes up or down, which is not good for employees. But right now we're in this golden window of opportunity for the next 2 to 5 years, is my assumption, where you can make a lot of money. And I mean, you are taking a lot of risk, right? Because like you shared earlier in the recording, basically that there's a lot of risk because crypto is so early and like the prices are up and down, right? But with that, I think it'll eventually stabilize and you'll see these grants come down massively. We've already started to see it happen. So like there's really like a very short window. And so if you miss on this golden opportunity, you will regret it the rest of your career, in my opinion.

So, okay, I got you. Well, I mean, as you're describing that, I was like, oh, Amazon's doing this like crazy. Like one of my companies I'm involved in just lost an employee to Amazon and they, you know, he told me the offer and it was like, yeah, I'm going to make 3 times more. And I said, okay, break that down for me. And he said, My salary is going down by 25%, but they're giving me RSUs worth 2.2 times my salary. And I said, okay, tell me about— tell me about that stock grant. And he said, well, after the first year I get 5% of it. After the second year I get 15% more. And then after the third year I get another half. And I was like, refresher.

And they get a refresher grant.

Yeah. I was like, you know what their turnover is in the first year, don't you? Like, have you— have you looked up? Ask him for the stats, ask how many people have quit in their division in this year. And he's like, uh, too late, I already accepted the offer. So, so yeah, so anyway, I— not to push back, like, we'll see if things normalize, but, uh, it seems like the company's ability to pull fast ones on employees has not yet exceeded the, uh, the ability for employees to get taken advantage of. So anyway, that's my soapbox. Sorry.

Yeah, I think that the Web3 companies do it much differently than like Amazon's or other large companies in terms of like grants. And there's a lot of different structures. I can't share those details, but, but, but yeah, there's all sorts of structures, whether it's like a 1-year lockup, 8 years, 6 years, 4 standard, like 4 years, stuff of that nature. But they're usually distributed evenly. I haven't seen anything that was like backloaded in our experience, at least.

So. Right. Well, I mean, I grew up, you know, I'm 47. I grew up in the age of, you know, one-year cliff and monthly vesting after that, like, kind of worked. I don't know why we broke it. It seemed like things were going fine. Some things don't deserve to get fixed, and I understand it's a competitive environment and why it is, but, um, it, it's, uh, maybe that's a get-off-my-lawn moment. So sorry. Um, cool. All right. So, uh, anything more kind of on structure and operational model and stuff like that? Otherwise, I'd love to kind of jump into your, your view on the market and competitors and stuff like that.

Sure, let's jump into it.

Yeah. So when you're competing, so it sounds like you're going to market with a relatively unique product targeted at a narrow set of customers. I love how you're able to define your customers very clearly. It's like Bay Area high-growth tech startups in one of these four areas at this funding level. Like, that's amazing. Um, and kudos to you because so many entrepreneurs can't define who their customers are. And I love that you can, but So you're going in there with, you know, a unique value proposition and a unique offering to them that I see the value in. Like, who are you competing with or what options are you competing with when, when you're, when you're going into an opportunity?

So it's really interesting. I don't think we have a direct competitor. It's very rare since pre-2020 or COVID times we had any direct competitors on RFPs. Right now we compete a lot against whether like, hey, we're going to hire these folks internally or we're going to hire temps. And that's really easy to compete for us because the models just, it lends itself very well to work against those because you just don't have the management costs and overhead costs and long-term commitment. And also on the consulting side, if you just hire one temp versus hiring, let's say, a person through us, that person on the temp side is completely responsible for their own success. With us, it's a business. So we don't look at it as just Jane on an account. It's Jane plus all of Job Moms. So like we will jump in pretty heavily to make sure folks are successful at accounts as opposed to when you have one, one person, it's kind of all the risks on them. So those are like main competitors. I could go down like a list of like more broader competitors, but there's not many folks that do what, what we do.

Yeah, super interesting. So it sounds like when you win, it's this unique offering that you have that just other people haven't, haven't done. Uh, hopefully this podcast doesn't spawn a bunch of competitors, but it's also, you know, anyway, competition is easy.

There's some, there's some that are similar. I'd say like the biggest one, I don't even know if they're a competitor, cuz we just don't, maybe we're not enough bids or there are not enough bids or vice versa. There's maybe just so much of a market share. It's like Rocket Power is probably one of them.

Mm-hmm.

They've done well. We've got a lot of respect for, for those folks over there. In the past, like, And the reason is the biggest competitor in the past was Bink. They were acquired by Robinhood, and we actually work with them now at Robinhood, which is pretty amazing. So yeah, our main competitor got absorbed earlier last year by Robinhood directly, absorbed their entire recruiting team, like 100 people. And then other than that, there's another one that was a spinoff of that that went under in 2020. Those are like our main competitors and, and Rocket Power is a little bit different than what we do model-wise. So yeah, that's probably the closest competitor.

So speaking kind of from like an investor perspective, like as you think about competitively your business, like what are the defensive moats that keep other people from coming in and competing with you? It sounds like brand is one, network is another. What, what other things are— how do you think about your business and defensibility as it grows?

Yeah, so I think the big thing is carving out niches, right? And that's why we're focused on these different segments is wanting to be the best in, and I know for a fact we're the best at what we do. And not only that, specifically Web3, there's no one that has the same customers or help these customers go through scale because there's no other companies that have gone through scale at the same way that a ConsenSys or Protocol Labs have in the last couple of years. And so the big thing is network and going from zero to one in quality. A lot of times even larger RPOs that want to reach out to acquire us and stuff of that nature, it's very common that they can't replicate it because they don't have the people internally to actually execute or the network to break into startups because they're not going to trust the couple thousand person RPO company to provide the same quality as a boutique firm like we are currently. So I think a lot of it comes down to quality. There's a lot of— we have lots of competitors that pop up. They're small, like 5, 10, 20 people, and then disappear very quickly because you will churn accounts left and right if you do not have a high quality bar in our NPS score, like over 90% retention and renewals, which is really good in this industry. Like long-term customers, really happy sending us referrals. And even like the 10% that doesn't renew, they still have positive outcomes from like a hiring standpoint. Yeah, just priority shift. So anyways, very high customer retention in the industry.

Yeah. And so who, who is responsible for that NPS, like accounting? Are you having the practice directors do it, or is the central— centralized group doing it?

Yeah, it depends on the accounts, but we have different account leads that will basically measure outcomes, submit weekly metrics reports, submit quarterly ROI reports. That's something we do that nobody else does. We do quarterly ROI reports. We'll literally add up, here's what we're working on, here's what we promised we would deliver, here's what we actually delivered, here's your cost per hire, and actually send a full report. And it's actually really nice for our customers because they're like a head of TA, Jack Shifted, or like a VP of talent acquisition head of people, you'd actually have to go to finance and justify why you're spending all this money with high-paid consultants. And so it just gives them ammunition to renew us, which is really nice. So something we do that's, uh, very unique but also like lends itself well to getting contract extensions because they have all the ammunition to do it.

And I love that compared to, you know, compared to more classical kind of consulting or like management consulting, for example, like it's incredibly difficult for them to characterize ROI there right? And you see these— you see these, you know, RPO groups and whatnot try to like harmonize all that and be like, well, we just made you $1 million. Yeah, in fantasy land. Like, it's just so hard. But it, you know, I love your space. Like, you can quantify like we brought you this many hires, like this was your goal. Yeah, that's, that's super fun. So, you know, one thing that distinguishes really good businesses from okay businesses is kind of the cash conversion cycle. So how do your customers pay you? Are they on net 30? Are they paying you ahead of time? Like, how is all that working?

Yeah. So we won't get into the very nitty-gritty of a few details, but I can tell you that we get paid about 30% of the contract before we start. So before we even engage for, let's say, just for Massig, $100,000 contract, we would get $30,000 upfront, and that's non-refundable. So it locks in. So basically, yeah, we have some different retention mechanisms that that lend itself well because what we found is like customers, if we go through the entire process and can hit our goals in terms of like timelines, we can deliver the outcomes they want. And so it's really important that like, hey, I know it's month 1. A lot of— so what happens a lot of times, the customers come like, as you mentioned earlier, when they raise a large amount of money, they want to hire immediately. And so look at the end of month 1 and be like, what's going on? Why haven't we hired anyone? And it's like, hey, it doesn't just happen, right? It's an organic process. It takes a month, like 2 to 4 weeks to ramp up, start to build funnel, and then months 2 through 6, you're going to see a ton of results. And so we want to lock our customers in, not because we want to retain them. If they want to cancel, like, you can have your money back. I really don't care about it. It's more to just engage to a certain amount of time to make sure that we see the outcomes that we promised. And that will happen 100% of the time.

Yeah. And so what, what percentage of your people are actually deployed as team members in this, in this model and what percentage are overhead? No offense to you because I assume you're overhead too.

Yeah, good question. So we only have— we have really high margin business mainly because our overhead internally is very, very low. We only have 2 folks that are true, like, internal. One that handles HR and, like, internal onboarding and hiring, and the other that does internal hiring. And that is the only— and myself. And so, like, the only other— that's the only, like, overhead that we truly have. Everyone else is doing a dual role where they're actually consulting for customers and bringing in revenue for the business as well as doing other leadership responsibilities. So a normal like profit margin for us is much better than traditional staffing or other firms. We probably range in the 55 to 60% profit margin range, which right now it doesn't really matter. Like we're not monetizing the business in a traditional sense. We have zero— it's one— it's myself. I'm a solo founder. I have zero investors. So it's a completely bootstrapped business and all of that money right now, 100% of it is being rolled back into the business for growth. So there's no, no me getting rich off of cash flow or anything like that. It's 100% reinvested back in the business right now.

So yeah, that's super admirable and I'm glad your, your customers are happy with it. What, what, you know, what are you doing to kind of protect your biggest asset, which is your people, right? Especially, you know, sometimes people in services businesses, they say, okay, well, I'm just going to be the owner. And the way I protect this is I'm the only one selling anything. So I own the customer relationship. But it sounds like you're not doing that. You're distributing that. You know, how are you kind of making sure that, you know, 15 people don't decide to leave and compete with you?

Yeah. So it's a good question. I think we've given folks some really amazing opportunities in terms of growth and opportunity. And I think the big thing that like from an ethos standpoint, I think early in my career We worked with, 2012 timeline, I worked with a few folks and just didn't like, I did really good work for them. And it's always like those folks will give you a recommendation like, "Hey, Jesse's great to work with." They'll never go out of their way. And so part of my mission and goal to help our team members is like, "Hey, if you come here and you commit a year of your life or career here, I'm going to be a career advocate for you for the rest of your career. So if you ever need a reference, you just text me, call me, whatever. I will jump on the phone the same day with whoever it is that needs a reference." And I told them the truth, which is you're the best recruiter at X, right? And make sure that it's the best reference you've ever gotten. I'll go out of my way to make introductions to other people in my network. So if you spend time here, and that's the same way for our leadership team as we expand, they have that same mentality, we will make it 10x your worthwhile, like in your career in the long run, because I'm still young, I'm 32, I've got another decade or two left in my career. I don't plan on retiring anytime soon. Oh no.

I feel insulted. I feel seen.

And so I think just being that career advocate for people makes a huge difference. And that's actually why we've had like 3 or 4 people boomerang back and actually a few more that are coming back after already going in-house and making a lot more money because they like the culture, they like working with myself and our leadership team. And I think that speaks volumes to our culture and like how we operate as a business. And I think that's going to help us long-term in retaining folks because it's not a money thing, right? Like I think the biggest thing that we offer is like, it's not, I hate the word family in business, like, because it's not, I completely think it's like an odd thing to use, but it's like a community, right? So when we think about supporting folks, it's not like we are as business, a family or a community that helps you spend more time with your family and your friends because we can help you be efficient and hit your outcomes and work work 6 hours a day instead of 10. And so that is how we're like support our employees. And that's much more value— valuable to people that are like have a family and have things they want to do outside of work as opposed to working at, um, other companies which might be different culturally.

So yeah, well, so how does it— you've talked about this like this, this balance that your team members are able to have. Like they don't necessarily need to live in the Bay Area, they get paid a Bay Area salary living in Kansas or Texas or wherever. And but at the same time, you're dropping them into these environments where, you know, those— it's every, every, every, you know, all stops are being pulled because they just got a big bunch of, uh, VC money to try to win a market. Like, how do you gel that? You're deploying this person into a culture which to some extent is having to sacrifice work-life balance, but a core part of what you're telling me, a value proposition, is work-life balance, you know, as being part of your company.

Yeah. So I would say that, and we're pretty upfront with folks that join us, that the first 1 to 3 months of any account's going to be stabilizing. And so that's going to be a lot more work than on the backend. So a lot more hours upfront than in the long run. Obviously we want to get to a stable place after the first month or two to where it's really about efficiency. I don't think people actually spend 8 hours a day working, right? Not even close to it. So if we're just much more efficient, and get the outcomes and metrics that we know track towards X amount of hires, then we can do that. We track metrics weekly, so we're able to get updates on progress reports based off empirical data that we have that can show that we're going to hit these outcomes in 2 months or 3 months or 4 months. And so we're very much data-driven as opposed to like, you need to be in here at the office from 8 to 5. We don't care about that. It doesn't matter to us. And we obviously we prep our customers for that. Like, yeah, we're going to respond after hours on Slack and like text, but it's going to be like, hey Michael, I see your text. I acknowledge what you said. I'm going to get back to it first thing in the morning when I jump back online. If it's obviously something urgent, like making an offer or something like that, we'll flex. But even then, like I tell, I'll tell all of our team members like, hey, if you work 35 hours Monday through Thursday, take off early on Friday. And like, if the customer or anything has anything, like, send them my way and I'll talk to them because I'm not— I'm probably the only one that works like 60 hours a week, but everyone else is on the 40-hour workweek or less.

So totally dig it. Well, so, you know, where do you— where do you want to take the business? Like, you just kind of talked about wanting to work another decade or so. And as a 47-year-old, I feel insulted. But, you know, what are you thinking in terms of where you want to take this business, eventual outcome? All that kind of stuff? Yeah.

So right now we're expanding services. I think the end goal is to be one of the RPO leaders. We've had— it's interesting. I've talked to a lot of the major players in the space and a lot of them tried to acquire us over the years. Going back to like 2017, we got acquisition offers and we declined those, thankfully, because it would have been so much worse in hindsight, but was really good offer at the time. And Basically, we want to be the leader in the space. And I think that that's where we're trending, where over the next 10 years we can basically take a foothold in the space as a lot of those legacy revenues decline and our customers keep going up into the right. And so it's just a long-term game, starting to build those different, uh, different branches and different muscles and expand into other services, which we're starting to do.

So yeah, well, it does, you know, I do think it'll be interesting to see, you know, with any any people-based, consulting-based business, you know, the always the challenge is how much equity can an owner build up, right? And it ties back to kind of some of those moats, whether it's brand or scale or customer relationships. You know, I think it'll be exciting to watch and see, you know, how that transpires over the next decade. And I mean, based on what I've heard from you so far, like, it's— I'm pretty optimistic about it. Normally I'd be like, oh, that sounds really hard. But like, You know, you've, you've, you're thinking about the business really in a way that's inspiring, right? It's very fundamentals, lots of tactics, uh, and not being greedy in the short term, which is super cool. A lot of people are, especially in Web3, are short-term greedy. So, um, anyway, that's, that's how it feels sitting on this side of the table.

That's, that's kind of you to say. I, I appreciate the, the kind words. I think, um, I think that a lot of the like traditional RPO companies are started you know, 20, 30 years ago. And so we're coming at it from a different lens, right? Looking at like the future of technology and really trying to go with that, those flows of business as they continue to grow. So again, it's a long-term lens. I think there's a lot more money to be made in the short term doing other things, but for us it's a 5 to 10 year plan.

So yeah, we're trying to dig it. Super dig it. Long-term thinking totally works. So one thing I have noticed, like you are active on LinkedIn. LinkedIn to me seems like a cesspool. Some of your content on LinkedIn seems like you take your Twitter content and put it on LinkedIn. So I'd love to hear, like, how are you thinking about these different platforms, like Twitter and LinkedIn especially? Yeah.

So for our business, LinkedIn is obviously really important. I don't like a lot of things about LinkedIn. I very much prefer Twitter. Just there's a lot of fake posts, I guess, on both platforms. But LinkedIn seems to have a lot of prevalent— like, I ran through the rain to make this interview, so I generally I really just try to help folks, right? Like, what's the future of work? What's the future? Like, how can you help improve, like, your interview processes? And that's kind of where I think through. And I get a lot of questions actually around, like, how much time I spend creating content. The answer is zero. Like, I very— it's just random thoughts or conversations I have with people like yourself throughout the day. And I'm like, oh, I got this idea from Michael Girdley and I's conversation today, right? And so, like, that's what inspires me. It's not, like, spending a lot of time with a marketing strategy or long tweet thread. Like, I don't have time for it, to be honest. I wish I did. Yeah, it sounds fun.

But I actually talked to one of, uh, a guy who took a salary cut to go work for Gary Vee. And, and, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk, right? Which, you know, okay, like, he's running around like buying baseball cards at, uh, at garage sales and stuff. But anyway, it is what it is. Um, but the guy is quietly— you can't, you can't doubt that he has a genius for what he's doing. Um, first of all, like, there's no way I can talk extemporaneously for 2 hours like he does. Like, I just don't know how people do that. Um, but second of all, like, he's just really, really, really very talented and insightful about it. And, you know, the guy that worked for him said that they have a very specific kind of philosophy on being out there on social media, which is the CEO of the company needs to go out there and be themselves and talk about their journey. And he said, look, if we, if we I guarantee if you came to work with our social media agency, the first thing we would do is hire a film crew to follow you around all day because I guarantee there is at least 20 minutes of interesting content that we can produce out of that every single day. And that's what you put on social media, being a real you. And I was like, man, that is really smart. Like, I think that's really good.

That's really smart.

It's good. The cool thing I think about as I read your Twitter, as I read you hating on my Twitter as I read, as I read your, your LinkedIn. Like, it's really you. Like, you're being a real person on there, and so many people don't. And it's just a, um, you know, it's just a mistake. It's just wasted effort. That's what it feels like.

I totally agree. And, and that, in my defense, I did— I did— pretty sure I pinged you a couple months ago saying I was really enjoying your content. So I'm pretty sure there's a DM in your Twitter account you can see that said like back in August or September, uh, that was me being authentic too. Like, I was enjoying your content.

I get so many of those. It's impossible to answer them all. Thank you very much. Hopefully I at least clicked the little thank you thumbs up button on it or something. But it is part of the challenge, right? If you want to go and be nice on social media and be a genuine person, and if you're a caring, giving person, people just keep asking, you know, and it becomes overwhelming. And it's something I've really struggled with. So, I don't know, I feel like I'm whining. So, if I'm whining—

No, no, I totally get it, especially because the field that I'm in, folks reach out for jobs often, right? So, like, I'm getting hundreds of messages a week across both platforms, which is awesome. Like, I'm really flattered folks want to chat with me. I just wish there was more hours in the day to help everybody, right? So, I've gotten very good at saying no, or not right now, or talk to this person, right? So, yeah, I totally get it. It's, it's a nice, like, it's something you don't think about when you start creating content, right? Like, I didn't think that people would ever reach out to me for advice or like feedback on as regularly as they do. So oftentimes I'll create content around like a lot of questions I'm getting, but that's the only time I really like focus on content creation because I don't have time to chat with everybody.

Yeah. Well, it is this interesting aspect of human nature. If you're out there on social media, just like I talked about Gary Vee, like, we know Gary Vee. Gary Vee doesn't know who I am. Them, right? But like, you know, social media and being out there, the people start to feel like they know you. They know you, and then they're going to reach out to you and talk to you like they're somebody that, you know, is a friend. And friends do things for each other. But it turns out I'm not Gary Vee's friend. He has no business to answer my stuff. Um, so it creates this weird dynamic. And, you know, people often on the other side, it's— they'll even take it further where they get mad at you. It's like, I thought we were friends. It's like, no, I don't know who you are. We're not friends. Doesn't work that way. So it's really, it's like asymmetric friends, like a really weird thing. So I don't know. And I often, I've had friends that are like super duper famous, like can't go out in public famous and like, that sucks. Like I told my son that this morning, I was like, dude, you want to know why I drive a Subaru, son? No attention, no attention. Like just stay under the radar. Nobody's going to mess with you. Yeah.

Yeah, same. I drive, I think I was posting the same post you were yesterday. I was like, I drive a Camry and all my co— all my employees, I'm pretty sure have better cars than me, the ones I've seen at least.

I just wait.

Like being casual. I get casual, a casual shirt. I just don't— no jewelry, no watch, nothing. Just nobody could identify me. Hopefully.

It's interesting because some people really talk about not being motivated by money and then, then you see revealed preference behind that. Like, like I believe when you said it, I believe it. Like I truly do. The way you've structured your business, the type of car you drive, You know, the way everything's put together, like, that's true. Um, so yeah, I admire that in you. So kudos to you for not being full of it. So thanks.

Uh, I'll not post if I ever buy a Corvette or Ferrari, uh, on social. You'll send me this audio clip.

Take it back. Whatever makes you happy, man. Whatever makes you— I think you can, I think you can own a Ferrari or a Lambo and not be motivated by money. Like, totally. You know, that's totally fine. Uh, and I think you could be owner of Ferrari and Lambo and be motivated by money. The only thing I would have a problem with is somebody running around virtue signaling that they're not motivated by money and they really are.

Right.

That's, that's BS to me. I'm not interested in that at all. So I'm not just, well, cool. All right. Is there anything about your business that we didn't cover that's interesting? I feel like we got the whole, uh, the whole colonoscopy on it. So thank you for that.

No, no, no. It's, uh, a lot. I think, um, I'd have, uh, new, new team members watch this as a way to understand the business better. So how was Super cool.

Super cool. Well, um, so do you have an audience for this? Um, you know, and last week's episode was our most downloaded ever episode, so I'm very excited to announce that. Uh, but what, what way can, um, me, my— I'm gonna promote this on social media. What the people that listen to this, what way can we support you, find out more about the business? What would be helpful to you?

Yeah, don't— no asks on my end. Happy to support the content, obviously. Really appreciate you having me on and, uh, If anyone's ever hiring and needs help, even if it's not the type of conversations I am happy to have with leaders, business leaders or founders, is walking people through how I go about hiring. And that doesn't have to be with us. It could be just hiring your own team. And those are things that really excite me and I'm happy to have those conversations. So if you're leading a team or looking at building a team this year, happy to have conversations directly with folks and you can find me on Twitter. @jessytensley or on LinkedIn and DMs are open. Happy to chat with anybody who reaches out.

Yeah. And for those of you on YouTube, I just pulled up your LinkedIn page and yeah, so it's LinkedIn slash @jessytensley. So super cool and great follow. I totally agree that people should follow you on Twitter. I enjoy it even though you muted me. Oh, oh, there should be a club actually. People muted me.

I'm okay with it.

Oh, I mean, sometimes you hear it where people are like, they're talking about you. I'm like, I have no idea. But also, like, you just learn not to care. That's— you gotta, you gotta have that if you're on social media. If you disagree with me, like, I don't care. So awesome, man. This is so cool. I learned, I learned a lot. This, this RPO model, um, or our— the RAAS model, like, of recruiting as a service model, like, I love it. Like, thanks for educating me on this, and it really opened my eyes really what's possible. So I definitely learned some stuff, and thanks for being here.

Yeah, thanks for having me on.