How to build global teams without the bloat ✂️ | Noel Andrews

Resumes and CVs are now 100% useless because of AI, because almost everybody is just putting their own resume and the job description into ChatGPT or into Claude and saying, optimize my CV, and at which point it adds rubbish in there. I think it used to be said that 20% of CVs had some little white lies. Now we've no idea what's true in it, so we just ignore them. There's lots of recruitment software now that scans a CV, scans the job post, and tells you what percentage match it is using AI. It's like AI scoring AI is just rubbish. It's completely pointless.

This week's Millennial Master is Noel Andrews, CEO of JobRack. After 15 years in the corporate world, Noel took a risk on a forgotten job board making just $15 a month. Then he turned JobRack into a global hiring machine, helping founders build high-performing remote teams in Eastern Europe and South Africa without burning cash or time. In this episode, we talk about how he halved his team and tripled profits, what AI is doing to hiring and why it's mostly noise, and the questions that instantly reveal great candidates. Millennial Masters is proudly sponsored by Jolt, the UK's top web hosting service. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling up a custom app, every great project needs a reliable home. That's why Jolt has hosting plans starting at just £3.95 a month, with unbeatable deals on domain registrations too. Why Jolt? It's a no-brainer. There's no waiting around with support within 30 seconds on live chat. Your site stays live no matter what, with over 99.99% network uptime, and you can also pay with Bitcoin or American Express, so you can rack up those points too. How good is that? Sign up today and enjoy your first 3 months free. Head to jolt.co.uk to get started. Noel, welcome to Millennial Masters. How are you today?

Really good, Daniel. Really good to be here.

Likewise, great to have you. So I was looking you up, and I saw that you were for almost a decade and a half in the corporate world before you decided to go for your first startup. But how was it in the corporate world? And what took you to the point where you wanted to leave it?

So I had a great time in the corporate world. And I think some of that was circumstance, and some of that was me. So I worked for an airline that went through a whole boom and bust cycle for 10 years. And so I just got involved in lots of things. I, from a very early age, I've always been very, very driven and I just tended to look for opportunities. So, you know, I'd get stuck in, seek out new projects. I did things in airports. I did things on aircraft themselves, very much in the tech side of things. And so I actually enjoyed it. At the time. I think as I was coming towards the end of my 15 years, just that entrepreneurial itch that I'd always had since being a kid, basically, was just getting too strong to ignore. I'd kind of had enough of the endless meetings and the bureaucracy and things like that. But I had a great time, achieved a huge amount, had some pretty good successes, made a difference, which was important to me. But yeah, my time was— it was the right time.

How would you describe that itch? What were you feeling at the time?

I think, I mean, like from a really young age, like when I was like 9 or 10, I've been doing various like pocket money making endeavors. So, you know, I did lawn mowing, I did car washing, all the things that normal people do, but then I did, or normal kids do, but then I did some unusual stuff. So I was really into planes and aviation. So I did plane washing at my local airfield. Technically it's like a very big car. And so, you know, but it was fun. I did it every year.

How long did a plane wash take, if you don't mind me asking? That piqued my curiosity. Yeah.

So it depends on the plane, but, and depends on the owner of the plane. So the one funny thing was this one guy was just like, well, it's like two estate cars, right? And I'm like, okay. I was just thrilled to be washing a plane, to be honest. Then he got me to wax the wings to get all of the fuel stains out of the wings. It took me hours and hours and hours. It was probably the lowest earning plane wash or kind of wash of any kind I'd ever done. But it was fun. But I was always driven to, you know, be entrepreneurial, do things. I used to deliver leaflets, all the kind of stuff people people do. But all I think I was always pretty confident I was going to do my own thing. My mum had some kind of business endeavors and various entrepreneurial kind of aspects of her life. And so that was an inspiration and influence. But I wanted to, I kind of wanted to go in the corporate world. I think there was a huge amount that I learned what to do and what not to do. And just over time, it was just like, yep, you know, I want to be a little bit master of my own destiny, have the ability to influence and just kind of have the challenge of figuring something out for myself, whether it's from the ground up or an acquisition, and then really making that difference and, you know, make your own mistakes.

So you decided to start something from the ground up first?

Yeah, the first bit was, uh, it was an interview coaching business. And so this was to help candidates get jobs. And it came off the back of my, well, my corporate life. And so I'd always led large teams, you know, my largest team was nearly 200 people and lots of hiring, firing, leadership, all that kind of thing. And I was recruiting for a business and I did 10 interviews, 10 candidate interviews in one day. And I was driving home at the end of the day, I was thoroughly exhausted. You should never do 10 interviews in one day. That's crazy. And they were all unsuccessful interviews. And I was thinking to myself, I was like, these were all lovely people, but they were rubbish interviews. We didn't get to hire a single candidate. And I'm like, why was that? And it sounds so cliché to say that I had a light bulb moment when I was like, oh, no one ever gets taught how to interview, right? And so I was like, well, I'm good at interviewing. Maybe I could teach people and coach people to be better at interviews. And Interview Confident was born. And so I was finished up the contract that I was doing just then. And then I launched Interview Confident and I was successful in the results we got. We helped a really good number of candidates get great jobs and get through interviews. And not through, you know, faking it through an interview, but just actually being able to be articulate, talk about, you know, results that they'd actually given, you know, have a compelling introduction that actually put themselves across well. So it was successful in that way. It was unsuccessful in that I couldn't scale it, or I wasn't able to scale it into a profitable, like, meaningful business. And fundamentally, that was because I didn't have the right market. I was focused on the UK. People in the UK generally aren't out there looking to pay for help for these kinds of things, whereas in the US that's very different. It's very common that people pay for admissions tutoring for college, for career coaching, etc. Much less of a thing in the UK. So yeah, run it for a year, learn a lot, you know, all kinds of things around SEO, paid ads, websites, CRO, all the kind of things that you go through when you're doing everything yourself. But ultimately decided this isn't the thing to go with. And I actually then went back into the corporate world. I needed money. And it was just as I was going back into a contract that JobRack actually came up for sale. That was, you know, that's my main business.

Before we go into JobRack, I wanted to ask you some of the key learnings you had from your solo venture, mainly in particular, what was the point when you realized that it wasn't going to scale to where you wanted to take it or what you needed it to be?

I think there was a couple of things. I think probably about halfway, maybe 6 months in, it was this realization that this was a time for money business. And while I do think in hindsight that it could have pivoted to be an online course or things like that, there's loads of great content out there about interview skills. I'm a big fan of premium services, right? I don't want to be doing low-cost you know, low margin services or products. So I think about halfway through, I realized that actually this was a time for money piece, and that's limit to that.

And a limit to your own time, because I'm assuming it was, it was yourself leading the entire business.

Yeah. And so there was, and you can hire other coaches and there's lots of businesses that have done that successfully, but it wasn't something that I was excited to grow that. And then also the difficulty I had getting people to pay. So when people did pay, they got tremendous value and we had incredible testimonials. But getting people to pay a reasonable amount of money. And I think at the time I was charging around £300. So what's that, maybe $400, €400, something like that. And they got a full CV optimization review for that. They got 2 coaching calls, they got follow-up support. So they got a lot of value, especially given they were going for jobs generally earning £50,000 to £100,000 a year. So they were getting a lot of value, but the desire and willingness to pay wasn't great. And so I think there was a realization going, oh, hang on a minute, I want to sell something that people are— I think Hormozy, Alex Hormozy says, you know, shut up and take my money, right? That offer is so good. Like, just here's my card. And that wasn't the case there. And I don't think there's almost anything I could have done to the offer that would have made it the case. I think it was just a market problem for me there.

And for anybody tuning in who's not an entrepreneur, but in business business, what would you say are the top 3 things they need to keep in mind when they go for interviews and presenting themselves? A bit of knowledge and wisdom before we move on to the next point.

Yeah, sure thing. So number 1, have a compelling introduction, right? Practice your introduction, make it interesting, give them something to kind of grab onto. Everyone's got something interesting about them. And I think just practice that and have a good compelling introduction. I think secondly, the STAR technique is brilliant, easy to YouTube or Google that. It stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. And it's just a way of structuring an answer to an interview question to make sure that you give the context. So the situation, explain the task that, you know, you needed to do. And then the really crucial bits are the action. What did you actually do? And then finally, the absolute most important bit is the results. Like, You know, people will say, you know, tell me about a time when, and people will talk about it, but they won't talk about the results. And so it's easy to hear your answer and be like, right, so what, what difference did it make? So the STAR technique. And then the third thing I'd say is to like, just to really, really emphasize it, like talk about results, like in everything you do, talk about what was the result of you doing that thing, or you being in that role, or you taking on that challenge, talk about results. So, so, so important.

And these are all things you can adapt also in the entrepreneurial life, which we're going to move on to next. So next up, Noel, you said a business came up for sale, and it piqued your interest while you were back earning money in the corporate world. How did you pick it? How, why did it get your interest?

So I was part of, or I am part of an entrepreneur community called the Dynamite Circle. And I joined it while I was running the interview coaching business. And it's a worldwide, really great community of location-independent business owners. And within there, there was a lot of chat about hiring and remote hiring. And because of my background with the interview coaching and with lots of hiring and firing, etc., I'd had this hunch. I was like, there's a lot of people here that need to hire. They're not experienced in hiring. A lot of them didn't have classic corporate experience. And I was like, I wonder if there's something here. Maybe there's some like kind of consulting that I could do to help these businesses hire. And so I did a little bit of that. I just, just helping people out on the side. And as part of it, I used a website, a job board called JobRack that was a remote job board focused on people hiring people from Eastern Europe. Uh, and again, it was owned by two guys in the community and I'd used it and it was great talent. It was a super simple setup. And then there was this post one day where they said, hey guys, we're going to shut job rack down unless we can sell it. Does anybody want it? And they had bigger— this was a side project for them. They'd run it for a few years. They had bigger things going on. And it just— I was like, oh, there's something here. So this is pre-pandemic, right? This is 2018.

I wanted to say it was before remote work became the norm.

Yeah, exactly. So pre-pandemic, um, it was niched down to remote. It was niched down again to Eastern Europe specifically. And I liked that. I like, I hadn't niched down hard enough with my coaching business. And it had been like mothballed, right? As they say. So they, about a year before they put it to $1 per job post just to stop scammers. So it was making $15 a month, $15 a month in revenue, right? Which means it wasn't making much, but it also, the price wasn't that expensive either. It was still a multiple of infinity because it wasn't making any profit. But I just had a hunch. I was like, there is something here. This is, this feels like a sweet spot for me. And then very quickly, I'd never bought a business before. And within the space of 4 weeks, I'd done due diligence, had a developer go through the code, work up a few different options, and we'd made a deal and transferred it across to me.

And that's when the bigger entrepreneurial journey began. How did you go about revamping the offering and turning it into a big business rather than something that was earning $15 a month as a side project for somebody else?

Yeah, so I mean, straight away, you know, put the price up to a sensible price for a job board. So, you know, put it up to, I think it's about $149 per job post, and talked about what I was doing, right? In within the community, it was very well supported. I did like a Black Friday offer just a few weeks after I bought it, made the sale price back straight away. And obviously then, you know, reinvested it straight into the business. Hired a team member to help me with the day-to-day customer support, some of the SEO and bits like that. And kind of spent really a year or so trying to find my feet and figure out, well, what was the right offer? What was the right direction? I invested a bunch of my own money into like paid ads and just really trying to scale it, which was hard because to scale a job board, you either need like significant money to invest, or you need digital marketing skills. And I didn't have either of those things.

So did you outsource them through JobRack?

So I didn't. So I kind of, I hired some freelancers, I tried various things. The biggest challenge I think with a job board, and why you need significant money to really grow it well, is because you're not charging very much, right? So even now, we only charge $299 for a job post. That doesn't give you much money to invest back in. And the people that you're targeting are some of the most expensive people to target on, you know, if you're on paid ads platforms like Facebook or Google, etc., you know, you're targeting entrepreneurs, you're targeting kind of affluent people in generally in the Western world. And so that was super tough. And I think over time, I realized that did I want to get good at digital marketing? Was this the right business model for me?

And actually, I realized that it was, And this was in the early days of you buying the business, pre-2020, when the world changed. And am I safely assuming this was a big turning point for you and the business?

So it was, yeah. And so around about where would we be? We would be like late 2019. And so I'd had the business around about a year and I started getting people asking me for help. To hire. And they, you know, I gave loads of help for free. I'd hop on calls with people. I love chatting to business owners and entrepreneurs. And they would ask me for help. And they'd be like, no, this advice is great. But can you just do it for me? Like, hiring is hard. And this all sounds like a lot of work, which it is. They're like, can you just do it? And I'm like, no, no, no, no, we're a job board. We don't do that. And they're like, yeah, but like, what if I pay you? And I was really resistant. Like, I did not want to become a recruitment agency or recruitment service because there's so many like terrible stories of recruiters in the world and how they behave and the fees that they charge, things like that. I was very resistant. And that happened for probably 4 or 5 months or so. And then I eventually realized I was like, oh, hang on a minute. I'm really good at talking to people. I'm really good at operations. I could hire great recruiters. What if we actually create a— what if I created a recruitment service that was different from all of the others that didn't do all of the terrible, horrible things that other recruiters do? What if we did it differently? And that happened at pretty much the start of 2020. And then I was in a very odd way, as you said, you know, when the pandemic hit, the whole world woke up to remote work. People that had never even considered that they could work from home, or crucially, that their business could operate with people working from home, that just opened people's minds to it. Then that obviously leads into when they need to hire, they're like, well, I could hire someone locally, but if they can be remote and at home 20 miles away or 50 miles away. What if they're 1,000 miles away or 3,000 miles away? And I've got just a much broader pool of talent available to me, potentially at considerably lower cost as well. That really was the—

And that's something that resonates with what other entrepreneurs told me on the podcast with Millennial Masters, that you can, especially if you work in a smaller town and you across the UK and you need specialist help, you will not always have it 2 or 20 or even 200 miles around you. So being able to have a wider pool of applicants from around the world or even specialized in Eastern Europe, as it is the case for you, then you can get the best talent from across the world for your business with some price advantages. Now, for anybody tuning in, when we talk about price advantage, what sort of percentage are we talking about compared to a similar role in the UK?

So here in the UK, probably maybe around 40% lower cost. If you're comparing in the US, you're probably closer to half. And the caveat that I have to add here, because it's when I talk to people and they ask me, like, what kind of salaries? Now I'll give a figure and it's literally, you know, almost half of what it would be locally. You naturally assume that means they're not gonna be very good, right? Okay. So we're hiring someone cheap. They can't be very good. And that's not the case.

There is a default, isn't it? Sometimes.

Absolutely.

Our mind appreciates something if it's more expensive, but that's not always the case.

Exactly that. And so the best analogy I can give, and I did this recently, I did a comparison of buying a home in certain areas of Eastern Europe, certain areas of South Africa, and we work in Eastern Europe and South Africa now, and compared it with the UK and compared it with the US. And there's like a 5 to 10x difference in the price of a comparable home, right? Similar construction, similar square meters, you know, similar in every single way, just apart from the location. And so if you can buy a house for half the price or less, if your general cost of living is considerably and materially lower, then that translates into lower salaries without it being exploitation and taking advantage of people. That's not what it's about. We're generally, when we're, you know, helping our clients to hire from these regions, they're getting incredible people that actually get better jobs and better salaries than if they continued working locally.

And so you now help other businesses to hire people rather than using them as a freelance service, or is it a mix of both?

Yes, it's very much focused on long-term team members. I'm a, you know, freelancers are great, project workers, things like that for certain things, absolutely great, right? Big fan. I use freelancers all the time for particular tasks, very small projects. But I'm a big believer that to build a real sustainable, profitable business, your core team needs to be like real team members, right? Focused on you. Some friends of mine coined the term shower thoughts, you know, so they're thinking of you in the morning in the shower, right? They're thinking about their day and how they're going to push things forward. And so for me, that's real team members. So that's generally permanent, full-time people that are looking to stick around and be a core part of your team for you, your business, and your clients or customers.

And when the remote hiring and remote work boom, in a way, started in the pandemic and continued afterwards. How did you manage to scale and grow the business? You said you already started a recruitment service, which was looking at fixing all the problems that your traditional recruitment agencies were doing. And then the global event changed the perspective and made it all more popular. How did you scale from there? I'm assuming in the beginning it was just you. And as you said, you work with a range of freelancers as well for a lot of the bits and bobs that you need.

Yeah, so I've always brought in people like ahead of when I needed them. So I had someone helping me do some sourcing for the job board. And it was her that I launched the service with. She was a very experienced recruiter. And we talked about it. And she was like, we can do this. I was like, great. So she was quite a pivotal team member at the time. She was working for me part-time. And we launched that service. We then added in a, you know, someone to write the job posts for us. And we just bolted on people. And I think, so the short answer to your question is I did it in quite a scrappy way. Some people design the business, right? They're really clear on the long term, right? This is the structure I'm going to need to do this really well. That wasn't really the case for us because it was moving very, very quickly. And I didn't take the time to step back and think, how does this scale? And I, like so many things, I thought I had it right. I completely did not have it right. I had it completely wrong. And so we scaled within about a year and a half. We had a team of 17 people, all lovely people, all great, but it was, it was pretty chaotic and we were delivering a good service. It was like graceful swan on the surface, but there was a lot of paddling going on beneath and lots of communication, lots of noise internally. Slack, which we used for communication, was hugely noisy. And it was a couple of years later that I actually realized that we weren't set up the right way to be able to really scale, certainly scale profitably. So over the course of a few years, you know, well, like I said, we got up to 17 people and then intentionally went back down to just 8 people. But with 8 people, we're doing twice as much work and 3 times the profit that we were when we were 17. And so initially it was that you just scale by adding bodies, then realize that, oh, hang on a minute, that it's a bit chaotic. It's a bit scrappy. Then revisit things.

If you frontload the business as well with the staff, you have the higher costs by the time you manage to get the revenue to get to the point where it needs to be to support all these bodies as well. So you can scale the team, but you also need to scale the business, right?

Yep, exactly. And that's where obviously hiring offshore from Eastern Europe and South Africa is great because it's a lower cost, but it's still a frontload. So it's always that balance of figuring out what role is going to make the difference, where is my zone of genius? Where are the things that I should delegate? Lots I should have delegated earlier. But ultimately, it was always about hiring people to focus on delivering a really great service. That's what's actually been core to what we do. And is the reason why we're now as successful as we are, because we get huge amounts of referrals from clients and repeat business. And so that's a sign that we're doing things really well.

So what's the secret then to halving your staff numbers and trebling your margin and profits? How did you achieve that? You told, you said what you achieved, but I'm interested how, what's, what's the lesson there?

So I redesigned the business and I did it with the view of the clients and said, what's right for them? What do they really want? So as an example, we had, there were 2 people involved, 2 or 3 people involved in each kind of, uh, in each role that we hired. So we would have an account manager, very classic agency models. We had an account manager. We then had the specialists, so the recruitment specialist, and then we had someone supporting the background, but the recruitment specialist was the one that was out there talking to candidates, selling the role, getting them interested, but they weren't the one talking to the client. The account manager was, there was all of this backwards and forwards, to and fro. So I redesigned it and I kind of said, well, what would be best for the client is if they were talking to the person that was doing the recruitment. Now, what that needs is that needs a recruiter that's got the client management, the emotional intelligence, lots of empathy, high EQ, et cetera. To be able to engage with them. That's harder to hire for, much harder to hire for. So it's— pay was painful and it is painful. It's very difficult for us to hire for ourselves, but the results are completely worth it, right? Because it's a much better client experience and it's much simpler and there's much clearer ownership. And that's what I really like. So I designed or redesigned the business so that each team member has absolute ownership of what they are there to do and what they're there to deliver. And then people take that ownership and the right people like having ownership, then they step up and then we deliver just much better results. So it was that, it was recognizing that there is a simpler way to run the business, albeit it's harder to find those people. So yeah, you can find, sometimes it can be easy to hire, but that's not always the right thing.

Speaking of hiring and firing, you've said you've done a lot of it during your business life. Both in the corporate world and also for your own business, as well as dealing with, I'm guessing, selecting people to join from Eastern Europe and South Africa, you said, for JobRad. What would you say are some of the red flags and green flags you have in interviews and conversation with people, both as potential employees, but also as potential collaborators or people you're recruiting through your business?

So I think red flags is a lack of energy, right? So we capture videos as part of our application process. We obviously jump on, we have interviews as part of it. I want someone to appear interested, right? And, and let's be clear from a candidate perspective, applying for jobs is hard work, right? It's often demotivating. Lots of times you don't hear back, you know, not from us. We always respond to our candidates, but lots of other recruiters and lots of other hiring companies don't. So it's a demotivating process. But despite that, it's really important that candidates like are awake and that they look interested and that they, you know, are putting themselves across well. So I think number one red flag is if someone is like slumped in their chair, a bit chill, you know, we had someone submit a video to us in their bikini, right? For a job. And the job was paying like, you know, a significant salary and we're kind of like, they were just hyper casual and it's like, that's not the vibe. You know, we're a professional business. We're fun, we're friendly, but we're a professional business. So I think making sure that you get the right vibe that's right for you as an employer and, you know, equally for a candidate, you know, put across the real you. Don't pretend to be someone else. That's, that's not the answer. So red flags, I think a lack of energy. If they use AI in the application process, I love AI with tons of areas where I think it's great and there's areas where it shouldn't be used. We're really clear, you know, we do not want candidates to use it to fill in an application form because we want to see, can they actually write clearly? Can they communicate? You know, what have they actually done? So flags like that and another red flag.

Let's pause a little bit on the AI one, because I think that's a, that's an interesting topic and LinkedIn is in a way full of it. There's the plethora of posts about, oh, how you can tell something was written by AI, but also from recruiters. And people hiring about how you should use it, or you should use it just to tailor what you want to say. And similarly, you said that somebody looking for a role, it can be demotivating. They have to go through dozens, if not hundreds at some point, of job applications. And something that I've seen myself, the job role descriptions are written with AI. And it's pretty clear So why would you say don't use AI back, especially when a recruiter or an employer has written their job role with the help of AI and it's pretty clear?

So with the job post, like sometimes, so we get help from AI, but all of ours are then human written, right? Because it's about, is it accurate? There's no point putting an inaccurate job post out because you'll get inaccurate applications. In terms of using AI, resumes and CVs are now 100% useless, right? Because of AI. Because almost everybody is just putting their own resume and the job description into ChatGPT or into Claude and saying, optimize my CV. And at which point it adds rubbish in there. Like, you know, I think it used to be said that 20% of CVs had some little white lies. Now, we've no idea what's true in it. So we just ignore them. If I'm asking an applicant to take a few minutes to fill in an application form, I want to hear from them. I'm not interested in some AI-optimized answer. So there's lots of recruitment software now that uses that, you know, scans a CV, scans the job post, and tells you what percentage match it is using AI. It's like AI scoring AI. It's just rubbish. It's completely pointless. And so we want to hear from the candidates because We're not at the point where we're, we're not trying to employ an AI, right? I do want candidates to be able to use AI. And so when we test them, we often encourage the use of it, but we also want to hear from them. We want to hear that they really understand it. And that's where we use videos as part of it. We are already seeing, or we have been for a while, we're seeing candidates use AI live on interviews to feed them what they think is the ideal answer. And you can always tell because there's like a half a second delay before they respond. One of my team the other day, the candidate was wearing glasses and she could see the reflection of ChatGPT in their glasses and she could see it change. And so she'd ask a question, half a second or so later, the answer was popping up and then they'd answer. Like, it kind of, it's just kind of pointless. And so I empathize with candidates, but that's why with our process, we're really, really careful and we put a lot of effort into making it a real human experience. So that it's, you know, because right now hiring is still humans hiring humans, right? That's what we want. We want people that are smart, switched on, have got the skills and experience, and crucially, the actual character traits and personalities that are going to fit in with a real team. And that will include using AI where AI needs to be used, but they've got to have the understanding. And that's, that's why it's so important for us to, you know, identify and figure that out.

So if AI is making CVs, and at least the first part of the recruitment process and filtering in a way useless, like you said, and some sort of video interview would be important. And let's just say there are a few more giveaways there when it comes to AI and somebody on screen. How do you make that initial filtering process?

So using an application form for us. So we make people fill out an application form. We want people to put some effort into it. And we can tell, and some of that is just, you know, there's like, how much experience do you have in this? And if it's less than the experience needed, you know, Oftentimes that means that they're not going to be a good fit. But generally we use questions that require them to write a few sentences, right? So we can gauge English level. It's very easy for us to tell if they've used AI to write those things. So that's the first pass and the video. Video tells us a huge amount, you know, what are their English communication skills like? What's their energy like? And we ask relevant questions based on the role. So that's not only are we looking at, you know, what is the video showing us in terms of their communication skills, but we're also looking at, you know, looking and listening and hearing their answer.

So what would be then the, a reasonable time you'd say that a job seeker or somebody you would be recruiting should spend on completing a form or a cover letter?

I mean, depends on what the requirements of the role are and how much they want to stand out. Everything is optional, right? And so we get candidates that I think you can apply for most of our roles if you're a, you're a good fit for the role. Our application form should take you 5 to 10 minutes, something like that. Not much at all. I think what we see today is that, and I think one of the reasons why candidates can get so frustrated is because they apply for hundreds of roles, most of which they're not a fit for. And naturally they get rejected from those roles and rejection's hard to take, right? And so they're almost not helping themselves. Like if, and LinkedIn as an example, it's one click to apply for jobs. And it just sucks in your LinkedIn profile and applies for the job. Most of the candidates have got no idea what they've even applied for. They're just like hitting apply, apply, apply as many times as they can. Again, it's just a, it's a bit of a broken model.

And you also mentioned AI being used on the recruiter side to filter people out, but if it's being served AI slop and analyzing it, then it's not effective. So, when you have hundreds of job applicants for a role, how do you actually go through it?

So, with some of it with difficulty, and that's a real reason why a lot of our roles, almost everything we do is headhunting and actively sourced. So, we are out there contacting people because a lot of the time, the best people aren't looking for work because they're happy in a job. And so, a lot of what we do is active sourcing and headhunting, which actually avoids us getting hundreds of applicants for jobs, because we're only contacting, you know, a select, you know, a select number. But yeah, using AI to review and filter, as you said, AI-generated slop, it's just madness. And that's why we don't do it, because it would just be a waste of time.

Now, headhunting. I'm sure we can share some wisdom and information here in both the interest of people making themselves open to it, but also in your interest in making sure that you find the right kind of people. How does one make themselves open to headhunters, easy to find, and in a way available, A, without their current employer knowing, and B, them being in a way happy in the current role they are?

Yeah, so I think there's two kind of different aspects to this, right? So from the you know, if you're working in a job and you want to be available to approach, but as you said, without the employer knowing, I think the main thing is just to have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile, right, that talks a little bit about what you do in your role, key skills, things like that. And then recruiters will find you, right? LinkedIn is very, very good. There's lots of kind of complicated search methods that we can use as recruiters to be able to find the kind of people that we're looking for. And, you know, if you want to be open to opportunities, then keep an eye on your messages, right? People will recruiters will message you. And so, you know, just keep an eye out. I think the flip for that is if you're an employer and you don't want your team to get headhunted, then it's really, really important to be investing in the employee experience and your team culture and what it's like to work at your business. And some of that's around pay and salary and benefits, but a lot of it's not. A lot of it is really about creating the kind of culture that, you know, people are friends with who they're who they're working with, and they're having fun and they're having a good time. And that's just as possible, in fact, more, even more possible a lot of the time remotely as it is in person. But it does take some effort. And so, you know, no one wants to lose good people. And so it takes effort on the side of the employer to make sure people aren't going to reply to those LinkedIn messages.

And possibly counterproductive from your side, but still nevertheless interesting, and I am going to ask it. Is even when we're speaking about remote work, and you clearly have an interest in making sure that your employees and the people you recruit stay with their new employer, what are the best techniques and ways to create a culture where somebody wants to stay in their role when working remotely, which can still be demoralizing to a certain extent?

So, I think, like, be intentional about it is my main thing. So I talk to my team a lot about, you know, what do they want? And so we— things that they— that's really important to most teams, but, you know, to my team particularly, it's recognition. Not in a financial way specifically. It's just about let's recognize and celebrate the wins. So we work really hard to celebrate our wins. We spend time together not working. So we do, you know, a coffee call every month. But we do actually do it slightly more regularly than that. We do fun team meetings where one of the team will run it and we'll do games like two truths and a lie or Pictionary or various different fun things. We spend time on every team meeting getting to know each other. So we have questions that we use, though it's a different question every time. And it might be something like, you know, what's your favorite season of the year? Or what are you saving up for? Or what's the most embarrassing accident you've ever had? And so the kind of things that just help you get to know each other. We've got channels for all kinds of different things that aren't really work-related or aren't work-related in Slack. I keep them up to date with what I'm up to and what's going on. We do lots of Loom videos. We send birthday cards, work anniversary cards. We do gifts, lots of kind of very little things that add up to a really, really great team culture. And so I think step one is be intentional about it. And step two is talk to your team about what is important for them. For it to be a great place to work and to stay.

And what do people tell you about what makes a great workplace?

So recognition is probably the number one thing, and people being told when they're doing well. Linked to that is feedback, right? People want to grow, people want to learn and have opportunities to develop. And then fun, getting to know their teammates. That I think is super, super important. There's some stat that says if someone has a friend, a close friend at work, the average tenure, the average time they stay in a role is something like 1 to 2 years longer than people that don't have a close friend at work. And so, I mean, that's huge. That's absolutely huge. So ultimately, it's building the kind of place where if you ask that question, just the fact that you as a boss or a business owner are interested enough in your team to care, that's actually a big step. But you need to actually do something with the answers that they give you as well.

So applying everything they said is just as important as asking. Otherwise, it's a one-way street that will lead to nowhere.

Exactly, more frustration. Yeah. And you might not be able to apply everything they say, but, you know, you being clear about, hey, you guys said this, this is what we've done. These are, we're going to do this one. We're not going to do that one. And this is why, and this one we're going to look at again in the future.

So how does one tackle both from your experience and from the recruitment and agency experience? How do you tackle when somebody says they had a better job offer elsewhere that offers them double the salary or 50% more? That's usually a conundrum for a lot of employers in various areas, but also something I'm assuming the people you work with are impacted by.

Yeah, it definitely happens. The couple of things, I mean, if it's something like a salary increase to that level, generally we're going to say take it, right? There's not that many people that will happily turn down a 50 to 100% pay increase, right? We will always talk about, figure out what is it that they really want. Want, right? What do they actually want? Because it's not always— it's often not just money. So a lot of the time, it's, yeah, it's do that. We— I've talked to some of our clients that have got, you know, existing, like, local team members that have had a job offer elsewhere. Therefore, they've kind of threatened to quit, expecting to be saved and to be counter-offered. And that's kind of why they've done it. They don't really want to leave. I'm not a big fan of that. So if someone has got to the stage of wanting to leave my business and my team, I've not seen many instances where a counteroffer, even if it does result in them staying, where that actually works long term. Like most people, by the point they've made the decision to leave their team, to leave that business, they have made that decision to leave. And whether it happens straight away or 6 to 12 months later, I'm not a big fan of counteroffering. In fact, I don't think I've ever done it. And I don't think I would do it in JobRec unless there was something I'd fundamentally missed. And that's why with my team, I've always said, I was like, hey, if you're at any stage you're thinking of leaving, then just talk to me first, right? Because if I think if you really want to leave, I'm going to help you. I'm going to do everything in my power to help you get what it is you want. If that's a job wrap, great. If it's not, also okay.

And you gave a few clues about the red flags in interviews, but I want to go back to that one. And I'm wondering if there are any key questions that give you a good impression or a good idea about who you're talking to. When that you ask in interviews or when recruiting? What's a dead giveaway or what's your magic trick question?

I think the main one is something called TORC, which I think is from Top Grading, the book, and it's the threat of reference check. If I was interviewing you, Daniel Ionescu, I'd be like, okay, Daniel, so what's your current manager called? And you'd say, I don't know, Bob. Right, okay, cool. So when I speak to Bob, what's he gonna say about working with you? And It's different if I just say, what would your manager say about working with you? You'll give one answer. When I make it personal and say, when I do speak to Bob, what is Bob going to say? It changes it a little bit because you're like, oh, Noel's actually going to do it. Well, I'm going to have to— I've got to think about that. And particularly when I ask, you know, it's great saying, okay, well, what does Bob like about working with you? That's one thing. But I often ask and say, well, what What things would Bob like more from you? You know, if there's an area of development, what would, when I ask him, what would he like more from you? What's he going to say? That requires some, a good level of self-awareness. And you can see candidates go through, well, what would he say? What would he say that I'm happy to share with Noel in this interview right now? And then we follow it up. We always reference when we're making an offer. Referencing is absolutely crucial. So I think that one for me, I want to see what their self-awareness is. I want to see how comfortable they are being vulnerable because I think that's really, really important. I'm not looking for people to be perfect ever, right? I'm looking for people that can recognize that they've got development areas and that this is how they're dealing with them and this is what they've done to grow and improve.

You mentioned about referencing when making an offer. If you're basically headhunting somebody, isn't that the point where you would give away your game to their current employer?

So normally we'd get a reference from a previous employer, you know, so to, again, because until they've locked that offer in, they might not want to, that's reasonable. But generally at the point where we're at that offer stage, they're generally pretty happy, right? They're generally pretty confident. And if you— yeah, most people are aware of the kind of reference they're going to get, you know, but I'd say maybe in 1 or 2% of cases, we, you know, Daniel, you'd give me your reference details, for instance, we contact them, we're assuming that we're going to get positive references. And so there's some things that we do to get useful information. But 1-2% of the cases they're not, and people wouldn't recommend working with them, and they give us— we find specific reasons. It's not always a, you know, that's definitely not going to proceed to employment. But if 2 references for the same candidate say the same thing, we're going to dig into that, and it's probably not a great sign. So a big bit is, yeah, the self-awareness.

So you might get a good one and a good reference and you stick with it, but if you get a bad one then you'll dig deeper to see if that sticks.

Yeah, exactly. Because it could just be a grumpy former employer that's just annoyed that they lost them, right? It's kind of human nature. So, you know, we're not just going to go on one, but we are going to dig it.

Yeah. You mentioned one of your books, and I wanted to ask you, in your personal development and business journey, what books would you recommend any entrepreneurs should read, but also what influenced you?

So, I think the biggest one that's influenced how I've built JobRack has been The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath, which is a book all about customer experience and about how mediocre most experiences with other businesses are. If you think about hotels, shops, any kind of businesses you've interacted with, like, when was the last time you were really wowed and really made to feel special? And it's really rare. And it's a great book. It explains about how often it's not the big things that make the difference. You can do some little tweaks here and there. How you— how can you wow people? And that's one of our values. You know, how can we wow our clients, our customers, and our candidates? It's super important. And a lot of it came from that book. And that, I think that's been pivotal in how I've designed the business, how I've designed the service, and how I've recruited for my team people that really enjoy doing those things and looking for those, you know, those little opportunities to wow people.

That's an interesting one. I haven't had it mentioned before. So I'll make sure I include it in the show notes for this episode. But if there's no other that comes to mind, as we taper off our discussion, I know from my experience, and most of the entrepreneurs who I've been speaking to tell me that, there's no success without sacrifice. So I'm wondering, Noel, what are the sacrifices you've had to make to be where you are today with JobRack, but also previously in your corporate life?

Interesting question. I don't feel like I've sacrificed much, but I'd probably say the thing that I'm working on now is like self-reflection and actually calmer thinking time. I've always been the Energizer Bunny, go, go, go, lots and lots of things on at the same time. I've got, you know, great friendships, great relationships, great business, things like that. Probably at the expense of peace, calm, reflection, the kind of the deeper thinking that's probably a bit more mentally healthy. So working on that at the moment.

That's a good point to wrap up our discussion for today. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of the wisdom and nuggets that should help quite a few people out there. And I'm looking forward to see where JobRad goes next.

Thanks so much, Daniel. It's been good to chat.

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