Partnering with third-parties to better monetize candidate users

[00:00:13] Welcome to episode 91 of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast. I am one of your co-hosts, Stephen Rothberg, with College Recruiter Job Search Site, where we believe that every student and recent graduate deserves a great career. I am here today with two gentlemen that I have, well, one of them I've had the pleasure of getting to know at a couple of conferences, and he's our guest. And the other one is Peter Zollman.

[00:00:37] Well, at least you classified me as a gentleman. That's a new twist. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to join you in this new year. Not so new anymore, but it is a pleasure to be here. Brandon, good to see you. I'm Peter Zollman with the AIM Group. We provide business intelligence, conferences and consulting for job boards and recruitment marketplaces.

[00:01:02] And one of our speakers and sponsors at the last couple of rec buzzes, rec buzzes, ooh, there's a word, has been Brandon Mitchell, CEO at RightSee, product leader. RightSee provides tools and services for the job board industry. He'll tell us in a minute.

[00:01:19] And he also, they just started moving into higher ed. And we'll get to that towards the end of the podcast. So welcome, Brandon. And sorry you're freezing in Tulsa. I'm freezing in New Jersey. And Stephen is nice and toasty warm in Minnesota. It's supposed to get up to 26 degrees Fahrenheit here today, which is about minus two for the rest of the world. This is about as good as we can expect in January.

[00:01:47] So Brandon, give us the RightSee story in 50 words or less, and then we'll get into the details. Well, Stephen, Peter, thank you both for having me. I'm hopefully not going to freeze for too much longer in Tulsa. But my name is Brandon Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of RightSee. RightSee is a platform that helps job boards and recruitment marketplaces unlock the revenue opportunities by providing really quality career services to the candidates.

[00:02:14] We believe that every candidate that's going to a job board should have some additional support. And we found that 95 percent of job boards don't really offer great services to the candidates, not because they don't want to, but maybe because they don't know how to. So we come in, we partner, we educate, we advise and really, you know, understand how it kind of gets done. And so it's been a great way to partner to kind of come in and kind of carve out a niche for ourselves, whereas a lot of job boards and aggregators are, you know, kind of doing their business.

[00:02:43] So it's been it's been phenomenal. Tell us how you manage to generate revenue from candidates without saying to them, send money. Yeah, absolutely. So it's a really interesting integration and it's very simple. Basically, we provide a free resume analysis first. And so for most job boards, they're just, hey, I have a lot of jobs for you. And that's it. Right. And so we said, hey, well, you know, those job seekers are probably need some help.

[00:03:12] I mean, my background as an ex-career coach, you know, I personally help job seekers from all walks of life, whether that was entry level graduates, mid-career professionals, executives, C-suites. And what we found is that it doesn't matter if you're a VP at Citibank or you're just graduating. Most people don't know high quality career services. So giving them that free resume analysis is great because we go over the structure of the resume, you know, kind of the best fits jobs that you might be a good fit for. And it's like a breakthrough. People read and they're like, wow, like I didn't know, like this is maybe where I might be falling short.

[00:03:40] And so that's just free. But then we give them the ability to say, you know what, I might want to work with a coach and fix this up. Or they can access self-service tools where they can pay a small monthly fee. And if they do upgrade, which we do see a lot of candidates upgrading because they're looking for it, we then share that revenue with the job boards. And so for the job boards, it's a super simple add on. It takes typically less than a few days to integrate. And, you know, their job seekers benefit from the great service. And, you know, we can share some of that revenue opportunity.

[00:04:08] You know, I love the idea of the revenue sharing for job boards where they're able to monetize the candidate side. Because job boards are most of the monetization that we do, my fellow job board leaders, it's on the employer side, right? They pay to post jobs. They pay to search resumes, CVs, profiles, call them what you may.

[00:04:29] Anyway, from a job board perspective, if not just with RightSee, but your competitors, other services that might have nothing to do with career coaching, resume searching, whatever. Some of them are just not going to be all that familiar with revenue share partnerships. Yeah. So many outside of, you know, you can do like webinars, you can, you know, do courses. I think is really great to find maybe these courses for your audiences.

[00:04:54] So if you have like, let's say a white collar job board, you might have, you know, accountants and marketing professionals. Well, why don't you partner with some, you know, really great boot camps or some really great technologies that target marketing executives? Because they'd love to get access to your audience. And so it's really just thinking a little bit outside of the box. And when we think about a resume, we think about it differently. It's not just a resume. It's a person behind that resume. That could be an executive that is a, you know, leader or someone who's going to be someone who could actually use your technology.

[00:05:23] So there's a lot of opportunities there. And we see and advise our job board, you know, partners on how to think about it creatively. I don't know about you, but I don't know very many people that are hopeful about the world of work. And I'd like to change that. My name is Marcus Mossberger. And I started the Hope at Work podcast where you'll find two things. Number one, really interesting guests. And number two, innovative ideas about the future of work. Check it out.

[00:05:53] Just as a follow-up, if I'm the owner of a job board and I'm not really monetizing candidates yet, I talked whether it's to right seat or to some other organization that's pitching me on like a revenue share opportunity. If you were in my seat or in the job board seat, how would you evaluate that opportunity? Like which revenue share opportunities are good? Which ones aren't good? Yeah, I mean, I think reputation matters.

[00:06:19] You know, depending on the actual provider, I think it's definitely important to do your due diligence. Potentially talk to some of their partners. And so we allow for our job board, you know, partners to kind of talk to one of our clients and say, hey, like we're generating, let's say, 10,000 plus revenue a month for XYZ partner. Why don't you go talk to them? I think word of mouth and real life testimonies are the best. But then also it needs to be a good fit, right? And so you got to take an inventory and an account of your actual job seeker from your base and don't provide services or, you know, tooling.

[00:06:48] It just don't make sense, right? And so if you're dealing with a lot of blue collar professionals, maybe you might want to target a little bit more kind of budget friendly tools or maybe tools that may not have a got maybe a premium price point just because maybe it's just it might not be out of the range, but it just needs to be contextually relevant. Right. And if maybe you have data science job seekers and maybe you have some data science boot camps and affiliates. And so it really depends on whether you're a niche job board, you're a white collar, you're a blue collar. And then just kind of meeting them where they're at.

[00:07:16] But we do find we find great open rates. And we find that when you do match the candidates with tooling that they're looking for, you see more engagement. Right. And so you're seeing maybe more time spent. They're coming back to your platform. And I think that you become a trusted advisor faster. And I think a lot of times we don't think about that, but a job board can be a trusted advisor. Right. Like it's not just about your job. It can be the ancillary things that wrap around as well.

[00:07:39] So that's how I would evaluate, you know, just talking to providers and looking at their reviews and, you know, testing it out yourself. Say, hey, you know how many job board CEOs have came to me and said, hey, Brandon, can I have my VP of sales get their resume redone so I can see how it works? And I'm like, sure. Right. And so like we let you get the keys and test drive the car. And if you like it, they're coming by. We're partners. Hey, that's always good. After the last rec buzz, I was frankly a little surprised.

[00:08:09] Alex Tchaikovsky, whom you and I and Stephen all know, who's an AI expert, a job boards, SEO expert, a job board wizard, came away from rec buzz and said he was really impressed with two things. And one of them was Wrightsy, which probably should have made you very happy. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then Stephen's next question is going to be about your Facebook integration. So tell us about what Alex said.

[00:08:39] You see how Peter grabbed two questions in a row there? I love that. I love that. You know, I'm not as dumb as I look. I know exactly what you were doing there. I love it. No. So, you know, big, big shout out to Alex. He's a he's a saint scholar in this space. Very, very reputable. You know, everybody, I think, in the space, you know, reads his blogs and articles and he has a really good following.

[00:09:04] And I think a lot of his words stem from actually seeing it in person, kind of what I just said, like kind of getting the keys to test drive it. We did a demo for him at RecBuzz and I think he was blown away with how far our AI tool called Job Search Genius has come. And that basically is a self-service tool where job seekers can get access to like real time mock interview, you know, preparation. You can create cover letters at scale. And our AI resume tool is not just like a standard resume builder. It's really advanced.

[00:09:32] It's fine tuned on training sets specifically for kind of career coaching activities. And we don't just like take a bullet point and like revamp it like a chat GPT. We actually think like a resume writer in a career. And we probe the user on additional questions to really fine tune to get what's what's out of them in a bullet point. So it's accurate. It's transparent. So, yeah, he saw it. He said, yeah, I could see a lot of job boards is easily integrating this, adding a SAS revenue stream to their business on the side. And it's a win win for everybody. The candidates are happy.

[00:10:02] The job boards are happy to create additional revenue and not have to build these tools themselves. And then we also get to help people. So, yeah, he saw it. He saw it in person. This is this is great. So not to disappoint my co-host, Peter. So I think we've got time for one more question. Wanted to look a little bit ahead for for RightSee just before we went hit the record button when we were in the green room.

[00:10:26] We were talking about a recent integration that you have with with Facebook, some promotion that they're doing with for you. Higher ed. Maybe you can take a minute and tell the listeners kind of like some of the exciting stuff that that you're they're announcing in January. Absolutely. So you're going to see a campaign running across the United States for the rest of the year. We did kind of like an alliance kind of partnership with Meta where we're using their open source AI models, Lama 3. They saw our story. They're amplifying and highlighting it.

[00:10:55] So across billboards, airports, subways, streaming services, you're going to see an ad that's all about job search units in RightSee, which is phenomenal. And we're going to be extending that partnership into different places as well. So you'll see a lot more. Follow me, obviously, so you can keep on that. And then, yeah, over the last few years, we love working in the recruitment marketing space. But we're also extending ourselves into higher education and workforce development.

[00:11:17] So using that same core technology with the AI resume writing, career coaching and cover letter generation, we're now getting into universities and having strategic partnerships there. So everything from University of Alabama to Tulsa Community College to Oakton College to College of Southern Nevada, Xavier University, are all now clients within the last year that are taking our technology and rolling it out. And we also have really big opportunities across city governments and counties that I can't name yet. And so really looking to diversify our set of where the job seekers are.

[00:11:47] At first, we said, hey, let's go to partner with these job boards because they have all the job seekers and we want to help them. That's not the only place. And so just right, you are a business owner. Take some time to really, you know, think about your inventory of like where your revenue mix is and think creatively and don't be afraid to expand it to new markets that may be unknown because you might find the next gem there. So that's kind of where we're going. Well, in some ways, I think we buried the lead by saving Facebook till 10 minutes in, 11 minutes in. But it's all good. Congratulations.

[00:12:17] Anybody who can work with Meta, that's not a bad name to have on your partners list. That's for sure. Yeah. Mr. Steven, you'll get the last words this time. Thank you, Brandon. This is great. Brandon, I've had the pleasure of speaking with you. Well, not the last one because I had to miss it, but the previous couple of RecBuzz conferences. It's great for the listeners who are going to the RecBuzz in Vienna. Hopefully, Brandon will be there. Hit him up.

[00:12:45] Stay away from Peter for sure, unless you're looking for a free, you know, glass of wine or something. Great for a meal ticket. Exactly. Exactly. Pleasure speaking with you. Love the learning about partnerships, how to evaluate them, and also just seeing the growth in Wrightsy. Good stuff. Thank you. We're really excited and honored to be able to participate in this space. We don't take that lightly. And yeah, I think, you know, 2025 is going to be a phenomenal year and we're wishing everybody the best of the best. All right.

[00:13:15] Thanks, guys. Cheers, Brandon. Cheers, Peter. Thanks, guys.