Revolutionizing Recruitment: Inside Jobiqo's White Label Solutions and AI Innovations w/CEO Martin Lenz

[00:00:00] If you look at the programmatic space, the big vendors like Appcast in the US or Recruits,

[00:00:07] they are usually, or Pandalogic, they are usually going enterprise.

[00:00:11] So they are talking to the large corporates, the higher volume hiring agencies

[00:00:15] and that's the long tail is the big mess of the businesses.

[00:00:21] So they are not keen to, they're too small to run all these campaigns.

[00:00:26] So they usually go to the job boards and say, I have this role, I need to fill this role.

[00:00:34] This is William Tend Cup and Ryan Leary and this is The Use Case Podcast.

[00:00:37] We have Martin on today and we're going to be learning all about his story, his technology

[00:00:42] and we can't wait, right, Ryan?

[00:00:44] I woke up this morning and all I wanted to do was talk to Martin.

[00:00:49] See, there we go.

[00:00:50] That's why I'm here.

[00:00:51] We had five minutes of Vienna talk in pre-show so that was fun.

[00:00:56] Martin, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your company?

[00:01:00] Absolutely and thanks for having me.

[00:01:03] So I say hi from Vienna, Austria or a nice hello that we say here.

[00:01:09] So yeah, I'm Martin, Martin Lenz.

[00:01:11] I'm the CEO of Jobico.

[00:01:13] We are in the job board space.

[00:01:16] So we are a job board software provider.

[00:01:18] We provide all kind of products that I hopefully be able to talk a little bit about.

[00:01:22] We build job boards, we build programmatic advertising solutions.

[00:01:26] We have search and match technology in place.

[00:01:28] We are a true global player.

[00:01:30] And one of the reasons is maybe because we are based out of Austria and there is not a big market.

[00:01:35] We talked about all the beautiful things here in Austria, the museums, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:01:39] They all are not in the recruitment space.

[00:01:41] So we have maybe more than 90% of our business we do outside of Austria.

[00:01:47] But there is a great tech hub in Austria and like around Vienna and my hometown, Lenz.

[00:01:54] So I'm very happy to be here.

[00:01:56] And yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:01:58] So what I heard there was your competition is Andy Warhol and the museum.

[00:02:05] And choir.

[00:02:07] Choir, that's it.

[00:02:09] So let's, let's, so you mentioned a couple of things and I can see people on the other side.

[00:02:14] Oh no, another job board.

[00:02:16] Why a job board talk to us about that?

[00:02:19] What was the job?

[00:02:21] Yeah, not job board.

[00:02:22] Yes, I shouldn't say that.

[00:02:23] Yeah, I guess it's both right.

[00:02:25] Yeah, I guess it's both because recently we announced our partnership in the US with the job network that we are kind of like operating from now on.

[00:02:34] So we are, we are operating some of the job boards, but we are also providing technology to run job boards and everything you need about it.

[00:02:43] So why did we do it?

[00:02:45] I mean, I'm a computer scientist by trades.

[00:02:47] So I started coding like in the late 90s.

[00:02:51] And I was, I always wanted to be a programmer.

[00:02:54] Like when I went to school and I started computer science and like I even worked for the company in 2007 as a developer.

[00:03:03] So it was at the time it was a job sport, right?

[00:03:06] So it was a job for apprenticeships in Austria or like for graduates in Austria.

[00:03:11] So I already met the founder, I was doing coding and then I said, oh, well this can't be, this can't be it.

[00:03:19] Right.

[00:03:20] So job boards are dead.

[00:03:22] No, not at that time, but it's like, okay, I want to see the world.

[00:03:26] I went over into management consulting.

[00:03:28] I went to Accenture.

[00:03:29] You probably have heard of it.

[00:03:32] And because of my background in working for job boards, I came into the job board space again.

[00:03:40] So I was working for public employment services like in Germany and Austria all across Europe.

[00:03:46] And I stayed there, I stayed there for like nine years.

[00:03:50] So I learned a lot about leadership and IT transformation.

[00:03:53] So I was always kind of a tech guy, but always liked to have like understand the business side and leverage the tech side.

[00:04:00] So I was never like the best coder and I realized it quite early, even if you could like literally anything, but I was never like out of the top performing coders.

[00:04:09] Right?

[00:04:10] Yeah, I love how you say that.

[00:04:12] I realized this wasn't good at this.

[00:04:16] Most people hang in there 10 years too long.

[00:04:18] That's that.

[00:04:19] I was workable.

[00:04:20] But you know, a quick thing real quick, your hometown is named what?

[00:04:27] So I'm,

[00:04:28] It's your last name.

[00:04:29] So it's similar to my last name.

[00:04:31] It's lint.

[00:04:32] So L I and Z.

[00:04:34] Yes, it's different like it means totally different things like lens and lints.

[00:04:38] It's totally different.

[00:04:39] But it's kind of two hours down the road from Vienna.

[00:04:43] It's like geographically in between Salzburg and Vienna, right?

[00:04:48] Exactly in the middle.

[00:04:49] And it's like, it was supposed to be like everybody knew it as a steel city because there were still par plans.

[00:04:57] And like steel production, right?

[00:04:59] Like already many years ago.

[00:05:01] It's a wonderful city.

[00:05:02] It has a lot of arts and museums.

[00:05:04] You see it there, but it's still like in Austria, if you ask people about this town, it's like kind of like the steel city and it's like, like Glasgow or Manchester or things like that.

[00:05:14] So it's Detroit and but it has so much more to do.

[00:05:19] I stayed there like for 25 years.

[00:05:21] Yeah.

[00:05:22] So there was a great tech technical institute to like study computer science.

[00:05:30] Like a lot of tech companies are also based out of there.

[00:05:33] But because of job reasons, I moved to Vienna.

[00:05:37] So it's like Vienna is the city of 2 million people.

[00:05:40] So not everybody realizes because Austria is such a small country, but Vienna is the second largest German speaking city.

[00:05:47] So yeah, we speak German in Austria outside of what Berlin?

[00:05:50] Berlin is the biggest and Vienna is second biggest.

[00:05:54] Wow.

[00:05:55] That's actually news to me because I've traveled all over Germany and I wouldn't have known that.

[00:06:00] That's cool.

[00:06:01] With the job or technology part, I'm assuming that you can white label that?

[00:06:06] Yeah, exactly.

[00:06:07] Or it can be provided white label to folks?

[00:06:09] To continue the story.

[00:06:11] Yeah.

[00:06:12] In 2017, I decided to join the company again as an investor and as a CEO.

[00:06:19] So the founder actually asked me, he said like, so they switched into like moving away from running a job board to technology.

[00:06:28] So he was always the tech guy.

[00:06:30] And he in 2011, he created a spin off which was then Jobico in that sense.

[00:06:38] And he said like, well, I want to focus on building job boards.

[00:06:41] I have way more fun in improving the technology, solving challenging issues in the online recruitment space.

[00:06:49] So this is how the white label solution actually was created.

[00:06:54] And it took us a couple of years to realize that I could actually work again for this company, but in a different level.

[00:07:02] So still nobody gives me access to the code, which I really not.

[00:07:07] You remember you.

[00:07:08] But they don't allow me to touch the code, but I always have the feeling because I know the code.

[00:07:14] I can ask way smarter questions and they let me in the belief of doing so.

[00:07:19] But that was kind of how it started.

[00:07:22] And the founder of Klaus Furtmüller at that time, he said, well, I think we really have something and he let he actually paid me to be his consultant.

[00:07:31] And he said, hey, look at the product.

[00:07:33] Look at the team.

[00:07:34] Look at the tech.

[00:07:35] Look at what's happening in the market because at that time, honestly, I didn't like 2016.

[00:07:39] I didn't even know that there was a category like there is a software category like building job boards, right?

[00:07:45] Right.

[00:07:46] And I was I was I was excited.

[00:07:47] I was amazed.

[00:07:48] I thought like the competition really is outdated.

[00:07:51] Like, really, I looked at the market in a sense like, hey, why is this also broken and like, why, why, why is the process breaking?

[00:08:00] And and I thought like, hey, with a really great tech from central Europe, we can just wrap everything.

[00:08:06] And I think the story also shows that it's not always about the best tech.

[00:08:11] It's just if you go there and show or talk about, hey, this is much better.

[00:08:15] It works much better.

[00:08:16] This is not what ultimately makes a job board successful.

[00:08:20] It's like a variety of things.

[00:08:22] And we kind of figured out, okay, we need we still want to provide the best tech, but we also need to evolve and learn what actually makes our customer successful.

[00:08:30] And and and being the enabler, not the blocker because most of the time when we when we when we win customers, it's because they're really unhappy with their current tech.

[00:08:40] And it's usually like getting a customer like that is great because they were so frustrated, but it should not take that much time to realize that it's that you can do better with the best best tech.

[00:08:54] But there's always kind of the problem of engineers, right?

[00:08:57] So how can you how can you convince someone that what is what is really the benefit?

[00:09:01] Is it just like a technology play and you're just super excited about something that nobody actually needs?

[00:09:07] Or can you can you really change something?

[00:09:10] And I was immediately impressed and said, hey, we can change something.

[00:09:15] And over time, we learn what really matters and how we use the technology and it took us years to realize despite a lot of growth because there were so many customers just liking the tech.

[00:09:27] And then we start to tech talk and it was always the tech talk.

[00:09:30] And just over the recent years, we realized, hey, there's so much more than the tech.

[00:09:34] And then you add the pieces of the puzzle and you add more services.

[00:09:38] You grow your partnership network and you grow globally and you learn what actually already didn't work in the past because if you never experienced it, you you don't know.

[00:09:49] So Martin, walk us through what the customer is the ideal customer is for you and what is driving them to reach out.

[00:10:00] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:10:01] So for the white label solution so white label means that we have a platform that has all the features that you need to run a shop sport to drive traffic to do sales to convert your users to re engage the users.

[00:10:15] The right, the right customer is someone who first of all once has a commercial case in mind.

[00:10:23] Let's put it like that so you want to make money.

[00:10:26] You want to solve the business need in recruitment and you want to monetize it.

[00:10:31] That's I think that's important because we also have nonprofit customers, but they don't lose it.

[00:10:36] They don't use a lot of the things that we offer like all the monetization things that they don't need it.

[00:10:42] And the second thing is you either need to know a lot about your, your vertical like your niche or you have a brand and you have an audience that you can that you can leverage in that sense.

[00:10:58] So very commonly we work with newspapers and be to be publishers.

[00:11:03] That's usually well known brands that also have an audience either build like regionally locally or in a certain vertical.

[00:11:11] In some cases we work with associations or recruitment agencies because they run a shop sport at the site to generate leads.

[00:11:21] And what is not enough is usually just to say, Hey, I wasn't recruiting 20 years.

[00:11:27] I never saw a job board in automotive industry.

[00:11:31] That's not enough because because literally anyone could start that right so you need to have you need to have you need to know more about what you can do like you need to know.

[00:11:40] What are what are employers even like willing to pay for? Are they willing to pay for a job posting? Are they willing to pay like for campaigns?

[00:11:49] Do they want to get access to your resume database? Do they want to do something else?

[00:11:54] So you need to actually know what you can advertise and we allow you to do that.

[00:11:59] And we allow you, we allow it in two or three different ways.

[00:12:03] So first of all, you need this platform to really run your business.

[00:12:06] Right? So you need a job or platform to make money with a job board.

[00:12:10] So it comes with all these features like products monetization user engagement and all these compliance stuff like GDPR in Europe CCPA in US AI Act.

[00:12:23] Digital Services Act, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:12:26] So there's a lot of compliance around that you want to you don't want to focus on that.

[00:12:29] You don't want to focus on just continuously updating your tech.

[00:12:33] We take care of that.

[00:12:35] We want you to focus on your customers to focus on their business and to educate the employers to how they can get to candidates.

[00:12:45] So how they how they can grow their, their applications and how they get quality applicants.

[00:12:51] I think ultimately this is the most important goal that a job board needs to solve.

[00:12:57] And I would agree that when you say, Hey, why not a job board?

[00:13:00] I think a lot of job boards did a bad job for the last couple of years because they just they were just sticking to their standard business model and just say, Hey, well, it's less than last year, but we can still continue with it.

[00:13:13] Right.

[00:13:14] And in the end, people missed the opportunity to think about why am I actually doing this.

[00:13:20] So I'm actually trying to help an employer to find candidates.

[00:13:24] And you think about that, then everything else just becomes a challenge to solve.

[00:13:29] It's a challenge to solve like what how, how would they like to pay for it?

[00:13:33] Is it like do they want to pay for a job posting because they know how it works?

[00:13:37] Are they more sophisticated? Do they want to run a campaign?

[00:13:40] Do they just want to get access to to a database because they're an agency or things like that they want to do active sourcing.

[00:13:47] And this is what they need to translate into a product that somebody can sell that they understand because the market is evolving.

[00:13:54] There is new trends up in the market and it depends on the employer how mature and well educated they are.

[00:14:02] But in the end, everybody has the same issue.

[00:14:05] We are in the space to help employers find candidates and actually to help candidates find great job opportunities.

[00:14:13] And we can touch base on like why candidate centricity is important as well later on on the show.

[00:14:19] Yeah, two things. One is I think you said something I want to make sure that I understand correctly because it's powered by when you when you when something comes up there's a new let's say there is new legislation.

[00:14:33] The EU passes something and it needs to now proliferate through all the job boards they all power.

[00:14:40] You all can make one change and it then it goes across all of the power.

[00:14:46] We have a we have a core product that we update like right on a monthly base with the latest feature upgrades, but you can also customize and configure it to your specific needs so we don't update us shop boards the same way like we do UK shop boards.

[00:15:04] But we actually know okay these are UK customers so they need this update and these are US customers that need this update.

[00:15:11] I love that. So the second question was about programmatic and whether or not do you do programmatic yourself and you have your own or do you work with other programmatic players that are out there?

[00:15:24] Yeah, so we started to do our own programmatic services early 20 like late 2022 early 2023.

[00:15:32] The reason for that was that we were always playing agnostic like we say hey here's the platform tech.

[00:15:39] We connect you with anyone in the market but we saw okay this is not enough so this is like the biggest problem for job board why it doesn't work is because a lack of performance and this is why the

[00:15:51] indeed and and step stones in Germany they outperform you because they could perform better and and to do that they need job boards also need to have programmatic so we actually built a programmatic solution for shop boards to stay competitive.

[00:16:07] So it's actually them using the programmatic solution to drive traffic to their jobs to make their customers happy because if you look at the programmatic space the big the big vendors like appcast in in the US or

[00:16:23] they're usually or a pen the logic they're usually going at the enterprise so they are talking to the large corporates the higher volume hiring agencies and that's the long tail is the is the big mess of the of the of the businesses.

[00:16:37] So they they're not keen to their too small to run all these campaigns.

[00:16:41] So they they usually go to the job boards and say I have this role and to fill this role. Can I post this job. What do you offer. And you say hey there's five different versions of the job posting whatsoever but in the end.

[00:16:55] You need performance so the job board needs to drive performance to that and we're trying to do this like in a programmatic way with job aggregators social media automation etc.

[00:17:07] So Martin talk more about what that programmatic is over for the and I know you your customers fall within different segments right. So you work with publishers and so on and so forth.

[00:17:19] So maybe let's talk about that for the for the smaller publishers in that group right. Yeah. What does programmatic mean to them if you're powering their job or.

[00:17:31] Yeah absolutely. So programmatic per se is just a way that we can drive traffic to your site from various different channels in a computer driven way so we can basically automatically determine where we should buy where we should send your job or share your content and buy traffic on

[00:17:56] a so called cost per click base to get more performance on your job. So why is this important for a small job board because usually they are not able to run the large big campaigns. So maybe they

[00:18:11] So when you look at many of the job boards they have a mix of their own I call it native jobs so its employers going to their site posting the job and then they have backfill content.

[00:18:21] So maybe they also have a backfill on their side they import thousands of jobs from other job aggregators to have more content on the site.

[00:18:28] So you want to make sure that the customers that pay you most get the best performance and maybe in the end it's just it's just 50 jobs on average per month.

[00:18:38] Right. So how do you drive performance on this. And because we are working with so many customers we can actually streamline we can actually streamline all the job boards that we work with and the needs that they have

[00:18:52] in the US and basically look at them like they were an enterprise customer. So we actually the campaigns that we run on a monthly base they're like an enterprise campaign but we streamline the needs the different needs of our customers

[00:19:07] It's it's market specific. So we work in a different way in the US and we work in the UK or in Germany because there is a different ecosystem. The market is very fragmented.

[00:19:17] Germany has a much less mature ecosystem of buying of but that's in a nutshell what we do and this is why why our customers benefit so they don't need to run a thousands of dollars in campaigns.

[00:19:31] They just need to focus on selling jobs and we can even take a fraction and this is where we work perfectly well together with very turn and panel logic as well because they allow us to automatically leverage the I and take advantage of their programmatic services.

[00:19:47] That's why I say we partner for example with very Tom panel logic for the job network in the US but we also have our own campaign automation we call it job eco air which stands for automated intelligent reach which we can again in kind of a white little fashion tailor exactly to the needs of the

[00:20:05] jobs board. So if you want to run an artist job board in the US for any warhol fans we can tailor the campaign to exactly what you need.

[00:20:16] Maybe a great business idea but we are actually at the moment the only one that offer that you know in a one stop shop like covering all these channels and because we like this staying a little bit in the in the background you know we're still the tech guys.

[00:20:31] We really like that it's another wide level solution so we help our customers to succeed and they can take away the flag and say hey look at my performance.

[00:20:39] Nobody knows that it's that we help them on the background. It's not visible. So talk to us about analytics because the way I think Ron and I've thought about analytics in the past is OK right time right budget right right person right channel all that type stuff.

[00:20:56] Maybe it gives you some insight into source of hire maybe it gives you an insight into how much that job how much budget you need to throw against that job to create the quality traffic.

[00:21:08] So teach us kind of what what what customers and prospects what they should be thinking about analytics wise. Yeah on the back end.

[00:21:16] So our solution comes with a built in analytics so we we can run as many channels as our customers want. We can buy traffic via social media job aggregators display advertising and it all gets together in one dashboard.

[00:21:31] So we kind of make it fully transparent where we buy the traffic how much cost I converted and we optimize it automatically but we also allow our clients to take control and say hey can I add this channel.

[00:21:44] Can I do this and this can I invent a new product like a premium job boosting product and then we just set up an additional campaign.

[00:21:52] But analytics is is key to really make sense if it works because I sometimes like to say programmatic advertising in the recruitment space is like the Wild West because you never know what you get.

[00:22:06] There's so much fake leaks out there and I applications out there and you really like if if you get thousands of application in the middle of the night.

[00:22:15] I don't know if it's like real applications and also when it comes to working with different partners. There's a lot of great partners but you have one relationship to everyone so you want to you want to streamline it and you want to make sense of the numbers.

[00:22:28] So that's the one part. The other part is don't get don't get confused by the numbers because there are so many KPIs around the market and people say what's my CPC and what's my CPA.

[00:22:41] But what does that mean. What is a cost per click. What is a cost per application. So I cost per click on a job aggregator is someone already clicking on apply on the site.

[00:22:50] So it comes to you and then they click apply again and then you go to the career side of the employer. Well then it's a cost per application click if you wish.

[00:23:00] Right. So it's very hard to really get down the funnel to the employer integrations to the ATS systems the applicant tracking systems and really get the information about well this this guy really finished the application or this person really got hired.

[00:23:16] So I think this is where all the vendors will work a lot over the in the next couple of years to really get this a little bit more standardized because there are some effects of standards but there's no real standard like when is it a click when is it not a click.

[00:23:32] So the T attack for example the trade association from Peter Weddle. They they have like a download section where everybody can contribute their kind of policy around what do we consider a click and this was kind of one approach to kind of standardize what it means but it's still it's still tricky and the reason I think is it's very hard to really understand for many of the of the users up there.

[00:23:58] So having analytics in place is the first step to start but understanding the analytics is not a topic. Let's go back to features for a second. We went through a bunch of features earlier but where where most of your customers loving you the most right where what features are they looking at and saying OK this is why we're going with you versus someone else.

[00:24:24] Yeah so I would like to differentiate the two products like let's start with the white label product. So the white label product what they love most is that it's very flexible so you can really like you're not stuck with the one solution you can really like configure it in many ways and we can also customize it in many ways.

[00:24:45] That's the reason why we also have a couple of very enterprise like job boards in our in our portfolio. Another thing is that we have a very very flexible system in terms of we call it taxonomies so that's kind of a technical term but you can actually tailor the search experience and the and the wording and the language and the classification of the site exactly to your audience.

[00:25:11] So it can be different languages but it can also be different industries. It can be regional specifics so it's very it's very easy to tailor it for the needs and last but not least everything around monetization and organic traffic generation is also something that we're really good at.

[00:25:28] So we have a couple of SEO automation capabilities so like that you can and Google is like changing a lot recently and we always kind of running after it but well we always updating it so our customers get the latest automation that that is allowed on Google.

[00:25:47] And also what many people are missing is how is the candidate experience coming to converting someone to really click on apply like or to re engage them signing up for a job or because many sites are very transactional so they buy the click they and then they get the click out and they kind of arbitrage in the traffic but that's how how you waste money because every every dollar that you spend is a dollar invested in your audience

[00:26:14] and you need to learn how you can do that and we can we provide a lot of functionality around that. And last but not least if you want to monetize the site what does it mean so you need to be able to provide your clients with products that they understand and that you can make perform.

[00:26:32] So we have a very broad sales inventory on our platform. You can look at it like a Shopify system and say well whatever product I want to look at like a single job posting candidate database flat rates subscriptions social media campaigns employer branding campaigns you can create these products and then we can help you to deliver.

[00:26:57] So that's what they really like about the wide label platform.

[00:27:01] So what are you seeing right now with regards to our generative AI now and what do you think is going to where do you see this playing out for those just the next year or so not yeah to flying cars but yeah just what do you what are you seeing right now.

[00:27:17] Yeah flying job boards.

[00:27:19] I don't hate it.

[00:27:20] So a good question. So we recently started to talk about the AI the AI job board because we're looking at a lot of so we started using AI in 2017.

[00:27:32] So we started with machine learning algorithms that we use for automatic classification of jobs to create a better search experience.

[00:27:38] So we're not new to the game but with Jenny I like generative AI and large language models the game completely changed. So I like to I like to compare it with the safety car in the formula one.

[00:27:49] So this is kind of Europeans like the formula love the formula one. So it's like everybody lines up again because suddenly everybody has the best tools at hand that nobody could think of in years and no matter what you invested.

[00:28:02] If I have to get to be I have something better than you had three years ago right. So this changes the game and then the question is how can you take advantage of it because literally anyone could start like something and say hey I have the AI here and I just send a prompt to chat to

[00:28:16] the team and get a result out there. And I would usually say like it's very it's very important to look at all the use cases that you could create like from job description generation to create your screening questions for the application process create your

[00:28:32] broadcast content. Anything you recruit them recruitment is all about text right and generative AI and large language models are especially good at text. So it's actually one of the best use cases is is is a job board but how can you make how can you benefit from how can you differentiate.

[00:28:52] And this is where we say you need to have brands. You need to have network and you need to have data because if you have one or all of those ingredients what you can add to your prompt is different than unique to anyone else.

[00:29:06] So this is where you can multiply the power of the large language model with your site and do we have a five year roadmap of what we build not yet but there is a lot. We have a lot of conversations starting with our customers and the way we change product development at the moment is that we that we open up more for interested customers to experiment.

[00:29:29] We would say hey we got to run an experiment and we want to we want you to participate in this experiment and maybe we can come up with a new solution because it's so easy to integrate and we we look at your site and you have so much data. Nobody else has that right.

[00:29:46] So take advantage of that you can provide a service in combination with Jenny I that nobody else can Martin where where where most customers so.

[00:29:57] So I'm thinking smaller companies that want their that have a community that one job or some thinking smaller publications so right local or even a small regional newspaper or online magazine.

[00:30:13] These types I think historically we have seen a lot of these people publish job boards right so indeed and the old simply hired and all of these other things that were out there right. A lot of them were just stagnant put them up.

[00:30:28] They said well I've got 50,000 100,000 200,000 readers a month. I'm going to put it up. I'm going to aggregate the jobs and going to earn revenue on clicks and things like that. Yeah where where do you differ from this right how do you how are you vetting your customers to ensure that they're actually using your software.

[00:30:46] Yeah very good question and to start with the answer is we work like in Germany we work in a different way than in the US so in Germany.

[00:30:56] Most of our customers out of the publishing and then and newspaper space and media space they want to have the SAS the software as a service platform and they pay us for the license because they still have big teams they have sales teams they have a big revenue stream from recruitment advertising and and they need the best tech to

[00:31:14] Yeah and they don't want to build it and they don't want to build it. They don't want to build it's like a make or buy it's like a make or buy decision by the way you can download on our website how to make a make or buy decision and it's cheaper for them to go to a vital solution because they can focus on sales and marketing.

[00:31:29] So why doesn't it work in the US of the US that the trend the down was trend of advertising going away from the from the publishers and the newspapers.

[00:31:39] It was much faster happening than in than in Europe trying to keep some of the old business models a little bit longer but in a very successful way they are super profitable at some point in some areas so it's actually not the worst idea.

[00:31:52] But in the US we needed to approach it differently so we had a couple of customers that were really excited about the SAS platform.

[00:31:59] Mostly it was very sophisticated job boards like health jobs nationwide or workplace diversity dot com it's like networks and they really could use our tech to power their network in a different way that they could never build before again a benefit it was cheaper to work with us and building it on their own and no other competitor was providing what we could provide.

[00:32:22] So the developers is different they are not they're not used to pay for the service right so this is why this is why we came up with so we partnered with Panologic already for a couple of years to power their sites on the job network and we said like hey this this is something that we really see it can work as it works in Europe but we need to have a different contract model or business model.

[00:32:45] So we approached it a little bit differently they can upsell our own products like they can upsell the job network products we can actually help our other customers in the job in the job equal network to provide their products like diversity products or like social social products college boosts etc etc.

[00:33:04] So we can combine all that and we can help you to get the sales and delivery machine like to get it to get the traffic get the products right get the side experience right make it the brand we can help you with that.

[00:33:17] What we what we yet not what we are not doing yet is like helping you with the sales we are also planning on providing services with sales.

[00:33:26] Sales agencies that help you with the sales because this is usually where the biggest problem is happening they really you can't make a lot of money just in self service if you are unknown brand and like people just go where they what they know like they go to sip indeed.

[00:33:41] Career build a monster etc etc if you are small and medium sized business so you need to help them to communicate to their employer customers and I think that's the most difficult part that they're facing how can they how can they grow their like their customer base what we can do we can do we can add all the automation to it we can help you deliver on the performance.

[00:34:04] We can help you to automate your marketing to your customers like sending a reminder if they run out of credits or if they should buy another credit on the job site so these are small things that really help you to like.

[00:34:19] Like land and expand with your with your customers and with your employer customers but it's not yet like a self driving car right so we are not there yet.

[00:34:30] And you need to you need to work actively with us then you get the best out of it.

[00:34:34] We have a couple of partners that are just happy with what they get organically but you let a lot of money on the table like literally so I want to get your take I got two questions but I'll save the second first one is get your take on aggregation.

[00:34:51] So when indeed first came to market.

[00:34:54] I believe they're one of the first I don't know if the first or one of the first because before that there was a lot of captured databases.

[00:35:01] So closed off you couldn't get to them unless you were a member signed in or whatever and then indeed comes along and it's aggregates and then fast forward and everyone.

[00:35:13] And so it's for when I want to talk to recruiters about this and even sourcing folks about this is like it's just a lot of noise.

[00:35:22] It's it's cool because there's your scraping career boards or other job boards etc.

[00:35:28] So there's a massive amount of jobs but there's also a lot of noise.

[00:35:34] And the question is your take on kind of that old model of a captured database of candidates versus what you see in aggregation today.

[00:35:45] Yeah, that's a very good question.

[00:35:47] I think I think partnerships in in that space work a lot work well if you're not planning to be the number one or number two player.

[00:35:56] So you really need to be really big to only work with your captive data.

[00:36:03] I still think not because of what I said about the AI there is even if it's just a low amount of data that you can generate there is some local nuances that you can add to that.

[00:36:14] But I wouldn't necessarily build my my business model just on aggregated data be just on aggregated jobs or aggregated candidates.

[00:36:24] I would really try to understand why is it difficult for my employer customers to get talent.

[00:36:31] Is it maybe a combination of getting the right traffic and being being being present in the market and it's like employer branding things like that.

[00:36:40] So we come with an employer branding feature that you can work on with your customers.

[00:36:46] So if you combine it then they also get better better candidates.

[00:36:50] But in the beginning it's usually like having a good margin on what you spend for buying the traffic and what you really can deliver.

[00:36:59] And any any job with business model in the world so far like be at the top aggregators or the job boards or whatever you do.

[00:37:08] You always look at the return on ad spend.

[00:37:10] So you need to spend more in the beginning to build your audience.

[00:37:13] So if your business model is to be big in the audience, you need to spend a lot of marketing in the beginning.

[00:37:19] So if you want to stay more on the transactional side, you need to have a good sales team and then take advantage of what I call the information asymmetry.

[00:37:28] So nobody knows why you were what it's kind of a retail business.

[00:37:33] Right.

[00:37:34] So you know more about the market to streamline the traffic to your side so you can make a margin on the single job posting or on the subscription or whatsoever.

[00:37:45] And this is how it usually works.

[00:37:47] This is different to the to the traditional media ad sales play, which was basically your job was done when the job was live because this is like 30 days were printing it online.

[00:37:57] Maybe maybe customers ask what do I pay for?

[00:38:00] I want to have any color or what do I pay for more words?

[00:38:03] This is no joke.

[00:38:04] Like we have these conversations Germany and and that's crazy.

[00:38:08] I mean the worst thing about is there is employers paying for that.

[00:38:12] And they and we got asked to build features.

[00:38:15] We once got asked to build a feature if we can make the print button chargeable because they don't have to be a website.

[00:38:23] So they would print it out and put it on the blackboard.

[00:38:27] Make our image black.

[00:38:28] I'm not kidding.

[00:38:29] Oh, no.

[00:38:30] 2019.

[00:38:31] And for April for April Fools Martin you guys should put it way.

[00:38:37] I'll do it for next year.

[00:38:38] But put a button that says upgrade your image to color on the digital version and much as you're as you're going forward with this.

[00:38:46] I also want to get your thumb way.

[00:38:47] I know you got a second question to this, but I want to get your thoughts on does the customer need to have a high volume of traffic to their site?

[00:38:58] Or do you find through your customer base that niche audiences perform better for the for the postings?

[00:39:06] Yeah.

[00:39:07] So if you have no audience at all, it's going to be difficult because then you spend a lot on buying traffic and usually you're at the end of the food chain.

[00:39:17] If you start working with aggregators, you're you're the one paying for all that what happens in between.

[00:39:23] So it's it's usually you need to have like a hybrid strategy on working on your organic traffic and also on your paid ad distribution.

[00:39:31] That's kind of how this is the secret sauce.

[00:39:34] We try to take over a lot of the thinking about how you can combine technology wise, automate your paid acquisition and your organic reach automation.

[00:39:45] This is what we do with our SEO tools and with our analytics, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:39:49] But if you start from scratch and you really want to make money, you can always have a lucky shot, right?

[00:39:54] But if you really want to grow like a recurring sustainable set of income, then you probably need to invest.

[00:40:03] So usually you you already have something that you can build on that's usually the best and it's easier for someone who comes out of the media space or digital marketing space than for someone who is just really knowledgeable about the industry.

[00:40:17] Because this is an advertising game.

[00:40:19] This isn't advertising and marketing game.

[00:40:21] It's not an HR game.

[00:40:23] And I hate to say that, but just because you know what someone needs in the industry, it will not sell you a simple job to any employer.

[00:40:31] The reason why you have like if you go if you look at unleash and all these big conferences, the biggest like like event floors are branded with the biggest brands because recruiters buy from something that they know and that they trust.

[00:40:49] So do you have something that they can trust into so either you're like an association or like a niche shop board that is already a norm or you're like a media brand is already known.

[00:40:59] This is a good starter and everything else we can talk about.

[00:41:03] But if you're completing you to anything and you just go there and say, I know everything about the industry.

[00:41:08] It's like, no, you'll find today telling me that this is why we see a lot of digital marketing companies or digital media companies.

[00:41:17] They own 50 job boards or not even job boards is 50 e-commerce sites because this is a game of marketing and eyeballs and they understand how to drive that traffic and convert them into a quick purchase application, whatever that whatever that is.

[00:41:35] But I had a second question.

[00:41:37] No, it's the last question.

[00:41:40] Last question for me is interesting candidate behaviors that you're seeing now.

[00:41:45] Maybe you've seen in the last year or so of just things that yeah, you need to change the technology for your customers because of the behaviors of the traffic that's coming through the candidates behaviors are changing.

[00:41:59] So any insight there?

[00:42:01] Yeah, so I think this is the part where most of the industry is really bad at because everything is about selling and advertising and buying traffic.

[00:42:12] Right. And it's kind of okay to be like that because if you only focus on candidate experience still nobody would buy a job like buy a job posting from your from your side right.

[00:42:23] But the big difference is how easy you can convert the user and this is usually happening with a good candidate experience.

[00:42:30] So candidate experience should be key on what you do.

[00:42:33] And we always like to say we are a candidate centric solution because everything we do is focused on understanding where we lose the user and it's usually the user of like the candidates.

[00:42:44] There's also to be part where you we have a sales dashboard and you can see where they're like the employers are turning when buying in your checkout process.

[00:42:53] But this is just a small part of a job site.

[00:42:55] A job site is really all about people navigating finding careers.

[00:43:00] And if you really believe in like your vision why you do that like kind of you help people find jobs, you think about it differently.

[00:43:07] And I would take a bet that 90% of people that run their job sites like as a side hustle they never tried to search for a job on these sites because then you will see what is what breaks the system and what is breaking the process.

[00:43:24] And it's not easy.

[00:43:26] So what we do with our matching solution we also try to incorporate like the behavior.

[00:43:30] So I really truly believe that if you if you have the ability to explore and you learn from a user exploring. Hey, actually it's you're not stuck to your keyword.

[00:43:41] Maybe you didn't even know what you're searching for but you understand. Okay, this path is interesting. You click on that job.

[00:43:46] And then the recommendations change because of your interest because this is what you probably mean with behavior.

[00:43:53] And in the future maybe also learning on why did you spend more time on this job than on this job. Why did you click on this immediately and on this like you looked at it three times but then you always stopped at the salary information.

[00:44:06] Things like that so it seems easy. It's just that you need to have quite a big of volume to not get misled by data because there is a lot of like the recruitment.

[00:44:18] The recruitment is complex so it's much more complex and nuanced than e-commerce but the market is much smaller.

[00:44:27] That's why there is usually not that sophisticated solutions out there and if you look at marketing technology and marketing automation out there, there is so much more that is always already here.

[00:44:37] It's because the market is so much bigger and it's so much easier to make money in that space than in recruitment.

[00:44:42] It's like you need to explain it to users that are not at the savvy and then there is not a big market and then in the end they always buy on the one that they know even if it provides bad performance.

[00:44:52] So they don't grow up as recruitment marketeers and I think the belief 10 years ago when programmatic started was well everybody will become a marketeer like all the recruiters will become marketeers.

[00:45:05] I mean some like in big corporates with talent acquisition units they become like that but in most of the companies out there you are focusing on the HR part and the people and your DIT and especially programmatic just scares you out.

[00:45:25] You need to observe budgets and if you push the stop button too late you could charge a lot by indeed or things like that so it freaks people out.

[00:45:35] We see it more in Europe that recruiters are not that savvy towards marketing tools than in the US.

[00:45:41] I think there is a cultural difference.

[00:45:44] Like US is obsessed by baseball cards and statistics.

[00:45:49] We are not in Europe.

[00:45:51] We are we are we are more interested in arts and things like that but that kind of changes how you think do you think in terms of data that you can explore and look at or do you are you more focused on the process or like the people itself and

[00:46:05] but in the end the recruiters are very rarely if at all successful at anything digital marketing in this space which is why digital marketers get paid a crap ton of money to do what they got to do.

[00:46:19] Martin this has been amazing thank you so much for coming on we really enjoy learning about what you guys are doing and excited to see where this journey takes you guys and moving forward and maybe we'll get to look at it one day that'd be awesome.

[00:46:33] Thanks Martin.

[00:46:34] Ryan Will thanks for having me.