Are you ready to meet the game-changer in the hiring arena? We're bringing you an insightful conversation with Kashif Aftab, the innovative CEO of SkillGigs, a platform that's shaking up the staffing industry. With its unique approach to talent marketplace, SkillGigs is ensuring that travel nurses and software programmers craft their career paths with the best contract opportunities. But it isn't just about job listings, SkillGigs offers a secure credentialing vault for safeguarding your essential documents and a 3D resume tool which gives software engineers the edge by presenting their skills and experiences in an interactive way. So, what's in store for SkillGigs' future? Stick around to hear about the expansion plans for other specializations.
But that's not all. What if the job hunting process could be more than just a chore? SkillGigs is turning the tables by revolutionizing the job bidding process. Imagine a world where the intimidation of negotiations is non-existent, the process is transparent, and recruitment feels like a swift 'speed dating' experience. This platform is ushering in the era of gamified job hunting, making it thrilling for job seekers and recruiters alike. Be prepared to explore how SkillGigs is weaving magic by quickly filling roles, ensuring that the crème de la crème of talent is found and hired. Join us as we uncover the future of recruitment with Kashif Aftab.
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Are you ready to meet the game-changer in the hiring arena? We're bringing you an insightful conversation with Kashif Aftab, the innovative CEO of SkillGigs, a platform that's shaking up the staffing industry. With its unique approach to talent marketplace, SkillGigs is ensuring that travel nurses and software programmers craft their career paths with the best contract opportunities. But it isn't just about job listings, SkillGigs offers a secure credentialing vault for safeguarding your essential documents and a 3D resume tool which gives software engineers the edge by presenting their skills and experiences in an interactive way. So, what's in store for SkillGigs' future? Stick around to hear about the expansion plans for other specializations.
But that's not all. What if the job hunting process could be more than just a chore? SkillGigs is turning the tables by revolutionizing the job bidding process. Imagine a world where the intimidation of negotiations is non-existent, the process is transparent, and recruitment feels like a swift 'speed dating' experience. This platform is ushering in the era of gamified job hunting, making it thrilling for job seekers and recruiters alike. Be prepared to explore how SkillGigs is weaving magic by quickly filling roles, ensuring that the crème de la crème of talent is found and hired. Join us as we uncover the future of recruitment with Kashif Aftab.
Listen & Subscribe on your favorite platform
Apple | Spotify | Google | Amazon
Welcome to Recruiting Daily's Use Case Podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better as we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech. That's what we do. Here's your host, William Tincup.
Speaker 2:This is William Tincup and you're listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have Kashiifo and from SkillGigs We'll be learning about the Use Case or the Business Case, cost Benefit Analysis, etc. Like how do you justify buying software In this case? How do you justify buying SkillGigs, kashiifo? Would you do us a favor and introduce yourself, make sure I got the conversation you're giving me correctly and also tell us a little bit about SkillGigs.
Speaker 3:Thank you, william, absolutely. My name is Kashiifo Afba, ceo of SkillGigs. Founder and CEO of SkillGigs. Skillgigs is a talent marketplace where we're disrupting your typical staffing industry and converting the staffing process into taking that into a technology process, if you will, and using technology to help travel nurses, as well as software programmers, land their next contract gigs across the country.
Speaker 2:I like that. So right now, we're focused on those two niches, or can we do everything in between?
Speaker 3:No, we're totally focused on those two niches. That's our bread and butter. We have over 200,000 candidates who have joined SkillGigs in the last couple of years. A lot of them are travel nurses and nurses, software programmers, developers, engineers, database developers, etc.
Speaker 2:Well, a lot about nurses and trouble nurses in particular is everything can be gridded out. They either have a degree or they don't. They either have certification or they don't. They have a specialization or they don't. They've worked in, whatever they worked in or for how long they have If you can almost see a matrix of they're a nurse and a nurse to assist, they've got their certifications, they've done all that stuff and they've been doing it for 10 years. It seems like that's easy to grid out. Have you all seen the same things?
Speaker 3:It is easy to grid out absolutely, but I think the challenge is how do you bring it all together and organize it in a manner that it's affected for the hiring managers. They get the best out of it. That's one of the problem statements, the use cases which is like a lot of these nurses have background checks, they have a licensure checks there's so much that goes on when you're in a healthcare delivery situation and when you're servicing acute care facilities. That's one of the problems that we solve using SkillGigs, which is you keep all of everything in this one credentialing system that we created a Vault, if you will that is constantly updated and the workflow, the user experience and the UI is simple and easy enough that you can keep coming back and using it as a nurse or as a hiring manager on the other side.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's nice and you called it a. It's a board.
Speaker 3:It's a Vault like a SkillGigs credentialing Vault. Wherever you are, the documents are secured, because a lot of this stuff is proprietary and you want to keep people's information as secure as possible.
Speaker 2:What I love about that is the portability.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you can take that wherever they want.
Speaker 2:Yes, I love that. And the hiring managers again, they can take that, they move to another place, they can then sign back up, et cetera. I can see some symmetry between software is engineers and nurses. Is there a desire or an appetite down the road to go after other types of specializations? Are you good where you're at?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, a great question. I think the name skill gigs derives from a vision that anything that we can measure skills on we want to promote within the marketplace and help lend them their next home jobs or contract jobs, whatever it may be. Initially we started skill gigs as a focused business on contract nurses or travel nurses and contract software developers and engineers, etc. But over the years we kept getting hit and being asked to open it up for full-time workers as well, and we did, and so a lot of full-time job seekers are also using skill gigs as a different way than your typical Indeeds and LinkedIn of the world, which is a little bit more static and more core calling-based concepts, whereas this is more of a using a technology to promote a certain candidate and then promote a certain job and then bring them together. So we use that concept in the full-time as well. So yes, short answer is eventually we're looking at other skills that could be measured and graded in some manner and bring them into skill gigs as well.
Speaker 2:And again it's I like the phrase of credentialing a platform, being able to actually make sure, validate these things, which is really important. I can see that both where you're at, with nurses, but also with engineers. Yeah, able to understand the old, to understand their skills. Are you doing more of the testing or how do you credential them, if you will?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question.
Speaker 3:Actually, we started skill gigs if the first market that we attacked was software engineers in the Silicon Valley and we're like, let's target these folks and see if they adapt to skill gigs, and that was our risk assumption back when we started.
Speaker 3:And what we did for them is we built something called a 3D resume, which we patented and what it is.
Speaker 3:That you come in and when you set up your profile in skill gigs as part of that process, we give them an option to go create the 3D resume and we feature that as a personal brand building tool within skill gigs or a feature.
Speaker 3:And what you do is you come in and you tell us, hey look, I've been working on Java J2E in this particular job and I thought my time in this job is spent with, let's say, microservices or API development or cloud work, etc. And we start gathering these data points from you in this profile development and then what we do is we take that away a career and in your job and we stop populating these bubbles in a 3D resume format and we give these percentages to that particular document so people can look at your 3D resume and within seconds determine what kind of a developer you are and what are your real skills versus what are your strong skills versus what are your weak skills, etc. And that kind of helps in that process of credentialing is what you mentioned earlier and that's something that we have done proprietary in skill gigs to give developers that brand effect, if you will.
Speaker 2:I like the thing is, I like the three-dimensionality of that to understand what they have. And also, what's great about AI is it can then see something that's not stated but it's implied If they're doing this, they're also doing this. They can round that out. And then what's great is if the hiring manager has an idea of what they're looking for not in a list, not bullets, but the old way, right. Okay, I need this checklist of things, but if they can look at something and build something to three-dimensionality to understand these are the skills that we need right now, but also the potentiality of these other skills. Does this person have some of those skills and some of that potentiality?
Speaker 3:Now the potentiality is all key. And look, even today, recruiters are using edit fine on resumes to find keywords that match what the hiring manager is looking for, right, right, and keywords don't tell the right story, right, a keyword might just be there because that is something that a person was on a team doing a certain skill set, but really they didn't have hands-on knowledge of it. And it's akin to, let's say, you need heart surgery. You want to go to a surgeon who does at least 15, 20 surgeries a month, versus a surgeon that does two. And I think same thing holds for hiring developers. If you're hiring for a certain tech or you're trying to solve a certain problem, you want to know that this person had hands-on knowledge on this. Obviously, that's what you try to validate in an interview process. But what we said was why don't we validate this for you at a primary level in a 3D resume format, so that you're not wasting your time talking to somebody? That's not a fit for you?
Speaker 2:What's great about that is it's also great for candidates. So we can obviously see the great part for hiring managers or recruiters, because it bubbles up. It bubbles up the people that are the most appropriate. You can't spend time on all 100 candidates. It just doesn't work.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you absolutely cannot do that. You cannot spend time on 100 candidates. You want to have a targeted list, then it helps. As you said, it helps on the AI side as well. A lot of these data points that we're collecting and that's the AI engine that we're building, which comes from our perspective. The goal is that once we track your hiring habits for certain roles and the 3D res many hiring habits coming together starts giving us a lot better idea of what works for you and what kind of candidates to bring to you when you're both in jobs or when you're recruiting.
Speaker 2:I like that because it also gives some flexibility for both sides of things that change. We're doing such a rapid changing market with AI and everything else that's going on in our lives that sometimes they used to say this about books the very moment that you publish the book is the very moment it's out of date. It's the same way with job descriptions and this old way of recruiting that you post a job and that made sense at that moment. A month later, it doesn't make as much sense Having the flexibility of understanding what again, which candidates to focus on, who's the most matched to it currently, but also who has some upside. Let me ask you a little bit about the marketplace itself For the candidate or employer. With a candidate, how do you sign candidates? Write me a balustrade. What's that about?
Speaker 3:We built SkillGigs to mimic your typical e-commerce marketplace, other marketplaces and platforms out there, so we wanted people to have a very simple, easy to use user experience into SkillGigs.
Speaker 3:So you come in, you sign up, you create a skill listing, you create your profile, you publish it and then you enter the e-commerce marketplace, if you will.
Speaker 3:Now the secret sauce and all of that is our bidding process, which basically allows the candidate to transparently go bid on jobs and, vice versa, the employer to come and bid on you, so the employer is actually applying to you through the bidding process. It allows for a couple of things to happen. Number one it means there's real action, real jobs, right, and everything is just sped up, if you will. So it's speed dating in that sense. But what it also does is it just takes away this whole fear of negotiations that happens for a lot of folks out there who are trying to find a job, and then creates this transparency where now the staffing agency is not determining the economics of the job, with their own margins sometimes going up or sometimes coming down. Whatever it is, it's all hidden in the staffing world, but in our world it's all transparent and board parties negotiate a placeholder, if you will compensation first and then they get to an interview. So that's how the process works.
Speaker 2:I like that a lot. I like that a lot and it makes sense to me because it's like again, it makes everyone move fast. So they're always sitting on a resume, so to speak. Now the hiring manager can't wait around, because talent's not going to wait for you. And it's also great for candidates, because they get to know their market value. Put something out there. And if you put something out there, let's say $150 an hour and no one bites.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know for a fact that the market's telling you OK, but you don't know that in the kind of the historical or traditional way you don't know. You just ask for something and they either say yes or no and there's no way to actually know. Let me ask you a couple of buying questions. One is your favorite part of the demo when you get to show skill gigs to somebody for the first time. What's your favorite part?
Speaker 3:I think for me personally, it is when they get into the marketplace and they get to see the candidates live interacting right then and there. That's speed to recruit. When they see that and when they get that happy look on their face which is like, oh my God, the relief that the can is right there and I'm not having to go through a whole pipeline of cold calling, engaging and all the other stuff that happens in recruitment. I think that is that happy moment when they see that when I'm looking for a director of nursing or I'm looking for an AWS developer or a Java developer with certain important skills that I need, for example, kubernetes or something like that and right there, there's not just one person.
Speaker 3:There's 50 people in the marketplace right in front of me that are active, not just names that I have to go contact myself. That is the most familiar demo. That's the best moment.
Speaker 2:I can see that being really exciting. You know, I don't know if you ever watched an eBay bid where it gets down to the last minute and people are just crazy doing jockeying and doing different things. There's an excitement to that.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. There's gamification to it and I think there's relief to it, but I really love the fact that it's like look, all of us who are responsible for some kind of a project or running anything. You cannot do that without good people on your team. We know that not success directly related to the team that we put together and I think if you ask anybody who's managing anything or leading anything, they would tell you that their biggest fear is not having the right person, the right role and then failing because of that. And I think that sucks right.
Speaker 3:And especially in healthcare, where there's a direct correlation between filling that role and being able to save lives. Being able to provide healthcare and the speed and time needed to do that is so essential, which was very obvious to us during COVID times, where a lot of our new customers who started up with us they really came to us because they were struggling to fill these roles in their hospital settings and especially in Houston, which is the fourth largest city. But you know what? They were being outcompeted by cities like New York and LA and Chicago and those places and that relief when they were able to bring in hundreds of nurses to their floors through skill gigs was just an amazing thing to watch and see.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Okay, so two things once buying questions, like for the employer side what are questions that, if they've never used a marketplace, if they've never, obviously they've never used skill gigs. What questions should they be asking your sales team when they first interact with them? They first do the demo and see something they've never seen before, like what questions would you love for them to be asking?
Speaker 3:Yes, that's a great question.
Speaker 3:I think the number one question they should be asking is how do we defer from your typical and I'm talking about procurement right Contractors or travel nurses?
Speaker 3:So this is a procurement department that is already using a VMS or a different MSP model, and they should be coming in and asking like look, how does direct sourcing help me fill my contracting and procurement needs and how does it save me money and how do you ensure that the talent you have is as good as your old model?
Speaker 3:And I'm gonna get that in, at least I'm gonna fill the same model roles or more through you versus using your traditional model. I think those are top two or three questions I would ask, as a customer coming in, if I was a customer who's looking for a contract now, if I was a customer who was looking to fill poem roles and a lot of our customers do both in skill gigs they come into fill poem roles as well as the contractor and travel roles as hospitals I would ask myself how does this help my recruiters, bring down my cost of acquisition, reduce my time to fill and ensure that I get access to the best talent possible in today's environment? And then, how is this different from me using a LinkedIn recruiter, or indeed, and how does this really help me from?
Speaker 2:the data. I think. I think that's pretty just in this phone call. I think that's pretty self-evident. That's the again. Those are both all those things. You have a place, the recruiter or all those places. They all have a place, but not when it comes to something that's specialized. I just don't. I think you need something specialized that understands the hiring manager's needs and the candidate's needs. The last thing is to shift your favorite success story without telling brand names or any of that type of stuff. But just what are your favorite story that you like to tell people, or your most recent favorite story that you like to tell people about skill gigs?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I'll go back to the time when the largest hospital system in Houston approached us to help them out during the throes of COVID, and the fact that we were able to supply them with nurses at scale.
Speaker 3:I think we ended 2021 by supplying them with at least 500 to 600 nurses and became the top vendors when it came to procuring these nurses in just in time. I think the fact that we had such a direct impact on people's lives during the scariest, probably, moment in American history, in the last maybe I don't know 40 years, where we were actually dealing with stuff and not we had Cold War. But in Cold War we were all thinking something might happen here, but in the pandemic it actually happened. Unfortunately, millions of lives were lost all over the world, and being able to impact that and being able to supply the nurses and manage that supply chain using technology was an extremely proud moment. And then everything our team did to step up I think I can't say enough about the leadership team, about the people who were helping the hiring managers and as well as the nurses, to get going and move at speed and doing whatever it takes. I think that was especially a proud moment I don't think I'll ever forget that, in whatever.
Speaker 2:I do Drinks, mike. Walk us on stage, brother. I love what you've built and I love the markets that you're serving and the way that you're serving with credentialing and the marketplace. I just love it. At least it's a wonderful way to help talent Both. Talent never sleeps. Talent moves really fast. It's moving even faster today than it was a year ago and that helps everybody. It helps the hiring managers if they want to move fast, and they usually do if they want to move fast. You can't move as fast as the cadence are moving. So I just love what you've built and thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 3:Oh man, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and great questions, and let's do this again sometime 100%, 100% and thanks for everyone listening.
Speaker 2:Until next time.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Recruiting Daly's Use Case Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite platform and hit us up at RecruitingDalycom.