The Use Case by RecruitingDaily
RecruitingDaily discusses with guests how practitioners make the business case or the use case for purchasing their technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better.
The Use Case by RecruitingDaily
Storytelling About Weekday With Amit Singh
Want to revolutionize your hiring process? We've got Amit Singh, Co-Founder and CEO of Weekday, in our corner this episode. Weekday is a unique recruitment marketplace making waves in the world of talent sourcing.
This game-changing startup is all about fostering trust by providing upfront reference checks and reviews for engineering talent. Discover how Weekday is challenging the status quo in recruitment, offering a fresh layer of data that could drastically accelerate your hiring timeline.
Our conversation takes a deep dive into the inner workings of Weekday, starting with their disruptive payment model. Imagine only paying 15% of an annual salary for a successful hire? Sounds tempting, right? We also shed light on how Weekday is shaping up to be an indispensable tool for recruiters, connecting job openings with the best-reviewed talent in a snap. Catch a glimpse of their impressive stats and success stories, including having 60% coverage of reviews and arranging five interviews within just five days of signing up!
So, grab a cup of coffee, sit back and get ready to rethink your recruitment strategy. You won't want to miss this!
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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 in HRTech. That's what we do. Here's your host, william Tincup.
Speaker 2:This is William Tincup and you are listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have a mitt on from Weekday and we'll be learning about the business case, so the use case for why customers and prospects pick Weekday. So why don't we just jump into it A mitt, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself? And Weekday.
Speaker 3:All right definitely.
Speaker 3:First of all, thank you so much, william, for having me on the podcast. It's an honor, sure. So, talking about myself, I'm the founder of a company called Weekday. We are a recruitment marketplace startup wherein we basically help companies find engineering talent which have upfront reference checks available on them.
Speaker 3:So the easiest way to think about us is for a layman would be something like if, let's say, you're going to buy a product, in general, you basically look at Amazon, right? You look at Amazon and while you look at the product description, you also look at reviews, and that's a major part of the decision making process. If you go to a restaurant, you look at reviews there and ratings, as opposed to when you're. And that could be like as a simple thing, as like buying a t-shirt, buying a bottle, etc. But when it comes to like making a much crucial decision of who to hire, that's something that is not available and there are related reasons for that, but that's what we are trying to break. Hey, can we get reviews on people which basically bring trust into the whole hiring process, and eventual idea is that how do we bring this trust in the hiring process so that the interview process and the process like the sort of steps, extra steps that get added because there's no trust in recruiting process gets removed eventually.
Speaker 2:So that's what we are doing and so the reviews are for people. So if we said Yelp for people or Glassdoor for candidates or employees, etc. How far would we be off?
Speaker 3:I think that's a little reductive, but I think that's broadly what it is and like for someone to understand. I think, yes, that's what we do.
Speaker 2:Okay, and so the buyer of Weekday, who's typically? Who are we targeting as the buyer?
Speaker 3:So right now we are basically looking at startups which are seed series, a funded, for whom, like, the quality of talent is like the utmost importance, and so these would be start up looking to hire the early funding team wherein what, like one particular engineering hire could make or break the startup. So those are the early sort of customers and then, when it comes to larger ones, it ends up being like a very critical role that like a larger company which has it's how do you get so?
Speaker 2:two things how do you get people to join, or do they need to join, and how do you drive reviews?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so that's basically. I saw like there's a fairly powerful community that powers on the back end, which enables us to become like a Yelp or like a people, which is like a community of software. Engineers sign up on our platform, connect their email contacts, linkedin connections and agree to provide reviews on people if and when they get shortlisted or interviewed. Okay, okay.
Speaker 2:So this is actually a really interesting way to validate talent, especially technical talent. We'll just use that as an example, because you use the software engineers as an example. So if you've worked previously with this person or you know them from school, you can review them. So it's another way, another kind of a data point for HR, for hiring managers, recruiters, etc. To see some third party validation One way or another. Validation can be positive or negative, right.
Speaker 3:So it just being valid has to be negative for it to for it for the positive ones to actually have any value. So this is very different from. There are recommendations or reviews on LinkedIn as well, but nobody really trust them because there are multiple aspects to it. This particular, the reviews that we are talking about, is actually not available for the job seekers to actually see. A lot of confidentiality, that is ensured and we basically design sort of the whole review collection system such that it incentivizes the people to actually share negative reviews as well as well as share the positive ones that they've had.
Speaker 2:So what? What are we displacing? And why ask that question in a way I do? Is it other software, or is it something that's being not being done, or what are we displacing?
Speaker 3:So typically, like right now, we're building like a data sort of layer that, okay, this is like a lot of new data that we're capturing about people Now in terms of buying behavior. Currently we are displacing recruitment agencies, which typically would charge some like commission, like 25% commission on the particular hire. We basically displaced them. Right now, the eventual idea is to become like a recruiter tool wherein they have like access, to become like an endpoint wherein it's like they have all this data available to them and they can use it on the per use basis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you could do matching for the job that's open for the per talent and then be able to match that to the people that have the best reviews.
Speaker 3:Yes, so for a company, how it works is like you sign up for us. You find find all the candidates which would be like a fit. Okay, these are the reviews that are available from this particular person. Do you want to interview with them or not? And if they end up hiring by us, they pay us 15% of annual salary. That's the current.
Speaker 2:Right, which is a little bit lower than just a kind of contingency fee that a staffing firm would charge. Yeah, oh, I love that. Now, I hate software categories, just the concept of software categories. But a lot of budgets are built in Excel or Google Sheets etc. So what are your customers, what are they calling you and what are they putting you and where they're taking money out of budget to pay for you?
Speaker 3:So right now it is the budget that they allocate for recruitment contingency agencies, staffing, yeah, yeah. So basically you would use like a recruitment agency for, or they would they probably have a LinkedIn recruiter or any of these products that they use, and if they have an in-house recruiter, then it basically either takes time from LinkedIn recruiter or it takes money from recruitment agencies.
Speaker 2:I love this because reviews are the way that you get talent in and for talent to validate other talent, review other talent. But really what you're displacing is an inefficient staffing or RPO, MSP kind of recruitment agency model that doesn't give you those reviews, so they give you. They might give you the talent or source the talent to you, but you don't really know if it's validated, which means it's harder work for the hiring manager to then go find out if that person is really what they say they are, Whereas, yeah, With weekday you could. That's already. Some of that work's already been done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, perfect. So that's exactly what we do and, like, the biggest thing that a company gets out of us is that the discovery of talent. So now that is, we're in the business of discovery of talent and within that discovery, one is surfacing talent, which a lot of other companies can also do. But among thousands of people, how do you find out which is the best one for me to actually spend my time talking to, right? So what happens as a result of this crowdsourced approach that we have is that one? It does help in surfacing the best people, which might or might not be apparent from their, as you may, or like a LinkedIn profile and along with that, okay. So once you have surfaced someone, then you have like reviews on them available as well, and it helps in discovery as well as selection.
Speaker 2:Yeah, validation, it's okay. So let me ask you two buy side questions. One is when you get the opportunity to show an employer, a potential client, the software for the first time. So you get to go crack open weekday for the first time, which your favorite part of the demo.
Speaker 3:So for us, it basically, and during the demo process we set up like, okay, this is the only thing that we need from a particular company is the job description, okay, this is what you're looking for, and we feed into the system.
Speaker 3:It turns out okay, these are the 30 people would be we think would be a great fit, which basically automatically comes up within seconds and for each of these people they see, okay, this particular person, this fits the bill perfectly. Okay, or, this person is probably not a great communicator. This is what their ex manager at the previous company had said. So when they look at this specifically review, they think, okay, now I can take a call and not waste take a call at this point itself and not waste my time talking to someone, go through four rounds of interview and then probably reject this person. So when this that reviews upfront is basically when they feel that wow moment, okay, this is. I've not seen this anywhere else, it's not available and I would probably have to waste probably six, seven manners to actually get to the same moment of date that they has already been connected.
Speaker 2:So other reviews just real quickly, for the application for the audience is other reviews. Can they be anonymous, they tethered to a profile, or both Like how do you, how does the, how do you know if you're a hiring manager, you're looking at a talent and you really like them and you see all the reviews that data is either again, it can be anonymized or it can be tethered to a profile, but again it's private, so it's something that only you can see. So what's the? What's your model around reviews? And again, there's pros and cons to anonymous and tethered to a profile. I totally get that, but just what does that look like?
Speaker 3:So for us, we basically optimized on how much can you trust that particular review. So majority of the reviews end up being non-anonymized, so that tethered to a profile and who is giving this review is that's huge, equally or like sometimes more important than the review itself.
Speaker 2:Agreed, I see that I like that. And again, if someone needs to be anonymous for whatever types of reasons, I totally get that as well. But if I worked with somebody at Metta and worked together for three years and it just so happens to be product leader or somebody that everyone knows, et cetera, that review especially if it's a glowing review, that review is going to carry its weight in gold.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and so what we typically see is that whenever there's a negative review that is, when, like the reviewer chooses to be anonymous in loom form cases and in exceptional cases that's they generally keep it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, but again, you don't want to, you don't want to burn that bridge. So I can see that as well, Because it's like they tell you early in your career you never know when you're ascending, you never know who is going to work for you, because you never know who you're going to know you're a work for. So I can see why people would want that to be anonymous. But also the realness people being able to say Pat's really good at this, not great at this. If you're looking for, like a software, if you're looking for a software architect, pat is fantastic, like top 1%. If you're looking for a person that just is going to spend 14 hours a day to writing code, that's not as strong suit. So what do you need? So it could be a review like that and so like I get somebody's going to have to be able to go through that review and go okay, no, that we do need an architect. We need we. This technologist needs to have more of a brain rather than architect than an actual program.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, and that's basically how our reviews are, like, structured as well. You have to choose between an access of these three. So someone is good at communication, someone is good at IC work, and you have to choose between the two, like you can't deselect both, which basically means that which is the strongest suit and then what is the second is probably the weaker suit.
Speaker 2:Oh, I liked that. I liked that a lot. Okay, Cause then against forced. But you've got to get people so that they don't say everything is great.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, yeah, that's the hell.
Speaker 2:Again. You mentioned LinkedIn earlier and that that was. They've never really put time by an injury. Energy behind that and it's always been thought of probably incorrectly, but been thought of publicly is just I'll talk to you, review for you, which will be glowing. You'll do a review for me and it'll be glowing. And neither are accurate.
Speaker 3:Exactly and, if you think about it, that's exactly what happens in the current sort of hiring system as well. So typically you would actually ask for a reference check towards the end, when you've actually made the decision to actually give it this someone, the give a person an offer or not, and you would ask that candidate hey, can you give me two references? And they would give two people who are most likely to give glowing references.
Speaker 2:I've always wondered that I've only who gives a recommend, who gives a potential reference, the a bad this person's going to give. It was a terrible experience. I don't think they really liked me, but you know what call them. Anyhow, let's just see how that goes. I've never understood that, cause these are three people that know me possibly are family members and they're all going to say really nice things about me, which is basically a waste of everybody's time yes and no.
Speaker 3:so it does have some purpose that, if your objective is not actually to find out any red flags, if your objective is, how do I set this person up for success in terms of just?
Speaker 2:Good point okay.
Speaker 3:It is still helpful, but it is not like serving the exact purpose why you were doing it right.
Speaker 2:We were trying to find out other bits of information that we couldn't find out there. What are? What's the pricing model? So what is we'll get in the dollars and cents part, but I'm assuming sass, or Is it not sass?
Speaker 3:So we do both. Right now, the majority of it is actually like person this we charge 15% from the company side in terms of if they end up hiring buyers. Small portion right now, which is slightly larger, the company's is sass, where they pay like a fixed amount per month.
Speaker 2:Okay, good, good, good. Let me ask you a workflow question. Where in the workflow do people use weekday we? Are they using it as a sourcing tool, or they're using it like? What I'm really thinking about is what? What other technologies does it need to be connected to?
Speaker 3:So they're using it as a sourcing tool and Once they've identified a particular lead who's actually shown interest and they have, they found okay, this was person. I don't want to do an intro or a first round call with. That is when it goes into an ATS and we don't get the idea sort of a side of the part. We're basically going to the bucket of sourcing tools, right services that exist on but it's a different type of way of going about sourcing, is you know?
Speaker 2:I mean, there's been sourcing tools that are great after on the marketplace, and but this is going about sourcing in a different. It's a different paradigm.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and so like the. That's why the analogy of like Amazon or yet make sense, because then you're Finding out this particular product after you've initiated, let's say, send a request to contact this person. Then the whole journey goes into another surface suit.
Speaker 2:I can see that. I can see that all right questions that buyers should ask. So If they've never bought something like this, right? So if they bought sourcing technology, then it's okay. This works similar to company X, but we're different in in this way. What questions if you could script them for for prospects, what would you like for them to be asking you?
Speaker 3:so most typically the questions that get asked to us is there are tons of other ways in which I can get quality needs right, which is I could use either like an outsourced agency or I could hire in-house person and do that. What like? Will I get a different set of candidates here? And the answer to that is yes, because For us, like whenever someone like this kind of talent that gets sourced here is basically passive talent, which is might or might not necessarily be looking out.
Speaker 2:I love that Go ahead, no finish it.
Speaker 3:Quality of talent ends up being very different from most, because most of the sourcing tools exist that out there, apart from like a few chosen ones, would actually have, like people who are actively looking out, and more often than not, that is not the quality of talent that you would want to restrict yourself.
Speaker 2:And we started with kind of a technical talent, and so let me go back to that real quick. Is that basically? Is that who we serve Is technical talent, or is it broader than technical talent?
Speaker 3:Right now it's technical talent, because that's we wanted to start with a sort of a very targeted piece of the market and then just be very good at it. So right now it is technical talent, but the idea here is to evolve into a more general marketplace. It's like a very similar thing to Amazon, that you start with books and then do everything.
Speaker 2:Are you going to market with partners right now? Are you? Is there? The question, I guess, is around the ATSs, because we mentioned ATSs. This is sourcing gets people to a place, whether or not you then integrate into CRMs and things like that, but also integrate into ATSs. If they want to drop that workflow into ATSs, are there? Are you already integrated with a bunch of ATSs?
Speaker 3:Not right now, but that's something that is in the pipeline. So we would like just about started building some of those integrations. But for now it is mostly driven by that once you have an interest person you manually have to do it right now, put into the ATS and which, because so like that is a friction point, yes, but because of that you add that sort of our customer C is high enough that they would still want to go through that friction point. Eventually we would want to make that friction lesser.
Speaker 2:What successes can we talk about without brand names or stuff like that company names? Tell us a little bit about some of the early successes that we've had with weekday.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So in terms of their two ways in which we define success, one is surfacing good talent and the second is do we have reviews on that? Right now we have. We are at a stage wherein, from for any talent that is available, we have reviews coverage of around 60%. So there's a 60% probability that you would find like a legitimate, trustable review of a particular person that you would want to talk to. So that's one specific success that we see. The other is how quickly would you be able to have five interviews, interviewable candidates, on your calendar? So that is basically what we pride ourselves in that within five days you would be. Within five days of signing up, you would be able to have five interviews on your calendar with 60% coverage of reviews available.
Speaker 2:So what's the basic go to market strategy right now is how do we get people to know about this? What do you think what's the strategy to get? Again, things are noisy, right. So like how do you get? How do you cut through the noise? How do you all plan to and how have you already cut through the noise?
Speaker 3:So right now, it is most of the times that we end up getting are through like interactions or people inbound, people reaching out to us, and we also have something called talent drops, which is whenever there's like someone who has done a job post and wants to get like access to three set of candidates. Then we have this list of candidates, which is a weekly newsletter that goes to recruiters or hiring managers and they can just browse these profiles and if anyone gets into profiles and reviews and if anyone is interested, they just deeper into it and then sign up on a platform.
Speaker 2:So we're having this podcast a year from now. What's different about weekday? No-transcript.
Speaker 3:So here from now, we would be, I think, at a stage wherein we have probably cut down a few steps in the interview process. So what I mean by that is because, at the end, what we're doing is we're trying to build trust into the hiring process. The reason why you make like a stranger which is you're looking to hire, go through so many hoops is because you don't trust that person and eventually, what the world we would like to do is because, let's say, if you're doing five interview stages which is making people cross like an individual step because there's a lot of trust associated with the person, the person is no longer a complete stranger. You would have only three interview stages and the time to actually hire someone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sorry to interrupt. It's interesting because you speed things up, but also you've increased the quality, because people can then see the reviews and again, just like Amazon, just like Yelp and et cetera, so they can see the reviews, they can see all the positive, they can see whatever might not be perceived as positive, but it will speed the hiring process up, which helps everybody helps candidates, hiring managers get talent recruiters everybody wins.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and that's the whole problem right now, like you're talking to a stranger and then you can't really trust a stranger unless you have you talk to them enough number of times. But if there is some way in which you could trust that person beforehand, you would not want to talk to them enough number of times.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because in my mind of I've combined on Google, or when you first go to Google and you've got that, the search bar, but you've always I feel lucky or I'm lucky or whatever, the one that's bit that I've never used, I feel lucky. It's almost like that at Amazon. If you were to just go to amazoncom and then just go yeah, I feel lucky, just serve something up and then just buy it, not even not looking at the reviews, not thinking about it. It's Amazon knows me well enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, good.
Speaker 2:Let me buy that. It's that it could be a home run, but there's so much that you could do that would help that and qualify. And again, reviews are an interesting, it's a really compelling way to qualify a candidate.
Speaker 3:And imagine, like, even in the Amazon analogy, if let's say you were like Amazon was not, did not have those reviews, or like a sort of component, what you would have to do is then do an inquiry to that seller and then you have to talk to that seller to just build that trust that is going to give me, and then probably have a bidding system, et cetera.
Speaker 2:I have to admit to you. I mean, I've been on record saying that it really doesn't matter what the reviews say. So just bear with me, it matters. It matters more how many reviews you have, and so this is typically because I advise a lot of startups, so this is usually advice I give them like listen, get on G2, get on software advice, get on all of these things, give reviews, get as many reviews as you can, because oftentimes people don't look at the sushi restaurant, the actual reviews themselves, they just look at the number 76,000 people reviewed this restaurant.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's got to be good, and so the assumption has got to be good. Now, with this being talent, they're probably going to go a little deeper than that. So maybe I can adjust my line of thought. But in general, like around software, they don't get into the reviews that per se. They look at the quantity of reviews, which still could hold true here. If it's too like talented people, one's got 180 reviews and one's got two, I'm probably just being a human being, I'm going to probably look at the 180 as better. Whether or not it's actually better or not, If I don't read the reviews, I won't know.
Speaker 3:But that's where this analogy breaks, because, like why you can do, look at things wherein the absolute number of reviews have been the SK user lesser. Like for the Amazon, it has a fairly limited number of products and then one product in that sort of someone is hiring a product for their particular use case and there are a large number of people are using the same sort of product, versus, as opposed to when you're working with a talent and if a large number of people have used that's not necessarily a counterintuitive right, so a lot of people are giving you reviews.
Speaker 2:You've worked with a lot of people.
Speaker 3:So it could, might not be that good.
Speaker 2:I love it. I absolutely love what you've built this is. I'm so glad we got on the phone today because I just I had an idea what you did, but you really did a great job of breaking it down, so thank you so much for covering our time.
Speaker 3:for us, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for these many insightful questions. I've interacted with a lot of people and, like even investors etc. Have not asked me this day to day.
Speaker 2:That's very kind of you, and thanks to the audience. Thanks for everyone being here and we'll see you 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 RecruitingDailycom.
