Thad Price: 0:03

I'm Ford Motor Company and I'm looking for folks that are in market to buy a truck. Where do I find people that are in market to buy a truck? They can be on a search engine, they could be... Facebook, they could Instagram any of these different, advertising areas. And so the whole idea is audiences. And we said, Hey, what if we could create a way and create a platform where employers could access talent audiences

Tom Raftery: 0:28

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Digital Supply Chain podcast, the number one podcast focusing on the digitization of supply chain, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 312 of the digital supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery, and I'm excited to be here with you today sharing the latest insights and trends in supply chain. Before we kick off today's show I want to take a quick moment to express my gratitude to all of our amazing supporters. Your support has been instrumental in keeping this podcast going. And I am truly grateful for each and every one of you. If you're not already a supporter. I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about supply chain. Supporting this podcast is easy and affordable with options starting as low as just three euros or dollars a month, which is less than the cost of a cup of coffee. And your support will make a huge difference in keeping this shool going strong. To become a supporter, simply click on the support link in the show notes of this and every episode. Or visit tiny url.com/d S C pod. Now without further ado, I'd like to introduce my special guest today Thad. Thad, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Thad Price: 1:46

Yeah. Thanks again, Tom. Great to be here. Great to spend some time with your audience and share a little bit more about talent attraction. And the art and science that we're tracking the right candidates. I'm Thad Price. I'm CEO here at Talroo, and I'm fortunate to lead the team and continue to forge our effort around creating an amazing talent attraction platform for enterprise and mid-market employers.

Tom Raftery: 2:11

Nice. And tell me a little bit about Talroo Thad. What made you, jump outta bed one morning and decide we should set up this talent company?

Thad Price: 2:22

Yeah, absolutely. So a little bit about my history and the evolution of job advertising is always a great place to start. So, I've been in the job board industry for almost 20 years and saw the focus, immediately around an employment marketplace and a job board. And, you know, early on when you think about the ways that companies attract talent and advertise jobs was through the newspapers. This was over 30, 40 years ago, many years. Newspapers were where a lot of companies advertised their jobs. Mm-hmm. And a lot of folks found employment through newspapers, many of us, including me originally. And as the internet continued to evolve and grow, we started seeing classified businesses emerge as a great, opportunity, to essentially attract candidates because you go where you go, where the people are. And in this world, you know, we started seeing, online marketplaces like employ, like, uh, Monster and Career Builder form very successfully at connecting to candidates and connecting to employers. And so they were kind of the first generation of job boards. Then, over probably the last, I would say, 10 to 15 years there was this move to aggregation. So because you have this fragmented, industry of Career Builder, Monster, Hot Jobs, and others, and many niche, job boards. Indeed basically came into the scene and aggregated a lot of the job content across these various job boards. Again, highly fragmented industry, newspapers, of course sold job ads as well in partnership with some of the employment marketplaces. However, Indeed was really this aggregation engine to really drive access to all the jobs in one place. So very successful business. This idea of all jobs in one place, creating a lot of great opportunity for job seekers and employers alike. And so as, as sitting on the sidelines and, and being in the industry and kind of watching this move, what we started to see is a focus around outcomes and a focus around activity. And so if you think about Monster and Career Builder, go back to the newspapers. Originally, you, you were paying per character. So if you wanted an ad in the newspaper, you would pay per character, Monster and Career Builder as they started to provide advertising services to employers. It was per post, so generally hundreds of dollars to post a job ad. And you know, it was, there was this, uh, view in the world where it was a post and pray, right? I, I, I post a job and I pray that I get the right candidates, and then as Indeed started moving into the scene, their business was more like Google. It was more pay per click oriented. So just like when you advertise on Google, you pay per click Indeed was, Hey, I'm gonna aggregate all of the jobs align, and then I'm gonna pay per click. Well, we started looking at the industry and we said, well, there's another movement here that's happened in other marketing businesses, and that's this idea of audiences and advertising to audiences, and essentially trying to find places to advertise, where the audiences are. So if you think about traditional, if you think about, online advertising today, when a company looks to engage in an online advertising campaign outside of talent attraction and job advertising, it's usually, Hey, where do these audiences hang out online? How do I access these audiences? Right? You know, Hey, I'm, where do I, I'm Ford Motor Company and I'm looking for folks that are in market to buy a truck. Where do I find people that are in market to buy a truck? They can be on a search engine, they could be... Facebook, they could Instagram any of these different, advertising areas. And so the whole idea is audiences. And we said, Hey, what if we could create a way and create a platform where employers could access talent audiences? And the idea is at search time and understanding more about profiles and job seekers, we can really focus the idea around connecting to the right audience and connecting your jobs with the right audience. And that's decoupled from a destination, right? That's not an indeed.com or a monster.com or careerbuilder.com experience, it is let's find the audiences where they are aligned. And so today our, our software and our engine powers almost 2 billion job searches a month. And when companies work with us, they can find those talent audiences like folks that works in the, uh, in the supply chain industry using our platform. And so you can showcase your jobs, you can advertise your jobs. And then the beauty of that is, remember I said earlier was this pay per character, pay per post, pay per click. We can advertise when a cost per application goal. So the applicants that are actually being submitted, in the applicant tracking system, we can optimize based on that. So that's the genesis of our business, is looking at where we can move and where we can provide more value to employers in creating unique offering.

Tom Raftery: 7:19

Interesting. And how do you get the audience, I mean, you, you, you say you, you're providing audiences to advertisers, but yeah. How do you get that audience?

Thad Price: 7:30

Yeah, it's great. So early I said, Hey, I've been in the job board business for almost 20 years. So we owned a job board. We owned a job board, jobs2careers.com. We own that domain and that job board today. And what we found was when we were going and chatting with customers about advertising on jobs2careers was that it wasn't as exciting. It's a job board. There are thousands of job boards out there. How is your job board better than, than any other job board? And so we opened up the architecture that Jobs2careers uses so that other companies can use our systems to bring jobs to people. So, you know, first and foremost, our origin, our history, our legacy jobs2careers is very important for us. Secondly, you know, as we work with partners and that have audiences, we can connect our architecture on those sites online as as folks are hanging out. So we can power job alerts, we can power notifications, and those sites when using our architecture, our employers have access to those candidates. And the beauty about that is we're studying those locations, those partners, the apply actions so that we are right pricing the candidates as we connect directly to the employer. So that's the story. So lots of companies using our engine to power job matching and job searching, across the internet are owned and operated site, which is job2careers.com is of course the largest.

Tom Raftery: 9:02

Okay. Wow. Interesting. And what kind of trends are you seeing in the space right now?

Thad Price: 9:09

Well, we're seeing a lot of interesting, uh, moves from a job seeker perspective and an employer perspective. So the first thing that we've seen, is that if we go back, probably I would say, five to 10 years, pay was of course one of the key, components of whether, you know, I will accept a new opportunity and I will, you know, I'll start working for the employer. While that is still the number one, key of whether you're going to, uh, attain a successful hire or not. The second is providing flexibility. And so what we've seen out of this is that flexibility is one of the things that folks are really looking for in addition to pay. And that's always been one of the top three to five, benefits that job seekers have been looking for and candidates have been looking for. But the margin is narrowing around pay. So there's definitely, there's compression. Folks want, a lot of flexibility. in addition to good pay. That's been one of the biggest things. And the reason why we've seen that, and one of the things that we've seen is that out of the pandemic, people want to care for their family. They want the flexibility to go and, ensure that they're, Investing in what's important for them, and that's of course their family. And a lot of, I think a lot of employers, forget that. So the other thing that we've seen is that in the last probably, I would say five to seven years, there's been this gig economy that has, formed that at any given time you can turn on an app and deliver groceries. Mm-hmm. You can, drive for Uber and others, uh, you can deliver food. And when you think about that and you think about, the ability, and I said earlier about flexibility and wanting flexibility, the ability to turn your app on and off when you want to work and maybe not make as much money but make, similar amounts, is very appealing for folks. And I think we're seeing more and more of that, especially in the frontline hourly labor market where we spend a lot of our time.

Tom Raftery: 11:52

Okay, cool. And what are the main industries, I guess first of all, that, that you're dealing with? Is it all supply chain or are there other industries as well? And within supply chain, are there particular aspects of supply chain that you deal with?

Thad Price: 12:07

Yeah, so one of our number one, industries, is, warehouse. You know, we're, we're delivering folks that are working inside, inside of warehouses. I would say last mile is probably another, uh, is probably number two. Number three would be, CDL trucking. Those are some of our top industries as well. And then we go into restaurant hospitality, anything that is essential worker related, hourly worker, oriented. That's where we spend a lot of our time and where our customers have a lot of success.

Tom Raftery: 12:38

Okay. We've seen, uh, in the last four or five, six months a huge uptick in, news stories around AI. Is that something you're keeping an eye on? Is that something that you're building into your own platform? Is it something that you see will impact recruitment in your space?

Thad Price: 13:03

I do. I do see will impact recruitment in our space and we're already seeing it, but how we're seeing it and how we think about the world and leveraging AI is, is potentially different than folks maybe in the media. What I mean by that is, is we should be automating redundant tasks. That's the key to this, right? Mm-hmm. You know, a lot of folks say it, I say it in a number of, different interviews as well. I said, Hey, you can't take the human out of human resources. There is an emotional connection to people. That's very important. The hiring process. There is this connection that needs to happen between an potential employee and an employer, and we need that. We need that experience to be pure. And however, all the things like scheduling and, screening from, from, in some ways, where we can actually provide the ability for human resources team to spend more time with folks to make that hiring decision, I think is where the opportunity is. You know, for example, you know, have little, little things like, you know, how often do we spend a lot of time trying to find the right time on a calendar for an interview? Well, there are ways that you can use AI to find the right time and be successful at that. Sure. And that's an example of where, hey, let's automate that redundant task of scheduling. Very simple, very simple use case. We're also starting to see, this being used for job descriptions to be able to write a job description. You know, one of the things we see from our customers is especially smaller customers that may not have a talent acquisition team or a large HR team is, the art and science of writing a job ad, is not embraced in the way that it should be because maybe the experience isn't there. But in some cases, AI can at least give you a place to start when you're writing a job ad better than potentially you could on your own. And so what I like to think about and what I like to say is it's really AI assisted, right? When we think of how AI can benefit talent acquisition processes and human resources processes, it's how we can benefit and how we can eliminate these tasks that are redundant or save us a lot of time.

Tom Raftery: 15:22

Right. That makes a lot of sense. And do you have any success stories or case studies or anything like that that you can talk to?

Thad Price: 15:31

Yeah, absolutely. So. one of our, large, staffing firms, one of our customers, StaffMark, has been working with TalRoo for almost a year now and providing a lot of great success in actually finding, temp workers within our platform and advertising, of course, their jobs, you know, directly. So that's a great case study. We have a number of case studies, on our homepage, and you're welcome to check them out. Another great one is with Transforce, which is a large staffing firm focused on transportation, and we work with them to provide them candidates as well, that they can then turn into hires in the form of truck drivers. So we've been working with them for a number of, months as well, over a year now, of course. And, um, happy to continue that conversation and, you know, feel free to check out any of our case studies, online.

Tom Raftery: 16:21

Okay, great. Great. Is TalRoo pointing itself more at the employer seeking employees rather than the employees seeking employers or is it, are you going both directions?

Thad Price: 16:37

Great question. We're going both directions. When you power a job search, you have to go both directions. There are a lot of, vendors in our, and partners in our industry that are focused on the B2B side, right? They're providing technology for employers to use in order to advertise their jobs. Because we power, you know, a job search engine and powering almost 2 billion searches a month, we have to ensure that we're providing a great experience for the job seekers as well in the form of job matching and providing them and surfacing the right job ads based on their behavior and based on what they're looking for. And so that's one component that I think is, is very important. So it's a great question. We have to satisfy both really. We have to satisfy, we have to satisfy another as well. And that is the folks that are using our architecture. So in that world, our business is probably a lot more like, Amazon, where you have Amazon Web Services, you have Amazon Web Services, Amazon to consumer, and of course the merchants that advertise on Amazon. Our business is very similar, where we have to satisfy the folks that are using our architecture to power job searching our partners. We also have to satisfy the employer who's advertising jobs. And of course, at the end of the day, the job seekers, the job seekers are the ones that are actually applying for jobs. And the ones that are finding jobs, that then from a business perspective and the employers benefit from. So it's, it's a tough job to handle all three, right. But we're, we're happy to, we're happy to serve the industry.

Tom Raftery: 18:04

Cool. Cool. If you were to give a few bits of advice to any employers looking to take on employees, what top three kind of tips would you give them, or what advice would you give them?

Thad Price: 18:20

Yeah. The first thing I would say is, is the idea of talent acquisition and attracting candidates today looks more like a sales and marketing process than ever before. And what I mean by that is, is if you take up your sales and marketing processes, you know, at the end of the day your sales team is looking to create a pipeline of customers and of course sign those deals. Mm-hmm. Um, in a similar way, your talent acquisition team or your human resources team needs a pipeline of candidates and they need to sign those candidates up as an employee, and drive a hire. And it's a very similar process, if you think about this idea of a candidate pipeline being very similar to a sales pipeline, it can help you rethink the ideas of, you know, the candidate experience, how your talent acquisition team is connecting the candidates, the time it takes for an employer to connect with a candidate that's in high, high demand, just like, just like a sales lead. Open your mind to this process is more like a sales process and a marketing process, and that's where Talroo provides value, right? Given that talent acquisition and the idea of attracting candidates should look more like a marketing process. You know, the idea is we want to help you build your pipeline, so when you're ready to hire and, and, and you're ready to make that decision, you have candidates available for you to hire, to interview, to go through your hiring process. And that's a marketing process and that's what I think is exciting about the industry is that when we can rethink this idea and reshape that talent acquisition is more like marketing and sales, and recruiting is like sales. Then we can challenge how we're connecting the candidates and how we're thinking about the world today as far as attracting candidates and driving hires for businesses.

Tom Raftery: 20:18

Okay, and to flip the question, if I am looking to get a job. I am actually looking to get a job, but that's another story if I am looking to get a job. Uh, what advice would you give, potential employees?

Thad Price: 20:35

I would say research companies, do research your companies, look at the processes in place. Um, look for companies that you feel a connection to. I think that's very important. Um, especially when you think of you know, you're gonna be pouring your energy into a company. So many folks will look at pay. I think pay is one component of that process, but I like to think of something, like the clearing opportunity. And the clearing opportunity is all the things that this potential opportunity offers you. And pay is one component of that, but it's more about where you can go and where you can grow. And I think when you, especially in frontline in hourly recruitment. Now, when I said earlier about, you know, this idea of, gigs and app-based marketplaces, really putting pressure, on employers to find, folks that are engaging frontline and hourly employment, that's transactional. You know, you can make some money, you can turn the app on and off, but it's a very transactional process. When you're thinking about this idea of maybe you can't provide as much flexibility as app-based marketplace, sell the idea of this is a place for you to grow and this is a place where you can essentially, you know, take your career to new heights. That's not something that's being provided in transactional marketplaces, you know, as a freelancer or in other areas. And I think that's very important. And so many companies need to really think about showcasing, uh, your internal testimonials of team members or employees that have actually started, you know, start at the bottom and work their way up. That's a story to celebrate and more companies need to celebrate that story, especially to attract audiences in a different way today.

Tom Raftery: 22:30

Okay, cool, cool. Where to next for TalRoo? I mean, what are the features and things that you want to add to the platform in the coming 3, 4, 5 years that you see are important?

Thad Price: 22:47

Yeah, so today we're focused, a majority of our time with mid-market and enterprise customers. So, you know, we work with companies like UPS and Amazon and FedEx and others through some of our channel partners uh, as well. And so we provide those businesses, great services and mid-market businesses as well. We provide great services, but those companies have a lot of scale, right? They're looking to hire a lot of folks, high volume, hiring quickly. They also have very, well built out processes and systems in place that enable this connection to team members and to prospects and candidates faster. Than other businesses. And we think today that there's a pretty big void in, and a pretty big opportunity on how small businesses hire. Mm-hmm. And a lot of our focus will be, looking at that area and seeing, you know, how we can automate, as I said earlier, automate some of the processes because small businesses usually don't have a talent acquisition team. Small businesses usually have one or two folks in human resources. But it's still, the processes are still not as streamlined as they should be and honestly, hiring's a drag, right? It's, it's something else to do when you're, you know, when you're the owner or you're filling in for folks that don't, reach their shift. And we think that if, as we look at the industry today, we think that there's a huge opportunity to bring more value to those businesses and, shine a light on, you know, how it can be more effective. And essentially be a talent acquisition team. Like how can our system be a talent acquisition team and fill the void and, you know, TalRoo provide the features and services and, and functionality that a lot of the enterprise companies have today, in more of a small business field. So we're gonna be looking pretty heavily on, you know, how we can provide value to those businesses while we continue to integrate. So, uh, the big thing for us, this year is integration with, applicant tracking systems. So applicant tracking systems, many companies have. They're, built for, workflows of candidates. They're not necessarily built for a candidate experience. So we're looking at connecting, and integrating with those applicant tracking systems to reduce friction for job seekers.

Tom Raftery: 25:08

Okay, cool. And I should have asked you earlier, where did the name TalRoo come from?

Thad Price: 25:14

That's a good story. so, you know, as we were, as we were in this journey, and I was, thinking about okay Jobs2Careers, you know, calling customers, trying to get a reaction to, okay, who is Jobs two careers? You know, are we a job board? It was tough. It was tough given that, you know, we weren't able to tell our story the way we wanted to tell our story. As we rebranded to TalRoo, the idea was we wanted be able to share this story of audiences and talent audiences, and it's about finding the right candidates where they hang out online and where they, you know, and providing value in, and the ability to create your candidate pipeline. And so we started looking at brands and started, you know, putting words together, you know, like right, like great, all great startups in that world, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and so we said, Hey, well, hey, what if we bring talent together with recruiting? And at the intersection of talent and recruiting, there's, there, there are hires. And so that was the genesis of TalRoo, this idea of bringing talent and recruiters together, through our platform, which is the Tavora platform.

Tom Raftery: 26:27

Okay. Very good. Very good. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now Thad, is there any question that I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Thad Price: 26:41

No, this has been great. Tom. I really appreciate your invite and great to share more about our story and I hope, uh, your audience has received some value out of talent attraction. It's definitely an art and a science.

Tom Raftery: 26:54

Fantastic. Thad that's been really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Thad Price: 26:59

Thank you so much, Tom.

Tom Raftery: 27:06

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, simply drop me an email to TomRaftery@outlook.com If you like the show, please don't forget to click Follow on it in your podcast application of choice to be sure to get new episodes as soon as they're published Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find a show. Thanks, catch you all next time.