Evan Sohn is the CEO of Recruiter.com an online hiring platform that provides on demand recruiting technology and services to businesses both large and small. They are also a publicly traded company; you can find their stock on Nasdaq under the symbol RCRT.
How's business these days?
So look, I think that we really are at the golden age of recruiting. Every industry, and I've been involved in a number of different industries around the technology sector, but every industry sort of had its moment in time; hardware, laptop, hardware sales, software services, software development, coding, telecom, e-commerce, mobile services, hedge funds, real estate, construction.
Every sector really had their moment in time to shine except for the recruiting industry. And now I think all points of light really shine on what's going to be an incredible business and industry to be in; recruiting and recruiting technology.
Here we are in a post-pandemic world, returning to the tight job market that it was pre-pandemic, and just a whole slew of economic, cultural phenomenon that's happening now, and we're at the epicenter of all those things as recruiter.com.
The market for recruiters is hot right now….how in demand are they from your perspective?
Yeah, so we post a recruiter index every month. It's a survey of our recruiters and we've been publishing the results really since the pandemic started. And we always talk about the hottest industries, where we've seen the biggest trends. And starting two months ago, we really started to see the recruiting industry really enter the top 10 industries.
So top 10 always included healthcare, IT services, software services, financials in some areas, and really starting to see the recruiting industry and staffing industry really pick up in the last two months.
And we're not surprised. As companies sort of now recognize that they decimated, in many instances, their recruiting departments, now they got to hire people back. And at the same time, we're preparing for the great resignation. We're going to see a significantly greater percentage of people resign from their current employment to go someplace else, either their virtual work, they want to only work remotely, they don't want to move; they move, they want to work someplace better; they don't want to go back full time; there are a variety of reasons, and those are all the things that are happening today.
Break down your products and services for the audience?
So the first really was, as a hiring manager, do you want to do it yourself or have someone else do it for you? And that's sort of the fundamental binary; do it yourself, you get a post-doctorate ZipRecruiter, Indeed, or LinkedIn, or some other job board, or I'm going to hire someone else to do it for me.
Now, it used to be that your choice of hiring someone else was either I was going to hire someone in-house and pay them a salary and pay them for their time, et cetera, or I was going to bring in an independent recruiter and pay them as a percentage of the overall salary. And those are really the two choices.
And what we're doing at recruiter.com is really reinventing the recruiting industry by allowing companies, large and small, to access, through our platform, on-demand freelance recruiters who will work as augmented in-house staff, paying them either by the hour or by the project, by the month, et cetera, to really help those companies, large and small, fill their candidate pipelines and fill the candidate requisitions.
Now, at the same time, we've sort of recognized that the best way to provide great recruiters is to give them tools, the recruiters, tools, through our software platform, that really make them incredible recruiters. And we have some incredible AI sourcing and engagement tools that really help build candidate pipelines quickly, efficiently and effectively.
And so those two things combined really represent the lion's share of our revenue. So it's on-demand recruiters, helping companies large and small augment their in-house teams, if you will, and then subscriptions to our software and services providing candidate pipelines.
Recruiter on demand how does that work?
So as a destination site for all things recruiting, and we are recruiter.com, we provide a number of third-party solutions to our network of recruiters. We actually run the largest network of small and independent recruiters, we've got over 30,000 recruiters on our platform, but we also run the largest LinkedIn network of recruiters and HR professionals in excess of 850,000 on a global basis.
So we're regularly bringing them value-added solutions, and what we started to see were people wanting to become recruiters. A lot of veteran spouses interested in becoming recruiters. That was the program that we started with Recruiter Academy, and really launched that through a partnership in training people on how to be recruiters, and then providing them internships with a variety of our clients as partnering them in the graduation process.
So it's been really exciting helping people become recruiters.
Tell me about your Recruiter Academy…
Yeah. It's a fee for service. I believe it's a 30 day program and then with some continuing educational programs. So we've been graduating a few people out of that. We used to provide training services also. Those are all available on the recruiter.com website.
Whats been the strategy for the job boards you have acquired?
You know, we're always about the recruiter, right? So in our opinion, a person makes three important decisions in life. The three most important decisions about who they spend their life with, where they choose to live and their occupation, and none of those decisions should be done alone. And we're not No Recruiter, we are recruiter.com, and that all starts, in many instances, with a job posting.
So we really found that, as a good lead generation tool, a job board is a great source to find the hiring manager at a particular company, as well as attract candidates. And so we have now Mediabistro, which is really the leading job board for the advertising and ad tech space; we actually also own OneWire, which is a financial services job board, 150 plus clients over the years, almost 700,000-something financial service candidates.
We're going to be launching a few others in the upcoming weeks to really help the lead generation process. We have demand today for easy ways for clients to really post a job.
And what's interesting is, ZipRecruiter and Indeed started off as, "Hey, here's a simple job board", and their model is, "Well, let's go spend more money to go find Google ads to go get candidates to apply." Ours is really leveraging the recruiter.
So, "I see Mr. Customer, that you've posted five different jobs for these different roles. Hey, can we help you use the recruiter to fill those jobs? Whether it's building pipeline, screening candidates, et cetera? And really looking at using our on-demand recruiting platform as augmenting your in-house hiring capabilities. And even if you don't have a recruiter as a company, what a great way to tap into an on-demand recruiter for specific either roles or challenges that you're having hiring people today."
