Fantastic Four? Interviews w/ VideoMyJob, YouVisit, Seekout & AllyO

Hey kids, this week Joel was in San Diego at ERE and Chad was in San Francisco at a Biddle Consulting Group Institute Summit - swanky right?

Luckily between naps Joel was able to get some quick interviews from - VideoMyJob - Kristen Graham, Co-founder - YouVisit - Erik Carlson, National Ad Director - Seekout - Anoop Gupta, CEO - AllyO - Ankit Somani. Co-founder

Look for these companies to get in front of the FIRING SQUAD very soon.

Give it up for our sponsors. Lots of wallet share love should be bestowed upon America's Job Exchange, Sovren, Ratedly and JobAdX - only one X.




Chad: It's Chad. This week, Joel was in San Diego at ERE. And I was in San Francisco at a Biddle Consulting Group Institute summit. Swanky, right? Luckily, between naps, Joel was able to get some quick interviews from VideoMyJob, YouVisit, Seekout, and AllyO. The problem is, without me around, well, Joel goes a little soft on the interview. So look for some of these companies to get in front of the firing squad very, very soon. Enjoy.

Joel: I'm here with Kristen Graham of VideoMyJob. Kristen, give us the ... Well, you're Australian so welcome to the States here, first of all. Talk clearly, 'cause our audience is a little slow. Give us the elevator pitch about what VideoMyJob does.

Kristen: VideoMyJob is exactly that. We bring jobs to life on a scalable way for organizations to govern their brand and ensure their brand is ... Can we start again?

Joel: Pause. Go.

Kristen: VideoMyJob helps organizations bring their jobs to life on a global scale.

Joel: Very good. There are a ton of video solutions out there. What makes you guys different? What's your differentiator?

Kristen: So, VideoMyJob helps organizations film with in-app features like teleprompter, lighting balance, volume, audio enhancement. We then allow you to edit the video and add B-roll footage of your team or the environment that you're working in. And then, we share. So, we allow the organization to share throughout their ecosystem. Whether it's on a job board or whether it's on their internal Vimeo, internet, or whether it's an email or text message. Or on all their social platforms in the right file format.

Kristen: And then, we track that video. So the fourth thing we do, we track how the video's performing. How many applications it's getting. Views, comments, engagement, all that sort of thing.

Joel: There's some debate about video. About whether it should be sort of a high-priced ad agency manicured video, versus just push play on the iPhone or record on the iPhone and submit to YouTube. What are your thoughts on those two worlds? And where do you guys sort of come closer to?

Kristen: Sure. I think there's always a place for highly polished corporate videos, especially for TV and promoting products. But when it comes to promoting a job, it's the people that sell the opportunity. And it's ... people join companies for people. And a hiring manager or recruiter or even an employee in the job are the best people to actually describe what the actual opportunity is. So I think there's somewhere in between. Picking up your iPhone and recording, I think, is a little bit too casual for a corporate environment. But VideoMyJob helps you get that authenticity across in a video. And, yeah. I think that's pretty much covered it.

Joel: Yeah, to me, you guys ... And we certainly can't show this on a podcast, but you guys have some features that sort of allow you to have a raw type video but then also look professional at the same time. Talk about those features that allow users to do that.

Kristen: Sure. So, we work with an organization's marketing team. So we set the brand guidelines in the app, and then close it down so your employees can be generating the content but keeping their brand guidelines set to the company's brand. We also have governance across, in the app. Where a standard user can create, edit, and ... But the administrator is the one that shares and promotes the video.

Joel: And one of the features that I think is cool is almost a little teleprompter where you can have a script and be video taping someone and they can read the script. So anyone sort of shy of video and nervous, I think you guys kind of take that out of the process.

Joel: Tell me a little bit about your pricing, the product breakdown. What does your typical client look like?

Kristen: A typical client looks like a large corporate client who really has a great brand. They have a great employee brand and they want to bring that to life through using video. So, we have different pricing models for size of company. But we're just started out in America. And opened our office in San Francisco 10 weeks ago. And we're going to market with a US launch special of 2,000 a month. And that allows an organization across America to create unlimited video, have unlimited users on the platform. We also ... that includes your onboarding. So, your users get to go through our online training platform. We also have these cool little selfie sticks that you get for your team. And also all your brand set up integration, that's all included.

Joel: Any thoughts on VR? Augmented reality? Are you bullish on that, bearish? What are your thoughts?

Kristen: I love it. Especially if ... for grad campaign show days where you try to really immerse the person in the role. I think it's an awesome opportunity. I am struggling to see how that can come to life in everyday job ads. I still feel typical bringing a job to life through seeing real people is a better, more scalable approach to that. If VR can be scalable, how awesome would that be?

Joel: She's trying to speak English, which is her second language. So she's stumbling through some of this. It's okay.

Joel: Where can I find out more about VideoMyJob?

Kristen: Videomyjob.com.

Joel: Thanks Kristen.

Kristen: You want coffee with that?

Joel: It's commercial time.

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Chad: It's show time.

Joel: Hey guys. I'm at the ERE conference, as you know. I'm here at the YouVisit booth. We're talking VR headset employment, which I've always found fascinating. Chad doesn't think so much of it, but I do. They are the only VR headset company here at the show. So I wanted to take a second to talk to them. Here I've got Eric Carlson, senior sales manager. Eric, how are you doing?

Eric: Great, thanks. Thanks for coming by.

Joel: Excellent. Well, give us the quick elevator pitch on what you do.

Eric: We create virtual reality and interactive 360 experiences for different use cases. From recruiting purposes, for training, branding, et cetera.

Joel: So a lot of people will say, "I don't have a VR headset. I've never done VR." What is sort of your opinion on the future of this? Is it really gonna take off? I assume your business is predicated on it actually being popular, or maybe it doesn't. What are your thoughts on VR sort of as a general business strategy? And ... yeah.

Eric: Well, VR ... Part of the ... Is VR is gonna continue to evolve as content becomes more available and accessible to be able to use it. Our platform actually, you don't need just the VR headset. You can actually access and have full interactivity on your mobile phone, on any platform. Tablet and desktop as well.

Joel: So you're working with Deloitte to do this. Tell us exactly what you're doing for Deloitte and how they're benefiting from VR.

Eric: Yeah, we've worked with a lot of companies. From Cisco, Deloitte, Pilot. And what we're doing is creating experiences that show a day in the life. So, someone walks in the door goin through ... it could be a different job track, for example. Something like that. With a compass group is something we created, where you can choose the job track that you're going on and now follow that person in a virtual experience, and a day in the life and see what their day is like and what it's gonna be like to work there.

Joel: What would Deloitte or one of your companies say is sort of the goal of VR? Is it actual leader candidate generation? Is it just a branding tool? What are they getting out of it?

Eric: It can be both. It's certainly branding. The part of it is vetting. You wanna get the right person who's truly interested in your company for the right reasons to come through the door to ... When, sometimes people are spending resources to bring people in for interviews, things like that too, you wanna make sure that you've vetted the right person and that there's true interest. Also, people are spending a lot of time researching your company. From going to LinkedIn, Glassdoor, whatever it might be. And going to your website. If they go to your website and find a link that can take them through a 360 experience and different parts of your company, there's a true value to that. For them to truly have an understanding of what it's going to be like to work with you.

Joel: Now, one of the things that your product sort of requires is that a user download a native application on Google Play or iTunes. Have you found that to be a hurdle for adoption or not so much?

Eric: That's only one component. You can use the mobile app for the mobile experience. Or, to put that into a VR headset. But the other components of what we do, as well, is that you can have the full interactivity on any platform. On a desktop or even a mobile device without downloading the app. The value to downloading the app is getting a fully cached experience. You don't have to worry about wifi, for example, or internet connection. But then also, being able to put it into a VR experience, which works really well. If you wanna bring some sort of cardboard headset, for example, to any type of event that you're doing or hosting. Or even use as a mailer to drive attention and to brand yourself.

Joel: Now, one of the things that I find amusing ... and I've been doing this for a while. When webcams were first on the scene, and not every computer had a screen on it, companies would actually send out branded webcams to candidates to then do over the internet interviews. And you guys have a nice little package here where I don't have to necessarily have a VR headset. I don't necessarily have to have the tools. So tell our audience a little bit about the packages that you're enabling companies to send to people, how they're using it, and just exactly how that's working.

Eric: Sure. We work with companies that you can actually ... it's called a cardboard headset. It folds down to basically like a four by six and a one-half inch deep. Very light. And these are something that you can actually brand. You put your logo information on it. On the back side, you can put the information. "Download this app. Put your phone into the headset." And now they have the VR experience. So this is something that you can use as giveaways and also as mailers. People will often mail it out, too, when you've identified a certain quality audience that you want to send this experience to. And now they have a branded headset specifically with directions to have the VR experience that we've created for you. And they're gonna hang onto this headset, as well to continue with your branding.

Joel: To me, it looks a little bit like a DVD box.

Eric: Yeah.

Joel: About the size of a DVD. Tell me about pricing.

Eric: Pricing ... the experiences really range depending on the level of interactivity that we do. We're a full-service solution from pre-production, going on location and shooting, post-production. Pricing starts in the 20k range and then builds from there depending on how many interactive elements we build into it. We are, with the experiences, able to take your existing videos and photos, et cetera, and build them in as hot spots, as well. So you can use your existing media as part of the experience.

Joel: Where can I find out more about you?

Eric: Come to youvisit.com.

Joel: Thanks, Eric.

Eric: All right. Thank you.

Joel: It's commercial time.

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Chad: It's show time.

Joel: I'm here with Anoop Gupta, CEO and company-founder of Seekout. Anoop, thanks for taking some time out with us today.

Anoop: Thank you, Joel. We are excited to talk to you. I love the writing and the work that you do.

Joel: Thank you very much. Well, a lot of people don't know Seekout. Give us the elevator pitch.

Anoop: Seekout is a passive recruiting tool for the savvy recruiter. Some of the unique points are how we give people talent insights. So you know, whatever role they are looking for, how do they find where the candidates, what they do. Both has a ... to be more focused in their recruiting and in conversations with a hiring manager, which has increasingly become important. We are very good at diversity, and that is important to almost all enterprises and business. To grow a business. Whether you're looking for African Americans, womens, Hispanic, veterans. How to find highly qualified candidates. And then one of the most unique aspects of Seekout is how we can enable you to find great coders who are there are on GitHub. We can take their GitHub profile, combine it with their public information, run education and experience. We can bring the work they've done in their repositories and serve it to you in a beautiful, searchable experience.

Joel: Great. Now, you have a pretty unique background. Tell me about that, and then also tell me, what inspired you to get into the HR space? And have you been verified by a therapist to be sane?

Anoop: That's a ... So Joel, my background is I was a prof at Stanford. And I sold my first company to Microsoft in 1997. And had a variety of amazingly interesting. I was fortunate. Roles inside Microsoft. From directly appoint to Bill Gates as his technology advisor to heading all our business communications exchange and Skype, global tech policy, education. Basically, after 18 years at Microsoft, I wanted to travel new roads. You know, all of us have one life and we gotta have the experiences and the learnings. And Microsoft is discovering the world when in an 18 wheeler truck. I wanted to get on a bicycle and travel the hills. So, you know, this is an amazingly humiliating and ... humbling, not humiliating, experience. And it is a tremendous growth experience for me.

Joel: There are the a lot of competitors out there that are sort of sourcing tools like yours. Entelo, Hiring Solve would be ones that our listeners know about. How are you guys different? Or, can you use all the services together? I don't know there's a winner take all? Or, what are your thoughts on that?

Anoop: So, Seekout is unique, as I said, in terms of how we help you develop tech talent. How we help you get to diversity. How we let you get the insights. And some deep machine learning in the search engine that we do for you. We interface and play vowel with other tools. And you know, ATS/CRM systems that are there. But it is our take, coming from a hiring manager. So one is, we love recruiters. We don't think it is replacing them, anything like that. But we also come very much from the hiring manager perspective. How do you improve that interaction? Because if you can engage with the hiring manager, you will waste less time sourcing people. So a lot of it comes from that perspective for us.

Joel: What do you think the profession of sourcing looks like in five years?

Anoop: I actually write what the recruiting toolbox people say. It has to go to be a talent advisor to the hiring manager. And also, similarly, a resource to the candidate. For the candidate to say, "Yeah, I wanna have a relationship with Joel and him pushing me or taking me to my future dreams." You've got to offer something. You've got to say, "This is what people like you are doing." Hiring manager needs to know whether this talent is scarce. How scarce? How do get it and what is really important. So, we wanna enable that relationship.

Joel: Give me a sneak peek into Seekout product-wise. What can we be expecting in the next few months for you guys to release if you can let us know?

Anoop: So, we are very rapidly evolving and adding things. And we are driven basically by what organizations recruiters what, hiring managers want, and which can facilitate. Today, some things we want to add a lot more sources. You know, LinkedIn profile is one snippet of what a human being, a professional, is. So one big area for us is how do we bring in information from many, many other sources to build a more complete picture that will allow a better relationship with the candidate and the hiring manager? The second thing I believe is that engagement is really important. One is to find the person, but then, how do you reach out to them? How do you engage? How do you follow up? That is extremely time consuming in hard. And we are figuring out what our role should be in that.

Joel: Gotcha. You mentioned LinkedIn. And our listeners know about the case with LinkedIn and HighQ. The scraping of data and profiles. Obviously, this impacts you. What are your thoughts on the case and how it might turn out?

Anoop: So, my belief is that the public profiles belong to the candidates. They want it shared with the world. And if LinkedIn is making it available to the public, the way the internet is structured, they should be available to anyone. And this si regardless of how we think about the data. If you do price comparison on internet, it won't work if you are not able to look at Amazon and [inaudible 00:20:41] and Nell. So internet, in fact, it's value comes from the openness. And that is what we believe in the LinkedIn and support the HighQ case.

Joel: Cool. Tell me about pricing at Seekout.

Anoop: So pricing, we have three levels. We have a 100 dollar a month, or a 1,000 dollar annual pricing. We have a 250 dollar price point, and a 500 dollar a month price point. And this is all depending on the capabilities. For example, the one with our GitHub and diversity and insights and lots of things at 500 dollars. But we have all different price points to meet the needs of recruiters.

Joel: And where can our listeners learn more?

Anoop: They should come to seekout.io to look at website. And you can mail me directly, anoop@seekout.io.

Joel: Excellent. Thank you, Anoop.

Joel: It's commercial time.

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Chad: It's show time.

Joel: Instead of starting out trying to pronounce my next company's name, I'm gonna let him do it for me.

Ankit: Our company is AllyO and my name is Ankit Somani.

Joel: Ankit. Correct? Okay.

Ankit: Yeah, that's my name. You got it.

Joel: All right. So, AllyO, providers of Ally, the chat bot. You guys just got some money. How much?

Ankit: Very raised overall 14 million dollars. And Bing Capital Ventures was the lead for the round. And we have Google AI Fund, which funds AI first companies come in. As well as Roundstar, who's a great industrial partner for us.

Joel: Great. So, give us the elevator pitch on what Ally does.

Ankit: So, Ally is ... The shortest version is, it's your team's AI recruiter. But the longer version is it really helps your applicants as well as hiring managers becoming their single point of contact throughout the recruiting process. For applicants, it means taking them all the way from initial hire to when they're hired. All the steps of the process automated over any form of conversation platform. So, it could be texting, it could be web chat. You could be seamlessly going between each other. But not only does doing it for applicants turns out hiring managers and recruiters don't have a great experience with existing systems anyways. So it's a lot about, "How do you make their life much, much easier?" 'Cause at the end of the day, you need to make their productivity much better.

Joel: So there are quite a few chat bot players here at the ERE conference. Paradox and their Olivia chat bot is here, as well as Maya. Anyone going through the exhibit hall asking what the difference is between you and the others, what answer do you give them?

Ankit: I think there are a few different things that we've done. So first, if you look at number of public deployments there are out there, that is this product proven or not? We literally let our customers shout out for us. So you see bunch of case studies. You actually see them deploying this product, completely scale it, and see and reap the advantages. And we have done multiple presentations with customers. So one is, the actual value of it. Is it proven? And in our case, we think it is.

Ankit: The second is, it's really end to end. So, we don't think of ourselves as just screening tool. We don't think ourself as just standard experience or just scheduling. We think the biggest problem with the ADS and HRS and the payroll world was that people spend their entire careers building these products and integrating them with each other. We wanted to have, as I said, a single point of contact. So, one that takes people end to end. And automated at that. We already do multiple languages. We are in multiple countries. So all of that is there. But the end to end part is really important. Because if you look at AI, a big part of AI is the conversation system itself. But the bigger part of it is, how do you collect data at each of these instances and make two plus two five? That is, use the data to self-improve the process over time. And I think that's where we really wanna be playing.

Joel: Give us an example of a current client and how they're using the tool today.

Ankit: Absolutely. So, one of our current customers is Hilton. And we even did a public presentation with Hilton two, three weeks ago at a conference at Vegas. And Hilton ... so, different customers use it in different places. There are people who use it pre-ADS where they are really trying to attract more applicants. There are other people who are trying to use it post-ADS. Where for them, it's not a problem to attract people. It's a problem that it's too overwhelming. So, how do you make recruiter productivity much better? And so in Hilton's example, and several other customers' example, there's a whole lot of screening and scheduling that needs to happen after that. All the way to somebody getting hired. Like, we even do offer extensions, background checks, lots of different things. And even continue the conversation post-hire. So we think of it as a complete package for the applicant. That's how people have been deploying it.

Joel: The latest round of 14 million. What do you plan to do with that money in the next year or so?

Ankit: Absolutely. So, I mean, we're a technology company. A big part of it is to continue to make our technology much, much better. We're investing a lot in that. We've just hired rock stars in that space. People who have been doing dialogue systems for more than 15, 20 years. So, a lot of focus on that front. We're gonna be investing ... you know, our scheduling product is our own. Already does multiple types of scheduling. We're gonna be investing a whole lot on that. But that's mostly on the product side. Bringing it global, making more languages happen. A lot of that. There's a ... there's a big part of focus which is around the sales and marketing side. So, we stayed in stealth for the longest time. Because we were getting enough customers, we were able to prove it out. But now, we wanna use this funding to really put the name and word out there. So that's gonna be a place where we've been investing a lot.

Joel: Right. Tell me about pricing.

Ankit: Pricing is, you know, it's always an interesting thing. Because when you are focusing on individuals and SMBs, you almost need to publish it out on your main page because that's how ... you just want that to be a very friction-free process. Ours tends to be primarily focused on medium to large size enterprises. So we have an enterprise-type pricing. So, it's not something you go on a website and you see. But it's very value-based. So we look at it in terms of, how is it that a customer's gonna use it? What's the value they're gonna get out of it? And how do we make sure that while they're enabling that value, we get a piece of it? So, that's how we think about pricing.

Joel: How can I learn more?

Ankit: There are lots of ways to learn more. You can go on our website, request a demo if you haven't seen that, of Ally. Would love for you to see it because the best part about chat bots, it's extremely experiential. And once you see it, I bet that you'll be a fan of it. So just come hit us up at www.allyo.com. Request a demo. Hit me up. I'm Ankit Somani, you can hit me up on LinkedIn. I'll respond to your text even if it is at two a.m. in the night.

Joel: Fantastic. Thanks.

Chad: Joel and I will be back in our virtual studios this week. So get prepared for the Chad and Cheese at snark level alpha. Yeah, I have no fucking clue what that means. But it sounded good. We out.

Tristen: Hi. I'm Tristan. Thanks for listening to my stepdad, The Chad, and his goofy friend Cheese. You've been listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss out on all the knowledge droppin' that's happenin' up in here. - They made me say that - The most important part is to check out our sponsors, because I need new track spikes. You know, the expensive, shiny, gold pair that are extra because ... well, I'm extra. For more, visit chadcheese.com.

#VideoMyJob #YouVisit #Seekout #AllyO #ERE

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