In this last installment of Voices with Joveo's founder and CEO Kshitij Jain (aka KJ) Chad & Cheese press discussion around programmatic use for diversity hiring and programmatic success stories.
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Voices Intro (0s):
Voices, we hear them every day. Some voices like mine, smooth and confident. While on the other hand, the Chad and Cheese podcast is like listening to a Nickelback album. You rather stab yourself in the ears with an ice pick. Anyway, y'all now listening to Voices of podcast series from Chad and Cheese that features the most important and influential Voices within the recruitment industry.
Voices Intro (31s):
Try not to fuck it up, boys.
Chad (33s):
Welcome back. We're continuing the conversation with a veteran of the recruitment tech industry. Kshitij Jain aka KJ, founder and CEO of Programmatic platform Joveo. Enjoy. We're in an age in, in a society right now, where especially in the US inequity is, is all around us and companies are talking about diversity, but they're really not doing it right.
Chad (1m 16s):
They're talking about it, but there's not a lot of action. Is there something that they can do, programmatically that can help them target more diverse pools of candidates so that they can find almost like, kind of like a partial easy button to get more diverse candidates into their jobs so that they can have better diverse applicants and hopefully fingers crossed they can get more of those applicants in as candidates and also hires.
Chad (2m 6s):
Is something that programmatic can do to help? Because good God, we need it.
Kshitij (2m 12s):
You know what I really truly care about? We are just taking it to the next level. So, and it's my personal case, right? I came wide-eyed American dream to this country in 2001, an Indian immigrant, right? An Asian immigrant. And I know that the minorities exist. I know that there is a glass ceiling, there's a constant challenge to move up the chain, right? It happens like, come on, like happens with so many of us around us, right, women, right? There's a glass ceiling. It is a known thing. And what we can do to do better across different races and even gender for that matter is.
Kshitij (2m 48s):
I actually kind of give you a small little example, our worldwide head of sales, Mike Warner. He actually was one of the pioneers in the ad tech industry. He had built two companies, sold both of them for a couple of hundred million dollars. One got acquired by Yahoo back in those days. And back in the day, early and late 2000s, they're talking about behavioral targeting. They're not intent marketing, back in that time, guys, we don't even think about intent marketing observed behavior, behavioral targeting, as of today.
Kshitij (3m 19s):
And these guys have been there, done that build one of the most successful companies and had some two couple of amazing exits and, and you know, he and I were on a call with a customer, and just to your point, diversity. It's like, Hey, I know the CEO of perhaps the largest ad tech company out there, or the head of sales and, you know, we know enact tech that we can actually pinpoint accuracy, reach out to diverse candidate and display right out in front of them. We can guarantee that we do that, right.
Kshitij (3m 49s):
And we can put the ad in front of them. But the issue here is if you leave it on someone else to do that, coming back to the push strategy, right? You leave it on someone else to do it. You don't really know whether you are actually putting the right job in front of the right person. The right person could be defined by diverse candidate as well. At least not companies can truly control. I want to make sure 20% of my ads go to diverse candidates, in front of them, 30%, 40%, whatever that number is. We can make that happen and then he told me that, I said, I just took it for granted, Mike, but I'm glad that you're saying it because you've done it.
Kshitij (4m 22s):
And you know, it's really interesting. They have done it in attic while for a different reason altogether, like a certain product will appeal to a woman more than to a man, right? They know how to target people. And the targeting is so advanced. You can't even imagine that. And I think we all should care about it. I think as a corporate, if I was running a talent acquisition, I will actually set us out a budget and say, this budget only goes to that player, which can guarantee me that this will go to diversity. I'm not going to give it to someone who is, I do it all, but I don't really know how much it goes to diversity.
Joel (4m 58s):
Talk about the, the pandemic quickly and the impact on, on not just your business, but sort of technology as a whole. Most of the popular sentiment seems to be that when we come back and into the business as usual, if you will, that there'll be a lot more automation. A recent article said that 40% of the jobs that are lost won't won't return. I'm assuming that, that's going to be good for programmatic solutions, right? Companies who bring back fewer recruiters, fewer people to post jobs, there'll be more efficiencies around that.
Joel (5m 29s):
Agree? Disagree? Are you seeing anything now that would, would indicate how programmatic is going to be adopted coming out of the pandemic and how do you think it will fare with other technologies like yours?
Kshitij (5m 40s):
I totally agree. And I would say I would go beyond that in saying that, people have taken this time to take a step back and say, am I doing it right? Right. What does it really matter? Right. We are asking these questions at every level that you're talking about and even on the workplace and this a time when people have understood that I can't waste money. These are valuable resources. If I save a little bit, I've saved jobs out there, right. If I spend a million dollars less in marketing than perhaps I will have to let 15 less people go right. For that matter, right? I'm just trying to, and I'm not in the math, but I think it's about that much.
Kshitij (6m 14s):
So, so where people have started to come to thinking about is, can I now therefore do something that will bring efficiencies and optimizations? Are my recruiting team or sourcing teams do what they're supposed to do, right? The kudos have to recruit Amman, engage that candidate, talk to the candidate, work with hiring managers and not spend that much time sourcing. So there's a lot of automation that I've seen started. People started talking about it. They started wanting to see the visibility to a hire and asking questions of how would you build the intelligence loop, which will, of course, Joveo and Programmatic is nothing but activations.
Kshitij (6m 52s):
I see we have three pillars, right? If you were to actually ask me and where we fit in this ecosystem and why we will as a, as a programmatic industry and not Joveo standalone and who, so it does a better job of it and maybe have a bigger market share? But the way I see it as, and again, this is Joveo is we are looking at it. Is there three pieces to the programmatic world? One is we call it the intelligence. The second is activation, and third is insights. And it's not something that we're creating new. This has been existing in that tech world for a long time.
Kshitij (7m 23s):
So, so now the platform we talk about the programmatic platform, it's just one of the three pillars, the trading platform where you do middle piece activation, right? So once you activate the suit engine, you want to get his insights. How did I perform? Did go well or not? You understand? There's a very big difference between diagnostic and prescriptive. We have always been a industry or as professionals, all this diagnostic let's diagnose the results. Come on. That that wall is gone. Let's do prescriptive analytics.
KJ (7m 53s):
That's tell you that based on the activation results, the insight should tell you that if you did this, this would happen. And then the system will take that back into the first pillar called intelligence and deploy that. So I guess everybody's starting to see that connection now, much more clearly than it was earlier. And therefore the industry is going to do much better now.
Joel (8m 12s):
Great. That we agree with that. And, and, and, and you've sort of laid out what that looks like. I want to give you a chance to sort of, sort of a plug plug, Joveo, and give us an example of a case study for a customer where they saw these kinds of efficiencies and what it meant for their business in terms of bottom line and actual bodies, you know, building the business.
KJ (8m 34s):
Sure. So I got so many case studies. I'd like you to pick an example of a ...
Joel (8m 40s):
So many, so many successful customers.
Chad (8m 43s):
I love that, that's awesome!
Joel (-):
Hell yeah!
KJ (8m 47s):
Actually we do less, but we do it better than anybody else, and that' kind of the philosophy. So if you really deeply care about the customer, we can go into deep with that customer, understand the problems and then try to solve. And if you solve it for that customer, you actually solve it for the industry or perhaps all your customer base. And one thing I would say, is giving an example of a customer. I like to take the example of a customer, which is not even North America, because it's easier here, right? To understand the context of a job in the English language and to do that mapping, I'll take you a little bit further out in Germany.
KJ (9m 23s):
It's a much difficult, much harder market. It is not an ecosystem that is similar to ours. And, you know, we love this one of the largest brands out in Europe, in our space. And then, and this is where we kind of deployed a lot of intelligence, right. And by the way, just so you know, it's not like we have a lot of data in Germany, right? We have some, right, we have some data in France and in terms of London in the UK, because we have customers out there, but unlike the U S we don't have a deep, deep data. And so, and I'm kind of just use that example, that if you have a good seed data that you have, and the seed data typically should happen at the beginning of the cycle of a user or customer interaction, right?
KJ (10m 4s):
You ask for historical data to give me, show me how you performed. And that, that is the intelligence that comes first. But if you do not have the seed data, then what you do is you, you do the activation. And we did activation through mojo platform and we saw some results coming in. And we kept on deploying this and after about seven or eight cycles, I would say, and this is a fast moving industry with cycles happen within 15 days time. So end to end cycle, you can see in how the results are performing and what are the outcome for that? Some people can define, apply as outcomes. Some people can define a hire as an outcome.
KJ (10m 35s):
Some people can define the lifetime value as an outcome, which is, which is very important in the gig economy, right? So that lifetime value is really the metric that they care most about. So what our outcome, they defined, we were able to bring down the cost, just the cost part of it, because they care about the cost. And that was the first part of the KPIs that we had by about 50%, half. They really, truly care about the time to fill. And that was also reduced dramatically. And that gives them a key advantage, that gives them a key differentiator versus the competitors in the marketplace, right?
KJ (11m 9s):
They're also competing with someone else the faster they hire, the better they will be able to get the work done then because everybody's competing for the same pie. And that became for that large, large company, a very key differentiator. I'll give you an example of, you know, a delivery company out there. They were able to do the same example, right? Reducing the cost to apply from, let's say a 16 to $20 range to a $4 cost. This is one aspect of it, right? If I'm a hiring manager, I will not care as much about the cost as my care about the speed at which I need to get the people.
KJ (11m 43s):
And we were able to bring the highest cycle from 30 days to about 15 days, just the relevance, right in these are relevance. You get lesser people, you get, and these are benefits and advantages that come, but the companies have to invest in Programmatic, right? Programmatic is not a magic wand that you put in one day and something will come out tomorrow. You invest not just time, but invest in data. You work and then you see the magic happen of like the other customer I talked about as I talked about 85% conversions, right?
KJ (12m 13s):
Once you know, who is the right person for a job. And, and certainly the world is different. I see a world where companies will take back control of the data and say, I'm using it judiciously. So that's the, that's the example I can take. So the delivery driver example was a very North America example. It is, it is delivery, right? It is very, very important. I can actually take historical data of a company and we can as an I as, and this is something I taught literally three years back, and we should be able to spit out and say, this is how you will change.
KJ (12m 46s):
This is how your world will change. We did this. And that is what we should be able to do that do not get into the diagnostic phase, but go into the prescriptive phase, give us your intelligence. We'll tell you how we'll activate it to give you the insights that will demonstrate to you that improvement has happened both on a cost to hire and time to hire, or like the cost and the time to fill rates as they talk about. And both are very important. And if you go to our mission statement, we say deliver the most relevant hires in the shortest time. So relevant and time that two key levers that we focus on.
Chad (13m 22s):
Excellent KJ. Hey Man, we appreciate you taking time with us. And again, going through all of the stockers in an awesome conversation, and we were very happy and honored to have you on the show. Thanks so much. Now, if people and people are looking to find out a little bit more about Programmatic and Joveo, where would you send them?
KJ (13m 46s):
I would say that please reach out to go to our website and fill out a form. My phone number is updated on the site, my email is there. All our sales team members information is another website. Please feel free to reach out to anybody. And it doesn't matter of hours we'll, we'll get back to you. We'd love to share with you how you could do it better.
Chad (14m 8s):
Excellent.
Joel (14m 8s):
joveo.com Joveo everybody.
Chad (14m 11s):
That's right Baby. Thanks so much. And we out
Joel (-):
We out.
Voices Outro (14m 18s):
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