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Chad Sowash

Chatbots Are Not Enough


Hourly hiring remains incredibly challenging for employers all over the world. Fountain is one of the leading solutions to help companies solve this problem. That’s why we invited Fountain CEO Sean Behr to the show. Hot off the heels of a recent acquisition and live from SHRM, if you’re doing high-frequency hiring, this interview is a must-listen.


PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:


Intro: Hide your kids, lock the doors. You're listening to HR's most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.


[music]


Joel Cheeseman: Oh, yeah. What's up, kids? You're listening to the Chad and Cheese Podcast. We are recording live from the Aaron Booth at the SHRM National Show in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. This is your host, Joel Cheeseman, flying solo as Chad works on his savage tan on the beaches of Portugal. And today I would like to welcome Sean. Don't call him Grizzly Bear. He's more of a teddy bear. Sean Behr, CEO at Fountain. Sean, welcome to the show.


Sean Behr: It's good to be back, man. This is great. And it's SHRM.


Joel Cheeseman: It's good to be in the trenches, right?


Sean Behr: It is right here.


Joel Cheeseman: You and your ivory tower, the CEO. It's good to come down and hang out for a little bit.


Sean Behr: In the booth, meeting people.


Joel Cheeseman: In the booth. So speaking of, you guys have a nice presence over there. Any quick takes on how the show's going so far?


Sean Behr: The show's great. There's a lot of people here. I think we're getting good traffic and having lots of meetings. Look, anybody will tell you that your number of leads you get by people just walking up to your booth is really small. You've got to do the work before the conference and after the conference. But this is a great show. You've gotta be here. I have to be here just to talk to you.


Joel Cheeseman: Of course. Of course. What better reason? Obviously. So everyone that goes by the booth knows what you guys do. Some of our listeners do not. Feel free to give a little bit about you, but also what the hell does Fountain do?


Sean Behr: Let's start with Fountain. I'll take the second part first. Fountain is all about high volume hiring. So think about roles that are your frontline workers, where you're hiring lots and lots of them, thousands and thousands of them. Most of the time and most of the booths here at SHRM are focused on knowledge workers, where you're trying to reward knowledge workers, retain knowledge workers, hire knowledge workers. Fountain is focused on the hourly worker or the blue-collar, grey-collar worker around the world. Someone who's in the front lines, someone who's doing a task every day, typically an hourly worker here in the US or in North America. And we help customers hire those workers at scale. We're honestly the best solution. If you're hiring thousands of hourly workers, Fountain is the best software solution. I call it a conversion machine. You go from sort of getting a few people through your door to lots and lots of people getting through your door, coming to work for you. Your stores go from understaffed to fully staffed at Fountain. It's a little bit about Fountain. For me, I'm a technology entrepreneur, so it's actually my fourth journey here.


Joel Cheeseman: Look at you. Your mom must be so proud.


Sean Behr: I'm working on it. Maybe if I get to five, she will be.


[laughter]


Joel Cheeseman: Okay.


Sean Behr: No, mama bear is always proud of her teddy bear.


[chuckle]


Joel Cheeseman: I like that.


Sean Behr: But yeah, this is my fourth journey and the best one so far. So I did one in e-commerce, one in ad tech, one in automotive, and now one in HR.


Joel Cheeseman: Awesome. I'm excited to have you on the show. So just a little bit, he's too proud to not say it, but I would refer to you as one of the apex predators of the new breed out there. You've raised around $219 million. You were founded in 2014, so there's a nice track record there. I wanna jump quickly from some recent news where you guys acquired a company. I won't steal any of your thunder. Talk about the acquisition.


Sean Behr: Yeah, we're really excited. We found a company and a team, Clevy, which they've been in the AI conversational, AI, HR space for the last couple of years. I was fortunate enough to meet them, get to know them. And when I look at an acquisition, I'll talk a little bit about the company, but when I look at any acquisition, I've done a lot of them in my career, the first thing you're looking for is team. Are these people the right kind of people? Are they gonna fit in with Fountain? Are they gonna help you move your mission forward? And so that was the first thing. And the Clevy team checked the box 10 times over. Second thing is, they have unique domain experience. Their product is focused on the conversational AI technology between workers and employers, which is great for us. And then third thing is, it plays into this trend of AI. I know a lot of people have spent a lot of podcast air...


Joel Cheeseman: It's kind of a hot topic.


Sean Behr: Lots of podcast air being spent on AI and generative AI and large language models, but there is some value in that. And again, not buying all the hype about it, but if you can deploy it to accelerate the mission, and at Fountain, our mission is to open opportunities for the global workforce. I'm interested in any kind of an acquisition that's gonna help accelerate that mission and bring more value to our customers and importantly, more value to workers around the world.


Joel Cheeseman: So Clevy is based in Paris. So I have this vision of what closing a deal with a Paris company looks like. Paint the picture for me. How many bottles of wine did you go through?


Sean Behr: They have excellent taste.


[laughter]


Sean Behr: In both wine, champagne, good food. But they are a hardworking entrepreneurial team. Incredible people to work with. But yes, good champagne.


Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, that was my next question. We cover Europe quite a bit and there seems to be something in the water in Paris. Some hardworking people that know workforce tech somehow.


Sean Behr: Defying the stereotypical. Look, we can't all be in Portugal on the beach.


Joel Cheeseman: No, we all can't be Chad. That's for sure.


Sean Behr: Only some of us can, but not all of us can.


[laughter]


Joel Cheeseman: So, news came out, I think it was in March, that you had launched Fountain AI. And part of Fountain AI was conversational AI, ChatBot, whatever you wanna call it. And then you turn around and buy Clevy. Was Clevy the back end? Did you find out that we couldn't quite do it as well as Clevy did it? What happened there between March and the announcement?


Sean Behr: Actually, we were doing great, but really saw the power of what we were doing. So first thing I'll say is, ChatBot's not enough. We've all been on ChatBot conversations that lead to nowhere.


Sean Behr: Just slows you down, doesn't get you the answer. And how many times have you been with a ChatBot or on a phone call where you're like, just can I speak? I need to speak to a representative. I wanna talk to a real human. So, ChatBot's not enough. We were really proud of the conversational AI technology we developed in house, but very quickly realized we could accelerate that even further. With the Clevy team and helping them join us as well as help accelerate the efforts we were already making. To give you kind of an example, our AI technology was great. It would help you collect information from applicants. We're all about how do you make it easy for an applicant to wanna work for you? For, the labor market in the hourly work world is incredibly competitive. Try to go look at any grocery store in the US. And there's signs up that say we're hiring, they're always hiring. We're...


Joel Cheeseman: With bonuses. Usually.


Sean Behr: With bonuses. Yeah. Nice bonuses now. What we say is, you've gotta make it great from the moment the person wants to apply for your job. If you only make it great after they start working for you, you're gonna miss out on 95% of the people, 'cause they're gonna go somewhere else. A lot of these hourly workers, they're applying to eight, nine, 10 jobs simultaneously. Which is incredible. I mean, and they're doing it all on their mobile device. If you can engage with them where they are, whether that's through an AI ChatBot or a mobile first application, or a way to use SMS or WhatsApp, if you're in Europe, those things get you a better way to engage with the applicant. And you can get more people through your funnel, more people to your front door, and then your stores become fully staffed.


Joel Cheeseman: Yep. So, as you know there are a lot of established players in the conversational AI ecosystem. Where do you guys fit in? Are you an also competitor? Are you different? Are you playing catch up to them? Is it pretty much equal at this point? Where do you kind of like rank everyone at this point? How do you see it?


Sean Behr: Yeah. I mean, the way I would say it is two things. I think, the conversational AI technology has rapidly evolved over the last 12 months. I mean, obviously ChatGPT is an open AI, but lots of other companies have made huge leaps there that have made conversational AI ChatBot technology, I would argue a table stakes issue. You just have to be pretty good at it. It's sort of a feature. It would be like having an applicant tracking system that doesn't do background checks would be really weird. You've gotta have conversational AI technology, I think as a table stakes feature, the thing we've realized is you can't, being able to just chat AI with an applicant isn't enough. You need to be able to schedule an interview. Which means you need to know what is inside the recruiter's calendar.


Sean Behr: What availabilities do they have. So that you can say to an applicant, Hey, here's some windows for interviews and book those interviews. Those are the things you need to be able to do that you can't just do with a conversational ChatBot. You need to be able to upload a driver's license if the job requires a driver's license or upload a nursing license if the job requires a license. Those things can't be done with just a ChatBot. You've gotta have deeper technical capabilities built into that. So the ChatBot can be a front door. But what's behind the door is way more important.


Joel Cheeseman: Interesting. So you bill yourself as a labor ATS, why not just an ATS?


Sean Behr: Yeah, that's a great question.


Joel Cheeseman: Why so fancy?


Sean Behr: Yeah. Listen, you gotta stand out somehow. Look, the world of ATS is an old, we've all had ATSs for 20 years. I've bought them 10 times over at 10 different places. The thing we think about though is most HR professionals who are generally knowledge workers make an ATS decision based on their own experience for them, for their peers, for the coworkers around them. Without thinking, Hey, I've got 10,000 people in the field who don't have a laptop. How do you build a labor? How do you build an ATS that works for labor? And that's how we came to this labor ATS, one of the things I did when, this now three and a half years here, or three years from the day one, I've said, look, we've gotta focus on the hourly worker. The blue-collar, grey-collar, hourly worker. That's our whole focus. And so labor, the labor ATS is just great marketing.


Joel Cheeseman: Okay.


Sean Behr: That's all it is.


Joel Cheeseman: We'll go with great marketing, we'll go with great marketing.


Sean Behr: It's like Pepsi. It's like the choice of a new generation.


Joel Cheeseman: Is it harder to be a good ATS or a good conversational AI technology?


Sean Behr: It's hard to be a good ATS.


Joel Cheeseman: Interesting. Interesting.


Sean Behr: Way harder to be a good ATS.


[laughter]


Joel Cheeseman: I can only imagine. I can only imagine. So you mentioned a little bit about the macro economy and things that are going on. You guys have raised a lot of money, so I'm assuming there's a lot of dry powder in your arsenal. But what's your take layoffs in tech? It seems to be a rolling recession, maybe, by some people's accounts, but I wanna know how you see the current state of the economy.


Sean Behr: Yeah, it's an interesting time for a lot of tech companies. I think the best way I've heard it is, we're sort of in the... We're in the hangover zone. We're...


Joel Cheeseman: A place I know very well my friends.


Sean Behr: Yes. We both do. We're in the hangover zone. Here's the reason, the party was really great, from, call it 2012 to about 2021. 2020. Late 2021, and it actually got... Even when we thought the party was over at the beginning of COVID, turns out that was when the good stuff came out at the party.


Joel Cheeseman: The good punch came out.


Sean Behr: The real good stuff came out at that party. And so what you're paying for now in a lot of tech companies is you're paying for the excesses of the party, during the party, the number one thing was growth. Growth at all costs, growth no matter what. Which makes sense when capital is free, when you can just get more money whenever you want from investors. That very quickly changed. And now it is not, capital is free. Capital is really expensive, if you can get it. It's really hard to just get it. And part of that is most of the companies and most of the venture Act companies, they need to go public. Or they need to have a path to public or they need a path to an acquisition. The problem is that the door to an IP is closed. And...


Joel Cheeseman: Is it opening? I just wanna...


Sean Behr: It might be towards the end of this year, we'll see.


Joel Cheeseman: CNBC really wants it to be back open, so...


Sean Behr: I'm sure they would love it to be open.


Joel Cheeseman: It's mostly closed for me, but not quite locked at this point.


Sean Behr: Not locked.


Joel Cheeseman: Okay.


Sean Behr: But look, that downstream effect of not being able to go public means, "Okay, I've gotta figure out a way to find another path." And typically if you're trying to go for that and growth is no longer the number one thing, you've got to pivot to, how do I get profitable? And for many of these companies, profitability was actually like frowned upon for the last 10 years.


[chuckle]


Sean Behr: Now it's the number one thing is get profitable. Grow, but grow sustainably and grow profitably. Fountain was very fortunate. We've raised a lot of capital. We've run the business with a real capital efficiency. So we feel really good. It's put us in a position where our balance sheet and the amount of capital we have on the balance sheet is actually, something that makes the company even more valuable in this market.


Joel Cheeseman: Interesting. So, touched on tech, which you guys don't really play in that area. Let's talk about what you do. The labor force, the essential worker if you will. What's your take on the health of that piece?


Sean Behr: It's actually getting better and better. So the first thing is, look, Fountain's mission is to open opportunities for the global workforce. That's been our mission from day one. I'm proud of that mission. Last year we helped 3 million people find their next opportunity, which is just an incredible number. 3 million people finding their next job, finding the next thing that's gonna pay their rent, pay their kids' school, pay their grocery bill, whatever it is. So that's our focus. That part of the economy continues to be really, really strong. What's interesting is happening is you've got a lot of people in the knowledge worker world who have taken a step back and looked at their life over the last couple of years and made different choices.


Joel Cheeseman: Yes.


Sean Behr: And we had all this, you don't hear about it as much now, but the great resignation. You have this, generational decide where people are, "I don't know if I wanna work as much. I wanna have side hustle, I wanna, do all those things. Those things are primarily talked about knowledge workers. What I can tell you is even in the hourly work world, you're seeing some of that. I'll give you a real cogent example. If you think to yourself, I run a large warehousing company, let's say, and I've got a series of warehouses and I've got to hire 50,000 people a year to sort of maintain my warehouses, replace the people that quit, maybe expand a little bit. I base that model of 50,000 on people working 36 to 40 hours a week. What I think you're seeing in the hourly work world is, a portion of those people are saying, I don't wanna work 40 hours, I want 28.


Joel Cheeseman: Sure.


Sean Behr: 'Cause I got a side hustle of my own that I'm doing. And what happens for the... That's great for the worker. It gives them more opportunities out there. For the company that's hiring those 50,000 people, if 20% of the people wanna work 12 hours less, I don't need 50,000 people, I actually need 60,000 to do the same work that 50,000 people used to do. So opens up lots of challenges. It's a really robust and healthy market, but it's creating challenges for companies. We even hear things like from a customer who has said, look, "We've been doing this for 20 years. People come in now and they say, look, I'm gonna quit. I'm gonna drive for Uber. Now, I wanna try it. I wanna set my own hours." Is that mean like everybody quitting the company to go work for Uber? No. But 10% of people deciding they want to go deliver food, they want to go do a gig job, they want to drive for Uber or Lyft or DoorDash. It's a big impact on the company.


Joel Cheeseman: Is it fair to say that's more of the rule now than the exception? The side hustle?


Sean Behr: It's definitely the rule.


Joel Cheeseman: In your space.


Sean Behr: Yeah. It's definitely the rule.


Joel Cheeseman: And to me it's, I look at Thumbtack or I look at TaskRabbit.


Sean Behr: TaskRabbit.


Joel Cheeseman: It may just be Task now. I don't quite remember. How does your tool... So a traditional ATS is you apply, you get hired, you go into a bucket and get interviewed, etcetera. The gig economy doesn't work like that. You put yourself out there, you get ratings from customers and whatnot. So does your tool somehow connect with what someone's doing on the side as well as their company? Can you recruit as well? Help me understand how and if they, you guys play with the gig economy?


Sean Behr: Yeah. First of all, we have lots of customers in the gig economy. I mean, one of the reasons why those companies have been able to scale to the size they are is most of them power their workforces with for some. What's interesting is if you and I... If you work for a gig company and I work for a traditional retailer, let's say. And we're both going after the same person. You are offering flexibility, you're offering potentially better pay, you're offering work your own schedule, you're offering get started tomorrow and I'm offering submit your resume and then one of my recruiters will review it. And next week we'll probably reach out to you. By the time I reach out to you to say, "Hey, I'm really interested, Joel, come work for me." You're like, "I've already been working four days and it's kind of good. I'm liking what I'm doing. How much are you paying?" Now, if I then have to pay you more, try to swing you back towards me, that has a real impact. So one of the things that we do is we feel like we bring a competitive advantage to companies. We know that that worker is probably applying to eight jobs, 10 jobs even more. How do you separate yourself from the other eight to 10 jobs, including some gig jobs? One way to do it is to just pay a lot of money. Give a $2500 signing bonus. You'll get a lot of people through the front door.


Joel Cheeseman: Is speed your secret sauce?


Sean Behr: Speed is really, really critical. It's really, really critical. But it's not just speed for speed's sake. You still need quality. You still need to do your process. So me telling you, you can hire people in 20 minutes if all of the people are not a fit for you, well, the good news is we had speed. The bad news is I didn't really help you at all. What I need to be able to do is be really fast, have a lot of speed, but also deliver the quality for you. So making sure that the people that you do move fast on are a good fit for you. Either they fit with your culture, they have the right licenses, they have the right qualifications, they can do the job, they have the right shift availability and schedule flexibility.


Joel Cheeseman: Yeah.


Sean Behr: To do the job. All of those things are really critical, but you've gotta do it fast. In this market, you've gotta do it fast. One of the things I would say that's interesting is, in the blue collar versus... Blue collar, gray collar, hourly work versus the knowledge worker, one on the employer side speed is really critical in the hourly work world, and maybe not that critical in the knowledge worker side. You actually kind of want to go...


Joel Cheeseman: The laptop class as Elon calls them.


Sean Behr: Yeah. You want to go a little slow, you want to pick the right person.


Joel Cheeseman: Yeah.


Sean Behr: You wanna be perfect on those things. What's interesting, on the flip side though, for the worker, it's actually flipped. Right now, if you're a tech worker, and you're looking for a job and a new job opens up, you gotta be fast.


Joel Cheeseman: Yeah, yeah.


Sean Behr: Because you wanna get in there and get that job.


Joel Cheeseman: Sure. So we've been doing this show for a few years now, and I feel like every year we're another year away from the robots taking over and everyone being unemployed. Where are you on automation?


Sean Behr: Yeah. Look, my last company was in the automotive mobility space and at some point the cars are going to drive themselves. That's probably a long time away. [laughter] A really long time away.


Joel Cheeseman: Okay.


Sean Behr: 10 years, 15 years. But it is coming. The car will drive itself, but it is not coming tomorrow.


Joel Cheeseman: Yeah.


Sean Behr: Despite what other people might tell you. Where I'm gonna see, like, and there's been some hype around like, will generative AI replace humans? Will the ChatBots take over? And then all of us, we'll all be in, we'll all be in Portugal on the beach just hanging out while the computer works for us.


Joel Cheeseman: AI ChadCheese.


Sean Behr: That's right. [laughter]


Joel Cheeseman: Produce content from the beach.


Sean Behr: Content, exactly. I don't think you're gonna see that, for a long time. I do think what you will see though, is a lot of the things that are what I would call high use, low value tasks. If your job is primarily focused on high use low value task, that job is going to be impacted. I'll give you an example. Today at Fountain, the AI technology is smart enough to understand your... What you are looking for in an interview. Like when you can come, what you're looking for, what's good, what's not good, and also smart enough to go into a recruiter's calendar, grab slots, come back, book the interview on their own. Even the candidate can reschedule the interview.


Joel Cheeseman: Yeah.


Sean Behr: They can say things like, I want to interview next Thursday. I want to interview two Tuesdays from today in the afternoon. The AI technology is smart enough to interpret that and say, okay, this person means June 28th, between 12:00 and 4:00 PM Pacific.


Joel Cheeseman: Yep.


Sean Behr: And go in, find the recruiter's calendar, grab those slots. That is a lot of a person's job today doing that back and forth. How many of us have gone back and forth with somebody and like, okay, I can do 12:30, can you do 2:30? I can't do 2:30, I can do 3:30. All right, how about we just do 1:45, that's all gonna be replaced. So what I would say is it's not gonna replace... The robots are not coming for our jobs. You guys are safe...


Joel Cheeseman: Maybe our wives.


[laughter]


Sean Behr: But what you will see is high usage, low value tasks, I think are probably going away.


Joel Cheeseman: I feel like at the show, there's a mix of optimism and pessimism. I'd say skewing, pessimistic, the term nuclear winner has even been thrown around. But you, you have direct access to job postings. What companies are doing directly. You see the sales process and the trends in that from the trenches at Fountain. What's your take from what you see in terms of what's around the corner?


Sean Behr: Look, it's hard to do my job and not be optimistic. But I am, I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic about where things are. I do think you're gonna see an incredible growth in the way that HR technology works over the next two to three years. Now that may have some negative impacts. There may be some companies that are currently exhibiting here whose value proposition is gonna be greatly diminished.


Joel Cheeseman: Yeah.


Sean Behr: There are also some companies probably down that way where their opportunity is just started. And so, look, there will be change, but I'm optimistic about where things are headed and, we'll see. Look at Fountain we say the future's bright.


Joel Cheeseman: That is optimistic. For sure. I like that. Based on that commentary, what does the future hold for Fountain? Global growth? What's, you're not gonna be like, I don't know, a different kind of ATS are you or just dis to labor? Like what's the growth plan look like?


Sean Behr: No. We're gonna be focused on the world of hourly workers and frontline workers. We think that's our space. We feel like we've earned the right to own that space. And so, you're gonna see us make really great moves in the world, but focused exclusively on hourly workers. And we're gonna continue to be... Do everything we can to help our product deliver great experiences to workers and to hirers to try to open up opportunities for those workers. And so that's gonna be our focus. You're gonna see us a lot globally. We already have a good staff there. Our technology is used in 77 countries today. We'll probably continue to grow that, but we'll continue to grow within each of those countries as well.


Joel Cheeseman: Yeah.


Sean Behr: Yeah, excited about the future, excited about Fountain.


Joel Cheeseman: Well, cool. You, we talked about the ATS, we talked about the conversational AI, but you guys do a lot of other stuff. What sort of is trending at the company in terms of features that you're excited about?


Sean Behr: Yeah. Anything that is... Coming back to this point, anything that is gonna make the applicant experience better. We're super passionate about. You typically, if you go try to apply for a job now as an hourly worker and have to do things like create an account with a username and a password and the password's gotta have an uppercase letter and a special character, and it's gotta be nine characters long, that's just so I can apply for the job. Just so I can have the privilege of applying for this job that I don't even know if I want yet. We're passionate about anything that's gonna eliminate that friction for the worker and for this applicant.


Sean Behr: But I think you'll see us continue to evolve in ways that will make it frictionless for workers to apply to those jobs. And for the companies that are hiring, how do we make it so that they don't have to pay the $2500 sign on bonus? Because the number one testimony I get from a customer is we used to have to pay bonuses for these jobs. And with Fountain, we don't. I'm like, can you go tell everybody else about that?


Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. You have native apps on iOS and Android. I assume a lot of your traffic flows through that. Talk about the impact that mobile's had on the business.


Sean Behr: Yeah, mobile is key. Look of... This year, we're probably north of two million people hired at Fountain around the world. Almost 90% of those people applied for the job on a mobile device.


Joel Cheeseman: 90?


Sean Behr: 90.


Joel Cheeseman: Wow.


Sean Behr: It might be high 80s, but it's roughly 90%. It is. I always tell CHROs, go to your careers page, go to a job posting, try to apply for a job, but you have to do it on your phone. You can't look at your laptop because what happens is you talk to an HR person and the first thing they do is they open up their laptop and I'm like, yep. Problem is that most of the people who are applying for your job are using a screen that's four inches big. And when you bring that to them, all of a sudden the design, the usability, the functionality of their experience comes really clear. I've had CHROs just essentially give up. And look, I'm not... I spend a lot of time on my phone. I probably spend too much time on my phone, but I can tell you like if you ask me to upload a resume on my phone.


Joel Cheeseman: Crickets.


Sean Behr: I don't even know if I could do it. I'm gonna probably give up. Say, let me find a job that doesn't require that.


Joel Cheeseman: Yeah. There must be another CEO job somewhere.


Sean Behr: Exactly.


Joel Cheeseman: But I don't have to upload a resume.


Sean Behr: Exactly. I don't even have a resume. I don't even know.


Joel Cheeseman: When was the last time you actually interviewed for that?


Sean Behr: A long time.


Joel Cheeseman: Anyway, that's enough about you. ATS's now rely a lot on marketplaces for their success. So people create an app, put it on the platform, companies... Company employers or customers can access that service. To my knowledge, you guys have not taken that jump. Will you? And if not, why not?


Sean Behr: Yeah, we have not. We're focused exclusively on software that makes the hiring process better. From a marketplace perspective, we think there's great players out there. There's lots of places to get applicants. There's lots of job boards. There's lots of things like that. We're exclusively focused on how do we deliver software that makes our customers successful in hiring the applicants they've got in the pipeline. And that's... Look by the way, that's a really hard job. We've been at it since 2014, and I don't even think we're halfway there. I feel like every day I wake up and I'm more clear that I have more to do in this world, despite the fact two million people getting a job this year, not enough.


Joel Cheeseman: So you talked about what you're not or not looking to do, but what are people saying about Fountain two to three years from now in terms of what you provide if it's different from today?


Sean Behr: What they'll say is one continued focus on the hourly frontline worker will be there. What's different than today is I think you'll see us expand in our portfolio approach to those hourly workers. You'll continue to see us develop innovative technologies around how do you help customers acquire more of these workers, onboard these workers. One of the funny things about Fountain, one of our original names, the project name that the company actually started under, was an Onboard IQ. So you can imagine. What folk...


Joel Cheeseman: Sexy.


Sean Behr: Exactly. One thing you should know about me is I'm a terrible namer of companies, always happen...


Joel Cheeseman: Fountain's pretty good.


Sean Behr: Fountain's pretty good.


Joel Cheeseman: I don't know if you came up with that, but it's pretty good.


Sean Behr: It's the only one... But every other one has been not great. But you'll see us do things around onboarding. Anything that we can do that's gonna power a customer's business from a labor perspective, super interesting at Fountain.


Joel Cheeseman: Own the life cycle, it sounds like. All right, Sean, we appreciate your time today. We know you're a busy guy. For our listeners who want to know more about you or the company, where would you send them?


Sean Behr: Yeah, just go to fountain.com. You can learn all about our solutions and what we're doing. And you can follow us on socials, on LinkedIn, Twitter. And you can follow me @seanbehr.


Joel Cheeseman: Easy enough. Thanks, Sean. Enjoy the rest of the show. This is Joel Cheesman reporting from the Aaron Booth live from SHRM National in Las Vegas. And that is another one in the can. We out.


Outro: Wow. Look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell. Enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey. Or just watch big booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back. Like an awful train wreck, you can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.

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