It’s no mystery that ChatGPT is already making inroads into HR tech. So, who’s ready for “ChatGPT for interviews”? Metaview thinks you are. That’s why Siadhal Magos, Metaview co-founder and CEO, faces the Firing Squad. A former Sr. product manager at Uber, Magos, created Metaview to automatically write interview notes for recruiters in order to “save time and focus on high-quality interactions with candidates.” Maybe he’ll use Metaview to summarize his interview on Chad & Cheese, but it will be no defense against a smackdown if his pitch is a dud. Locked and loaded, let’s do this.
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Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to put the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover kids. The Chad and Cheese Podcast is taking it to a whole other level.
Joel: Alright, alright, alright. It's Firing Squad everybody. And this is your favorite guilty pleasure a.k.a the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your co-host Joel Cheeseman joined as always the woody to my buzz Chad Sowash is in the house and we welcome Siadhal Magos, co-founder and CEO of Metaview to the program. Siadhal Welcome.
Siadhal Magos: Thank you very much for having me.
Joel: Glad to have you here. So most of our listeners don't know who the hell you are. Give us a little bit about you in a Twitter bio.
Siadhal Magos: Nice, thanks. So I'm Siadhal. As you've mentioned, I'm one of the co-founders at Metaview. Been building Metaview for about four years. Before that was on the product team at Uber when they were one of the fastest growing companies on the planet which is really where I started to get pretty nerdy and frustrated about hiring processes and how we might be able to use technology to improve them. Metaview's pretty full on, but outside of work, I've got a very young family. So I have a two-year-old and a six-week-old. So if I fall asleep...
Joel: Wow.
Siadhal Magos: During the show, then please forgive me. It's nothing to do with how entertaining the show is. It's only to do with the lack of sleep. [laughter] So pretty full on that side of things doesn't leave much space for other things. My wife's on a mission to visit 100 countries in her lifetime, so by default, I do a bunch of traveling too. We're currently on 60 which is we're getting there. But the pesky kids have sort of got in the way of late. [laughter] I grew up in London, currently live here too, but in between, I have spent a bit of time living on the west coast of US and a couple of years living in Amsterdam as well. So that's a bit about me.
Joel: Benny Hill or Monty Python, which is funnier? [laughter]
Siadhal Magos: I would say Monty Python, but that is both a little bit before my time. But Monty Python I think has stood the test of time a little more.
[laughter]
Joel: He's off to a great start calling us old. [laughter] He's off to a great start.
Chad: Joel just loves Benny Hill because of all the boobs that came along with Benny Hill.
Joel: You say it like it's a bad thing.
Chad: I didn't. I was just putting out a fact. So how many countries in Europe have you actually visited? All?
Siadhal Magos: No.
Chad: Most?
S?: Europe has a bunch of countries in it. [laughter]
Siadhal Magos: There's a lot of the small ones that we haven't been to and... But my wife's very strategic about it. She's like, "Listen, we can do those European ones easily anytime." So what we had to do before we started having a family was go to the sort of hard to travel to places. And then she's got a bunch that are easier to travel to now, so we're more likely to do a bunch of those European countries. And then I guess we get back to challenging ourselves in some distant future.
Joel: Talk about how great Portugal is when you visit. That's how you get on Chad's good side.
Chad: Everybody loves Portugal. Shut up.
Siadhal Magos: Yeah, absolutely. [laughter]
Joel: And over this Euro trash, tell him what he's won.
Chad: Yeah. So this is how Firing Squad is going to play out. At the sound of the bell, you're gonna have two minutes to pitch Metaview. At the end of two minutes, we're gonna hit you with about 20 minutes of Q&A. Be sure to be concise or you're gonna get the crickets. Just means to tighten up your shit and move along. At the end of Q&A, you will receive one of either from the two of us. Big applause, pop the champagne, this one is a winner. Golf clap, put away the champagne, it's looking good, but you still have a lot of work to do or the Firing Squad.
Joel: Ouch.
Chad: ChatGPT just drank all the champagne. You better pull out the whiteboard because this one is headed to the dumpster kids. That's Firing Squad.
Joel: ChatGPT more like ChatGPT with the guns. Are you ready?
Siadhal Magos: I'm ready, I'm ready.
Joel: The pitch begins now.
Siadhal Magos: Interviews are the most crucial touchpoints in any hiring process. They're aware the decision gets made by the team and by the candidate, but every recruiter and every interviewer hates frantically taking notes during interviews rather than actually engaging with candidates, then spending a bunch of time submitting subpar notes that don't really feel like a full reflection of the conversation. Metaview makes it so that you never have to take interview notes manually again. No more sort of cracking your knuckles before and taking a big deep breath before the interview begins. Metaview does that exhausting work for you. We've built the first of its kind AI that seamlessly records your interviews, then generates your interview notes for you, so recruiters and interviewers can instead focus on high quality interactions with candidates, save time writing up notes after every interview, and really just give the judgment, the decision, and why they're making that decision rather than sort of the morass of content you captured during the interview.
Siadhal Magos: Now what's more, the notes are far higher quality than you'll be able to write yourself 'cause of course robots are doing it for you. A few things that make experience of using Metaview the best assistant for your interviews, one, our notes are purpose built for recruiting. So they take into account all of the context and specificities of the interview context. Secondly, where typical transcription might let you down maybe with technical terms or specialist language within your industry or company names, Metaview does not because we've trained it particularly for this use case. And thirdly, we know that every person's note-taking needs are different. So after every interview, based on what you do with your notes, our AI tailors and improves itself to get closer to your specific needs for note-taking. So that means if you prefer paragraphs to bullet points, your notes will be in paragraphs instead of bullet points.
Siadhal Magos: If you prefer bullet points, they'll be in bullet points. If you prefer really succinct notes versus really detailed, we'll take that form. So it learns based on how you take notes. Our AI generated notes are being used by recruiters and interviewers at companies like Brex, Robinhood, AngelList, Pure Storage, and the proof is really in the pudding. 80% of recruiters say they would be very disappointed to have to go back to the old way of doing things. They say it saves them anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes after an interview and obviously has an immeasurable impact on candidate experience. 50% more scorecards are being completed within 12 hours. Head to... That's a... Obviously I had to run. Head to metaview.ai to find out more. Thank you.
Joel: Alright, alright, alright. Well, we'll let you squeak in that last bit there. Metaview the name, talk about that. Your metaview.ai, metaview.com is not in use right now. Did you try to buy it? And more interestingly, has Zuckerberg called you to file a lawsuit?
Siadhal Magos: Okay. So Metaview is a mashup of metadata and interview. So that's where the name comes from. Metadata is data about data. We found that a lot of people were focusing on the outcomes of the hiring process like time to close or time to offer acceptance rates without having any data about what led to those data points. So that's where the name comes from. We would love to have the.com. Watch this space on that one and Zuck has not been in touch. We were Metaview before Meta was I guess part of everyone's daily penance.
Joel: Part of the daily lexicon of business with meta. Okay, I can buy that, I can buy that. So there seems to have been a fair amount of pivot with ChatGPT and what the business... The core business to what it is now. I think December or February maybe something major happened. Talk about the pivot, why you did it, and the difference in the business now versus what it was before.
Siadhal Magos: Yeah. I probably wouldn't call it a pivot. The product still retains a lot of the features it had before that point. Really what changed with... We've been working with OpenAI for a couple of years on a few elements of our product. It's sort of how we ended up enriching a lot of data off the back of interviews. But what sort of... The changes around... You said December is when all these changes started to rapidly occur. We then launched this new product, this AI notetaker in February. What we saw was just... So it was a different pinpoint for a different bunch of people. So previously we would sell sort of to help organizations understand, take control of their interview process. It was a strategic sale, still very much part of our business. What we're finding now with AI generated notes is it's just flying off the shelves for individual recruiters who want to make their life easier and want to give it a go. And we are wrapping sort of a different go-to market around that. We're enabling people to sign up and start to use it and have a very quick onboarding because the product really speaks for itself and the time to value is so instantaneous and the value is so clear to them that it's just crazy not to.
Chad: So the problem you're trying to solve is note-taking. Is that the scope?
Siadhal Magos: That's the problem as the sort of the end user feels it for sure, like the sort of the franticness and exhaustion of taking notes. If you are running sort of five to 10 interviews a day, yes. Obviously the downstream impacts of that impacts the candidate experience, it impacts the speed of your... When you run better interviews 'cause you're actually present during the conversation, you make better decisions which means you have fewer weaker candidates sort of polluting the rest of your pipeline. But yeah, I think it's really fair to say the big sort of the painkiller that we're providing to folks is stop doing that really manual rope work 'cause machines are better at it now.
Chad: Okay. It's pretty much a micro point solution at this point, right?
Joel: Feature versus product.
Chad: Yeah. When you take a look at it, are you looking to perspectively grow this into a platform or really just focus micro and get this right for really a small segment of the universe? Or are you looking to expand that?
Siadhal Magos: So right now, laser-focused on this AI note generation. There's so much more you can do to make it even more delightful. The way that we think about I guess the market is that summarization is gonna be one of the key capabilities that is gonna impact many parts of business. So people will be summarizing all of their meetings and they'll be relying on AI to do that. And there'll be various platforms that will do that job. Maybe Teams already has this capability for general meetings. Zoom I'm sure will at some point too. But recruiters and people who are involved in interviewing have a very specific workflow and very specific expectations around who can access their notes, who in the conversation is the person who'll be most interested in getting notes about that?
Siadhal Magos: There are all these very specific things that means we have this steady. Having a dedicated summarization solution for interviews makes a ton of sense and there's loads more we can do there before you move into that platform world. When you think about that platform world, we actually have a bunch of these capabilities already because we built this previously. What we focus a lot on is one, how do you help interviewers level up? So as well as sort of taking away the need to write notes which means you can be more present and you're just a release valve in terms of improving your basis for interviews. We also play back data. How much did you speak compared to the candidate? How many questions did you ask during the interview? And how does that compare to other people in your company who are responsible for this same interview type? So we can give you really contextual data to help you understand, "Looks like I ran that interview a little differently to what I usually do."
Chad: Okay.
Siadhal Magos: Secondly, we help organizations create training programs that are fully automated too. So a lot of top tech companies especially, and I'm sure it's true in other parts of the industry, will train up interviewers by having them shadow. So, "Hey, listen in on Joel next time. He's doing an interview. We think he's really good at interviewing. You can learn how he does it." That has a couple of downsides. One, Joel might be good at interviewing, but this next interview might be terrible and it might be with a candidate who is really not up to the task and therefore you never really get to see what a rigorous interview looks like. And now you are calibrated based on this weak interview. The great thing about having this corpus of recorded interviews which is part of Metaview's platform is you can actually identify your canonical examples of amazing interviews run by your best interviewers and say every single person who's gonna interview at this company going forward is gonna listen to those very best interviews before they start doing it themselves. So training is a big part of it too. Essentially there's a whole number of applications that unwrap themselves when you're capturing these conversations. But AI notes generation is the painkiller that makes people say "Hey, I want this today."
Chad: Okay. So who are your main competitors in your mind today?
Siadhal Magos: From an AI notes perspective, we are really first to market with this and years ahead of any competition because anyone else, if you look at say the Otters of the world or these companies that do generalized meeting summarization, they're not specific for the use case which means really there's no competition. In terms of the broader interview intelligence market, there are other companies like BrightHire, Pillars who sort of also record interviews as well.
Chad: Yeah. Now you've got ChatGPT in the market plus you're gonna have to face some bigger competition with organizations who have been in the Chat realm for a very long time and they're already gathering this data. Now they can plug into ChatGPT and just bulletize what happened. So when you take a look at the landscape today especially with organizations who can plug into chatGPT and take all of this text like you're saying, it's not created the way that I want it. Well, I can get it there pretty quick. All I have to do is tap into an API and boom, I'm done. What is your next step because this isn't gonna get you where you need to go?
Siadhal Magos: Just to clarify your question, when you're saying these other players that have chats, what are the sort of thing you're referring to?
Chad: I'm talking about conversational AI talking about all of these other...
Siadhal Magos: Got it.
Chad: Even hone it who does the transcription, I take the entire transcription. All I have to do is plug it into ChatGPT and I can get it bulletized in a heartbeat. It takes no time.
Siadhal Magos: Yeah, yeah. So where you start to gain advantage over time is one, integrating into workflows as I mentioned. So I mentioned a few. The fact that we know... Given we have integrations with the ATS, we know that the recruiter for this role is this person. So when the candidate was interviewed by the hiring manager, we can default into knowing the recruiter has access to that set of notes which means they don't have to spend time chasing up the hiring manager to say, "Hey, give me your summary," only to get a one line summary. All of that is sort of ingested into the workflow of this summarization.
Chad: Well, all that should go into the ATS in the first place and you're just integrating it into the ATS. So I mean, this is all systems and process. This has nothing to do with your system.
Siadhal Magos: Yeah. No, no, it does because the generation of the content that goes into the ATS which is...
Chad: Where's my recordkeeping system? Are you my record keeping system?
Siadhal Magos: No.
Chad: You are not. So therefore it has to go to my applicant tracking system. That's where I'm going to do business. So from a process methodology standpoint and from a recordkeeping and storage standpoint, it better be in my damned ATS. So that's nothing that you have control over. Correct?
Siadhal Magos: It's correct that we don't have control over. So the pushing of the content and helping people fill in the ATS which is a...
Chad: Do you have control over where the recordkeeping actually takes place?
Siadhal Magos: No.
Chad: It's gonna happen... Storage wise is in the ATS. So therefore access is available to anybody who has an access point there. So either you're talking about SMBs who are gonna use your platform as a point solution and they're gonna use it as the full solution. But when you're talking about enterprise, you're talking about an entirely different animal. Let me go ahead and really quick pivot into experience. You and your co-founder, how much experience do you have in this industry before actually starting Metaview?
Siadhal Magos: As hiring managers in interviews, we were hiring managers in interviews for four or five years.
Chad: That's not in this industry. That's not talent acquisition. Being a hiring manager, I was that before too, has no bearing on understanding the processes, these issues, and the problems in this industry. Before you started Metaview, how long have you or your co-founder actually been in this industry?
Siadhal Magos: Given the definition that you described there, we were not in this industry before starting the company.
Chad: Okay. Joel.
Joel: Let's talk about fundraising. You guys have raised 7.6 million. 6 million of that was in late '21. So it's been a while. What have you done with the money you've raised? Is there gonna be another round here soon? Talk about investment.
Siadhal Magos: Yeah. Bulk of the cash is, as I guess with any company our size, was used on building the team, getting much more experimental on the marketing side of things too now as well which is yeah, a good thing. So in terms of raising again, we'll look at things later this year, is where our sort of timeline brings us in.
Joel: So you mentioned building a team. Richard Cho is a fan of the show and we're a fan of his and Chad sort of grilled you on experience in the industry. I will help you out a little bit and say that you are at least bringing some people onto the team that have a pretty deep knowledge...
Siadhal Magos: Oh a 100%. Yeah, yeah.
Joel: Of the industry. So talk about getting Richard on the team. He's an advisor at Gem still. I don't know exactly what his relationship is there, but he's on your team. Talk about that.
Siadhal Magos: Yeah. So Rich Cho was... We got an introduction to him probably about three years ago now from Village Global who are one of our early backers. And we sort of initially just jumped on the products really as at the time, it was more of a prototype. Robinhood was going through absolutely crazy growth at the time and he had a bunch of thoughts around the directions we should take the product which were all pretty prescient, but not things we could do at that point. We were sort of three people. So we obviously had to pick which arrows we put our wood behind. And we just stayed in touch since. He became a customer at Robinhood over time and we stayed in touch as he moved on to Gem. And increasingly, I've been sort of picking his brains for sort of some of the sort of both positioning questions, but also very much product questions too around what direction to take the product. And yeah, we made it official start of last month that he's a strategic advisor to the company.
Joel: So you mentioned some of your logos customers which from my standpoint are pretty small in nature. And Chad sort of alluded to what your customer look like. Who is your customer, who you're targeting? Talk about global footprint if any at all at the moment.
Siadhal Magos: Typical customer is venture-backed tech company. So usually series B to series D and then a couple of marking customers further along the net. Recently, especially with the launch of AI notes, we're finding a lot more inbound from other parts of the market, whether that's recruitment agencies or much smaller organizations, maybe just even with one recruiter who's water wall, doing interviews every day that we can help. But typical sweet spot is that sort of series B to series D, maybe up to series E I'd say. In terms of sort of international footprint you asked as well, well, about 50% of our customers are in the US and then the rest are dotted around different parts of Europe. So we have sort of... Yeah, it's about 50-50 at the moment.
Chad: So why this industry? It's slow to adopt, it doesn't garner the types of budgets that marketing and sales does. So I mean, why get into this tar pit?
Siadhal Magos: Yeah. [laughter] You folks have probably heard this from a bunch of founders before, but really when you're starting a company, the best advice is to scratch your own itch. And at the end of the day, much as you pointed out, we don't have frontline recruiting experience as founders, we were at companies where we were running a lot of interviews as hiring managers and sort of interviewers on other people's loops. Uber, as I said, I was there 2016, 2017, growing incredibly fast. Co-founder was at Palantir, which interviews a lot of people to make one hire, let's put it that way. So you end up just doing a lot of interviewing and that's where we really got exposed to the problem. So yeah, it was very much scratch your own itch thing. It wasn't sort of a super opportunistic thing necessarily. It was something we felt that we were understood really well from, again, a hiring manager and interviewer perspective. I think the thing that we've learned a lot as with folks like Rich Cho have really helped us with this is the way that recruitment... The work that recruitment have to do around interviewing, but also the way they view it, which I think when you scratch beneath the service is this is just a big dependency for them.
Siadhal Magos: They need to hit... They're supposed to hit their number, they really value the quality of their relationship with their hiring manager, and they just have this big dependency in their ability to achieve, which is the interviews. And none of those people in that interview process report to them or work with them. And so that's sort of the other side of the coin that we realize over the last... Well, as we started the company. But yeah, anyway, background is it was our own itch. We wanted to scratch it. We didn't probably know all of those characteristics of the market that you just described, Chad. Those weren't top of mind for us. We just wanted to... We just thought this product made a lot of sense.
Chad: So go to market. Talk to me about your sales, go to market strategy.
Siadhal Magos: I'll go to market. As of six weeks ago now, we launched a free trial. So folks can get onboarded for as few as many seats as they want and run a free trial which runs for 10 interviews. So you get your first 10 Metaview written AI notes for free. And then we have a conversation about converting and you can buy one seat or you can buy 100 seats. It's up to you. And then if you decide you wanna roll it up past your recruitment team, then it's more of an enterprise discussion because obviously a lot of interviews don't interview every time and per seat doesn't quite make sense. So sorry, per seat for recruiters and then enterprise for if you wanna roll up beyond the recruiting team.
Chad: Okay. Are you going direct? Is the main focus direct to brands or are you actually doing partnerships with other platforms?
Siadhal Magos: Vast majority direct. As in direct is our... Our focus is on getting direct as efficient and optimized and predictable as possible.
Chad: Okay. So what about integrations? What integrations do you currently support? I see that it says you sync with the applicant tracking system. What does that mean? What applicant tracking system? Tell me more.
Siadhal Magos: Sure. So, yeah, we are sort of partners with Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, Teamtailor, recruiting a few others. So again, these mid-market ATSs are the ones we partner with most closely. And then our system also works seamlessly from a... So that's one really sort of important integration point. You don't need to integrate with your ATS to use Metaview. You can still get really high quality. You just have your notes written for you even if you don't integrate to the ATS. It just helps with some of the workflow that we were talking about earlier. And as you said, that's where the notes need to end up. And then on the video conferencing side, Teams, Zoom and Google, we capture interviews on those platforms.
Chad: Talk to me about your exit plan. What are you looking to do? Are you looking to actually have a bigger player gobble you up to be a part of a a larger ecosystem? Are you looking to prospectively turn this into a platform that serves more than just note-taking?
Siadhal Magos: Definitely the latter. So if you buy the idea that interviews have always been this black hole in your hiring process, which we completely do, then the ability to turn those conversations into data is gonna help our customers make much better hiring decisions in the future. And if you have access to what's actually happening in the interviews, given that is where the decisions get made, if you have the platform that has those interviews... Is making those interviews available to our customers, then actually suddenly you become a really interesting place for those hiring managers to make their decision. So if you think about the system of action for a hiring manager, where does a hiring manager go and a recruit, anyone involved in hiring decisions go to make their decisions? Currently, of course the final decision is logged in the ATS, but the actual act of the hiring decision is usually debrief conversations or Slack messages back and forth or corridor conversations and it's not super data-driven, but actually if you have the data, then you can become that system of action for hiring. And that's our bigger play. And we think a lot of power... I guess strategically a lot of power rushes to the platform that has the most compelling data about your hiring. And actually we think the most compelling data is in these conversations.
Joel: Walk me through how this is recording conversations. Is this a Chrome browser extension that you turn on and it records phone calls? Is it a mobile app that's recording both ends of the phone call? Talk to me about that 'cause I'm a little confused about how it can pick up video conferencing as well as your phone calls and record all that talk. Talk me through that.
Siadhal Magos: From our system's perspective, those are two applications. We have our video conferencing bot that will essentially pass... Whether it's a Teams link, a Zoom link or a Google Meet link will understand that this is where the interview is happening and they will join that as a participant and record at that point. From a phone conversation, it's your classic switchboard application where someone will dial our number first and then they'll later patch through to the candidate. And that's how we capture those. So those are two different channels for capturing the conversation.
Chad: Do you also capture the video?
Siadhal Magos: It's configurable. So most customers prefer to capture the video too, some opt for just audio.
Joel: Which makes it odd that you wouldn't say like a HireVue or a Vervoe wasn't a competitor. No?
Siadhal Magos: Most of the time on the... Definitely for our market, most of the perception, most people see HireVue more as the sort of top of funnel filtering tool that's sort of like the asynchronous video interviewing, the on-demand video interviewing. What we focus on is completely the live video, the live interviewing where you have a human being talking to another human being and they're sort of potentially meandering conversation, potentially going off on tangents. Those are all of the problems that we witnessed, less so they're sort of the top of funnel filtering. How do I not leave three thousands, thousand CVs and maybe rule some people out based on a on-demand interview.
Joel: Clarify this for me. Chad asked you about integrations. You started talking about partnerships with Greenhouse and some others. Are those different in your mind? Have you built on those platforms? If you haven't built on it, what is partnership in your definition?
Siadhal Magos: Partnership really, it means that we have an agreement in place with these organizations that we are logged on their partner app store, we have access to certain of their APIs, which means we can build either right data to their ATS or pull data from the ATS depending on our customer's discretion. So it's a relatively... It can be light touch. It's again, really up to the customer.
Joel: Okay.
Siadhal Magos: But that's what partnership means in that context. It's not like a go-to-market or a marketing partnership necessarily. That's really we source our customers. It just tends to be a lot of them are Greenhouse or Lever or Workable users.
Joel: You guys are on all those marketplaces. If I use your service, I can use it integrated into the system. Okay. Alright. I think last one for me is the world is moving toward more automation. ChatGPT is gonna be everywhere. Chad sort of alluded to being a commodity at some point where hell, I can just plug it in and I'm a competitor of yours or it's easy to do that. Convince me that this product won't be irrelevant in five years.
Siadhal Magos: So five years from now is obviously... That's a very long time.
Joel: Pick whatever timeframe you'd like. Three?
Siadhal Magos: The context for your question was more about note-taking. So the reason note-taking will always be specific for interviewing is because of the workflows that sit around recruiting. I talked about some of the characteristics. I think, Chad, you alluded to the idea, well, I could get the transcript, I could give ChatGPT some prompts and they could format it for me. The fact is we have a bunch of people who are working tirelessly and every day to make sure that this is the perfect notetaker for this particular context and I won't sort of bore you by talking through some of those contexts again. But that's the primary reason why there will be specific applications, specific note-taking applications for very common structured conversation types such as interviewing.
Siadhal Magos: Just as there'll be one for sales conversations and one for customer research conversations, for example, there'll be one for interviewing. In the longer term, again, the richest data that you've never had in your hiring process is what happens between interviewers, hiring managers and candidates in those conversations. If you are the organization that knows what topics are being covered in those... If you're the platform that knows what topics are being covered in those conversations, how long different people are speaking for, when this person is really vocal during the debrief, we tend to make bad hires, if you start to get these sort of alerts and these bells ringing in your company, suddenly you're in this world where you have a much better hold on how you can actually design a high quality interview process and a hiring process as opposed to what most companies do, which is leave it to luck. Like, "Hey, I think this person seems pretty smart. Let's put them in the interview room." And I've got no log of whether they've made good decisions in the past. I don't really remember what they said for this, but it's just a complete... Hiring has not had that moneyball moment yet, and that's what's gonna change.
Joel: In 30 seconds or less, run us through your pricing.
Siadhal Magos: Pricing is start free trial. If you wanna use it beyond that, it's $25 per seat, per recruiter seat. And then if you want to expand it beyond recruiters, ie, into the whole organization, then it's a much lower unit price per seat because of course these people don't interview, but it's essentially based on the volume of interviewing.
Joel: And that's per month?
Siadhal Magos: You can go per month. Most people go per year.
Joel: When you say 25, it's per month.
Siadhal Magos: 25 per month, billed annually. $32 per month if you wanna go month to month.
Joel: Alright. You know the bell. It's the end of the Q&A. It is time to face the Firing Squad. Siadhal, are you ready?
Siadhal Magos: Yeah, bring it on.
Joel: Get him, Chad.
Chad: I gotta say, I love, love, love the idea of taking big tasks off of recruiters and then also hiring managers because yeah, that was one of the things that really sucked about being a hiring manager, was doing interviews 'cause they suck, they're horrible, they're uncomfortable, and you don't get a chance to really focus because you're taking notes and because you're thinking about what's my next question, and etcetera, etcetera. So it is a pain in the ass. Interview data needs to be gathered so that training can actually happen. So I agree with that 100% and I love that Cho is on board. He's a great guy. And he's been in the space for a minute, so it's good. So next time somebody asked you about experience, just pull out a picture of Richard Cho, okay?
Chad: Cho hooked you up on that one. But for me, the biggest issue I think I have right now is that it timing. Take a look at the current landscape, take a look at ChatGPT. The solution, it's a little bit too micro for me. Once you start to expand and perspectively be able to start pushing out training modules and start to create a training business, I think there's something there. The experience that you and your founder have, like I had said earlier, you have to lean very heavily on individuals who have been in this industry who understand not just the tech stack, but the process methodology and also the thought process behind talent acquisition.
Chad: It is much different than most other business leaders, I promise you. Go to market execution. I would go to white labeling as soon as humanly possible because there are so many damned threats that are out there that you might not even see right now. So at the end of the day, I love where you're going. This is very early, I think, in the journey for me. So I'm gonna have to give you the Firing Squad.
Joel: Ouch, ouch. Alright, Siadhal. You still got to face me. This one's really hard for me. We're in the early, early days of ChatGPT, and I can remember a day when there might have been a few players that were doing like search engine optimization for jobs and people would say like, oh, if you just fix the URL, if you just fix the title tags, then everyone has SEO, right? The truth is Jobs2Web was really the only solution that paid... That got paid big money for what they did. You could say the same about mobile or particularly job postings, right? Like, "Oh, if I just plug in an API, I've got every single job that Indeed has, I've every single job that Monster has." Like if you're a job board, then you're irrelevant, right? Because this thing is a commodity. To me, ChatGPT is in the same place. Like, I think it's a little bit disingenuous to just say, well, anyone can plug this technology in and you're all the same and that you're on a level playing field and it's a commodity.
Joel: I do think that while the technology will be available, I don't think it's as clear as saying everyone's gonna be the same because they can plug in this technology. I think that right now you're more... You're much more of a feature than a product. I think you need to work hard to become more of a product and become like the place where people go for all things interviewing. I don't know what that looks like. You guys live this every day, so hopefully you'll figure that out. But I do think unless you become more of a product, they're gonna be a lot of companies with this feature and you're gonna get squeezed out as an also ran. And I don't think that you want that. You don't have experience in this industry. However, you're clearly a smart guy. Spent some time at Uber and in some other places. I think Richard Cho speaks volumes in terms of my impression of your stock if there was stock at the moment. Richard Cho Facebook, I mean Jim, I mean his resume speaks for itself, but he would not be on board this company in any form or fashion unless he saw something there that was worth getting behind.
Joel: Pricing I think is right on. I don't think it's a hurdle. I like that you're transparent with your pricing. A lot of people are not in this space. So for me, it's just really hard to like endorse it and get on board, but it's also, I think, impossible for me to just shoot it down to the Firing Squad. So for me, this is gonna be a golf clap. I think there's opportunity. We're unclear what ChatGPT is gonna look like and you're bringing on team members that know the market. So I think you got your work cut out for you, but you can make it thus the golf clap. So that is one Firing Squad and one golf clap for Metaview. How do you feel?
Chad: It's early, it's early. Come on, man.
Joel: Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate the feedback. I think there's some great feedback there. So I appreciate it and thanks for that. Yeah, we know we're... We've got some really happy customers out there, so that's what... That's I guess the most important thing.
Joel: And Chad's just a double American anyway. For those who wanna know more about Metaview, where would you send them?
Siadhal Magos: Head over to metaview.ai, sign up for a free trial. Would love to get you on board. And, yeah, you can decide I guess whether it makes a difference for you.
Joel: Chad is limping out with some blood flowing, but he's still alive.
[laughter]
Joel: Maybe he'll be back in a few years to tell us to stick it with how successful his company has been. And with that, another Firing Squad is in the books. We out.
Chad: We out.
Outro: This has been The Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese Podcast, so you don't miss an episode. And if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.C-H-A-D-C-H-E-E-S-E.com.