Hey, it’s Steven Rothberg with College Recruiter here for another session of the High Volume Hiring podcast. My guest today is a good friend of mine Jonathan Duarte is the Founder and CEO of GoHire.

Also a serial entrepreneur. But Jonathan, for the people who don’t know you personally maybe give them a one minute who are you? Where do you live? What do you like to do?

So I live in the San Francisco Bay area.

Started in this industry in 96, back in the o OG days, started one of the first job boards and then got married wife and kids and one in high school, one in college. And I. Just love being outdoors. I’ve done three Ironman triathlons and so it’s I guess that endurance of sticking around helps in HR tech too.

Endurance insanity. There, there are so many different words, but some 96. So that Go Jobs? Was that

Yeah.

Was that your site that year?

Yeah.

So after Go Jobs then we, built Good Hire a small business background screening company, which, you’ll love this.

In 2014 you could not get a background check without a three to five day wait period.

I. And faxing information to HireRight and, to Sterling and all that,

Yeah.

It was still paper-driven.

Yeah.

So we changed that model, to make it fast for companies.

Yeah. The days of the fax machine, my wife and I are catching up or watching for the first time, the wire and yeah, fax machines and, if anybody has a cell phone, it’s a flip phone. It’s. It’s thankfully, in so many ways, it’s a different world.

Yeah.

We’ll use that analogy in high volume, it’s almost like people are faxing candidates.

Yeah,

yeah. And so GoHire my shorthand descriptor a chatbot for mid-market companies hiring for sure dozens, maybe hundreds of employees a year.

Yeah, it’s and it’s chatbots over the web. As well as text. And to most companies, the most important part is text and using text messaging as the channel of choice for our frontline workers.

Okay, so your ideal customer is not the Fortune 100, not a massive government agency, but could be a. Healthcare company, a trucking company, a logistics company that maybe is over the next year or two, they’re gonna grow from say, 500 to 750 employees, or a thousand to 1100 this year.

Something in that range, is that right?

Exactly. Front frontline workers, and it could be a. Division of a larger organization that are using their local recruiting budget for their logistics. It could be like, we’ve got some Fortune five hundreds, but we work on the manufacturing side of that business, not the, massive retail or global footprint.

We call it recruiting automation for hr.

Oh, that totally makes sense. Even before you and I knew each other, which was, I think Eisenhower was still president I worked for Honeywell, which at the time was a Fortune 50 company, 80,000 employees, but it was very decentralized.

Yeah.

And so we had the automation unit and the aerospace unit, and some of those business units, I’m guessing were a few thousand employees.

Yep. And not high turnover. So we might have had 3000 employees in a Phoenix based company that maybe hired a hundred to 200 a year. So a division like that. Would be actually a good fit for a GoHire.

So it’s not the enterprise solution that’s gonna take six months to implement.

It’s something literally you can buy with a credit card and get started in a couple days.

Okay. So now we’re starting to get into, the differences between a mid-market, solution GoHire, and an enterprise solution.
1. So speed to implementation. That’s one of them.
2. Another one, it sounds like you might only have a single point of contact, a recruiting manager, or somebody like that .

So when you compact that down, purpose-built for a smaller organization. It’s something that doesn’t have to take six months to go through the IT team to get, approval.

So if there’s a company that’s been thinking that an enterprise-level solution is just too much money, too complicated for them to install, what’s the expression? Hunting a fly with a bazooka, it’s just over, right? What are some things GoHire would be offering to a regional hamburger chain that needs to hire 150 people a year.

Yeah, that’s a great question.

So the the reality is a lot of this tech is similar. It’s just a smaller business who wants to use a QR code, put signage on their building around their manufacturing facility.

They wanna be able to text candidates. They need a, toll free number . and so what ,you’re trying to do is just say, I need manufacturing or logistics or even a seasonal hiring event. I need to spin something up quickly. And my alternative is to call a staffing firm to give, get me a hundred people for Q four.

Or I need a system where I can install and hire quickly and text a bunch of people quickly to get ’em into the scheduled for interviews.

Cool. So from the employer’s perspective, they go online, they look at GoHire, that the pricing’s right, the turnaround time is right, et cetera. They sign up with you.

What are the. Onboarding steps. What are the, because I think you are gonna need to know from them what questions do candidates ask, what are the answers? Is it a tree that if they enter exactly this, then return this answer? Is there some kind of. We used to call it fuzzy logic. Now people, I think, are generalizing that to call that ai, like if the candidate doesn’t type in exactly the right words do they get an answer back? How does GoHire handle that?

Yeah. So there’s two things. So this is a great distinguishing point in a really simple tree. We’ve worked with healthcare, we work with retail. We’ve worked with restaurants. Guess what? They all have the same minimum criteria.

Like you have to be 18, you have to pass a drug screen, you have to have the right to work, right? So literally in our system, you can click a button to say, I’m trying to hire logistics or manufacturing.

And the whole thing spins up in literally an hour. It’s done and then you can customize it. So that’s how you can get out quick and you can customize a question. So it allows our side to get the client up fast and then they can come back and say, okay, I want to customize these questions to make ’em more relevant to my business.

And then if they’re multi-location or they need additional conditional logic say they have two locations and they want different teams to get the different candidates. Present it to them because of the location or the category of job, then we have to customize it. But it’s a, a weak customization at max in most clients.

And then the onboarding from the client is they get a onboarding email as soon as they sign up. The biggest area of implementation is a client connecting their calendar.

The biggest pain point that recruiters are seeing today when I talk to directors of recruiting is that they’re only talking to 15 to 20% of their candidates that apply even into their A T Ss. And part of that reason is because there’s manual processes and then they have to pick up the phone where they send them an email.

And we have that big drop off.

So from a job board side, we’re presenting candidates. Yet the recruiter team, they’re out there trying to herd cats and engage with these candidates. But if we’re trying to use email and phone to try to reach a mobile first community.

You might as well just take out your fax machine ’cause you’re gonna have just as bad luck.

But where you can send a candidate, a text message and ask them if you know they fit these criteria and then if they say yes, they meet those criteria. We connect them to your calendar and say, okay, Steven, you’ve already got like these things already set up. Yep. What do you have for availability at 15 minute increments?

Again, all customized, you have to choose those. Yep. But the idea is, Recruiting teams want qualified candidates on the phone. Yeah. So if you can get qualified candidates on the phone and you don’t have to do all that other stuff, that’s what we want.

Yeah. So that’s, the technology’s there for recruiters to get that now. As an individual buyer and you don’t need an enterprise solution to do it. Yeah. And then that the recruiter, the recruiting manager, whoever it is that’s gonna get connected with that candidate, they might block off from one to three o’clock on Tuesday and nine to 11 o’clock on Thursday, and then just let the system block individual interviews in 15 minute chunks, whatever the appropriate amount of time is.

Yeah, the candidate’s so friendly to them because they can go through the process, decide, am I qualified, am I not? Here’s my application. They can get an interview even today or tomorrow. And then that recruiting person basically like jumps on a call, does that screening.

And if it’s like, Hey, Jonathan, You know what? You are great. I wanna schedule a full interview in the office on Zoom, whatever. At that point, they’re on the phone. Exactly. And they can easily compare calendars.

Awesome.

So it’s that first part of that engagement is the biggest gap right now. Yeah. And it’s the one that costs the most time.

and the candidates, right? If you don’t get back to these candidates in a week you’re gonna lose ’em. They’re already hired by someone else

and then just let the system block individual interviews in 15 minute chunks, whatever the appropriate amount of time is. Yeah, the candidate’s so friendly to them because they can go through the process, decide, am I qualified, am I not?

Here’s my application. They can get an interview even today or tomorrow. And then that recruiting person, basically like jumps on a call, does that screening. And if it’s like, Hey, Jonathan, You know what? You are great. I wanna schedule a full interview in the office on Zoom, whatever.

At that point, they’re on the phone. And they can easily compare calendars.

Exactly. Yeah. So it’s that first part of that engagement is the biggest gap right now. And it’s the one that costs the most time.

And the candidates, right? If you don’t get back to these candidates in a week you’re gonna lose ’em. They, they’re already hired by someone else, because you’re trying to herd the cats.

They’re gone and that’s why you’re only getting very few results.

There’s a couple of numbers that justify this stuff. Our clients that are using the interview scheduling, sending a text, and asking the candidate the questions, and then interviewing them, they don’t follow up with email and phone anymore, like that’s done like that.

That’s like the fax machine that’s old. We don’t do that at all. The reason why is because instead of talking to 15% of the candidates, They’re talking to 82% and it happens quick. They self schedule in 24 hours. And then because of that speed, what’s happening is you get to choose the candidates.

You don’t have, you don’t have the ghosting,

and you’re not the fifth company trying to reach the candidate. You’re the first. So it’s just the process. You gotta kinda get through that Okay. I’m not waiting in the at T Ss until I have a resume.

If I see ’em on Indeed, I text them, I give ’em the questions. If they respond back and our set, our technology is set up that if they don’t respond back, instead of set up an interview, we send ’em a reminder. Yeah. And then if they don’t respond to that one we send a third reminder.

So again, it’s all that manual processes that are stacking up that we can’t do in parallel causes the delays.

And it’s just the coolest thing.

Having done this for so many years, as you have too, to see the breakthrough of these big, gaps that we couldn’t solve for.

That’s what turns me on about, 54 starting another, startup is really solving big problems right now.

Very cool. For listeners who want to reach you where should they go?

So GoHire.com or on LinkedIn.

So you can’t really miss that one. That’s crazy. Awesome, Jonathan, it has been fun. I look forward to seeing you at an upcoming event. Awesome.