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Brandon Amoroso on Solving Recruiting’s Biggest Breakdowns
5 Plays9 days ago
In this episode of MustardHub Voices: Behind the Build, Curtis sits down with Brandon Amoroso—co-founder and CEO of SCALIS—to explore how broken hiring systems inspired him to build a fully integrated, AI-powered recruiting platform. After scaling and exiting a 50-person agency, Brandon saw the same pain points over and over: unqualified applicants, bad job recommendations, data loss across disconnected tools, and no feedback loops to improve match quality. Combined with his brother’s surreal job recommendations, those experiences pushed them to solve the problem at its root.
Brandon shares how SCALIS consolidates sourcing, ATS, and AI-based workflows into one engine, closing the loop between recruiter actions and algorithmic learning. He also breaks down the role of Bella, their agentic AI recruiter, and the real-world challenges companies face when adopting AI in hiring. Curtis and Brandon dive into the future of HR tech, the shrinking of entry-level roles, the return of in-person interviewing, and what great leaders do to create connection in remote teams.
About Brandon:
Brandon Amoroso is the founder of Shopify Plus agency Electriq and a 2023 Forbes 30under30 Miami awardee. He built the agency to oversee more than 55 brands and 45 team members in just three years before DRINKS.com acquired it in April 2022. Since the acquisition, he continues to run the agency while overseeing DRINKS' strategic partnership with Shopify and the DRINKS App, the world’s first real-time alcohol tax and compliance solution integrated natively into Shopify’s checkout.
Brandon is passionate about building businesses in industries that are rife with inefficiencies and legacy biases and processes. His new startup, SCALIS, was cofounded last year with his brother Parker, a recent graduate of Stanford, after Brandon’s frustrations with the hiring process and difficulty finding qualified and diverse talent, and Parker’s experience applying for internships. SCALIS is the world’s first fully-integrated job board and ATS platform, leveraging AI and machine learning to democratize hiring by matching relevant candidates with relevant employers.
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Transcript
Introduction to Brandon Amoroso and Mustard Hub
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello again, welcome to Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. In these Fireside Chat episodes, I sit down with the people building, backing, and running better workplaces. I'm your host, Curtis Forbes.
00:00:18
Speaker
My guest today is Brandon Amoroso. um Brandon, very ah excited to have you here. Thanks for ah for
Founding Journey and Challenges
00:00:26
Speaker
joining me. Tell me a little bit about yourself.
00:00:30
Speaker
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. So I'm Brandon, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Scalus. Prior to this, I started a Shopify Plus marketing agency while I was going to school out in LA at USC back in 2018. I grew that team to just over 50 full-time team members and a successful exit in 2022.
00:00:52
Speaker
And it was out of the pain points that I had hiring and recruiting for that organization, combined with my younger brother's pain points as a job seeker in the market, that we decided to actually ah start Scaleless.
00:01:04
Speaker
I love that. I think some of the best ah some of the best products and services are obviously built out of your own your own story, your own your own need. um So you're co-founder of Scaleless. Very interesting recruiting, ATS platform. um Obviously not your first venture. You just ah you talked about you know what you did prior.
00:01:25
Speaker
As a fellow founder, I'm always super interested in what that kind of journey looks like for for others. i I want to hear about that, the you talked about the pain points, right?
00:01:37
Speaker
So tell me a little bit about, you know, what that was that sort of led up to Scalus. What were, if you had to articulate some of those pain points to talk about it and what Scalus actually solves, how would you describe it?
00:01:50
Speaker
Yeah. So we got up to about 15 full-time team members primarily through referrals. And then that's about the point where The referrals were not bringing in enough volume in order for us to sort of meet our hiring needs and goals.
00:02:04
Speaker
And so at that point, we went external and we basically had two options, you know, job board advertising or recruitment agencies. And, you know, the recruiting agencies were a little bit too rich for my blood at the time with the 20 to 30 percent you know first year of salary commitments.
00:02:23
Speaker
And the job boards is what we are left with. And ah we use the ACS as well. So pretty much the way our flow worked is we post a job, we get all these applicants. I was spending a bunch of money on LinkedIn advertising to get those applicants and maybe 5% of them had ever even logged into Shopify before, which was quite literally the only criteria that we were looking for.
00:02:45
Speaker
And we did that for, you know, the four years that we were growing and scaling that company. And we hired for really only two or three different positions. And so I thought, you know, using the same platforms that there would have been some sort of improvement or optimization of the types of candidates getting brought in, but that never occurred.
00:03:02
Speaker
It was always just the same over and over again, know, thousands of applicants, maybe five to 10% of them having logged into Shopify.
Innovative Recruitment Solutions with Scaleless
00:03:09
Speaker
So there's a lot of manual work that we had to do on our end to actually get to the 5% that mattered.
00:03:15
Speaker
And obviously a bunch of wasted a time and money in that process. My younger brother was getting was getting recommendations from these job board platforms and sourcing tools out there to go be the air traffic controller at the Dallas airport or a part-time women's shoes associate at a Macy's in New Jersey.
00:03:34
Speaker
Things that made zero sense in any way whatsoever. And any person in the world who looked at his resume and background would never have possibly come to those two as the recommendations that he should be applying to. and so When we took his experience and overlayed it on mine, we decided to go solve the root of the problem, which is the recommendations themselves.
00:03:55
Speaker
You know, why are all these platforms so bad at matching the right candidates to the right open roles and vice versa, despite there being an immense amount of data out there and also shared in any given application process.
00:04:06
Speaker
And what we uncovered is that the biggest gap is that to take candidates from sourcing all the way to offer letters signed. There's usually three to like seven different third-party platforms that an organization would have to use to facilitate that process.
00:04:20
Speaker
And so beyond it just being really expensive and cumbersome for both the employers and the candidates alike, there's data loss throughout that whole process. And there's no feedback loop going into the sourcing tools. So when I was hiring for those Shopify developers, as soon soon as they clicked apply on LinkedIn, they had no idea if they even submitted their application to the ATS, let alone if they were qualified or not,
00:04:41
Speaker
which round of the interview process they made it to, what were we ranking them on our scorecards, what was the AI interview note taker picking up during the call, what are they scoring on their skills assessment tests, if we did reject them, why did we reject them, were they a silver or bronze medal candidate, on and on and on. There's an immense amount of data that lives downstream that gets trapped there and dies there, and there's no feedback loop into sourcing.
00:05:03
Speaker
So that's why there was never any improvement, because you need reinforcement learning to be able to improve machine learning algorithms over time.
00:05:13
Speaker
Wow. I mean, that that's um that sounds pretty incredible. So you're able to now sort of synth synthesize that all sort of in one in one component. You take folks from that sourcing all the way through offer letter signed and um and you work with your brother at the same time, apparently.
Collaboration and Brand Identity at Scaleless
00:05:34
Speaker
Yes. what you on What's it like working with family? Say it again. He runs the product and engineering team. And I'm all go to market, general you know business stuff and ah the CEO responsibilities, if you want phrase it that the fundraising events, et cetera.
00:05:53
Speaker
And so having that delineation of responsibilities makes it very easy. And we're also very different. So I would never want to be in the engineering sprints and tickets and working with the Figma files in the way that he is.
00:06:06
Speaker
And he also would never want to be at 60 plus dinner events a year, you know, going to conferences, dealing with fundraising, sales, et cetera. So that delineation has, uh, has worked well.
00:06:22
Speaker
What, um, tell me about the name. Where did the name come from? Is it a family thing? It was originally ladder. So you're like climbing the corporate ladder was what we were trying to invoke.
00:06:35
Speaker
There's a lot of businesses with that name, as you can imagine. So Scaleless is ladder in Latin and it sounded kind of big techie. you know, if you think about like Slack or some of these other names that really had no meaning in any way whatsoever until they did.
00:06:54
Speaker
and And then we ended up incorporating the ladder into the A of the logo. So he came up with that and then I came up with our tagline, which is hiring shouldn't suck.
00:07:05
Speaker
So we got that. Got that trademarked and that's all of our dinner events that we run. They're the hiring shouldn't suck dinner events, which we've done about 40 this year. and And at some point next year, we'll start doing some sort of fun out of home activations ah playing off of that.
00:07:22
Speaker
You've told me about a little bit about those. That's a, I have, and that's, I think a really, really smart marketing tool. And now I fully understand the logo that is on your hat right now. So I appreciate that.
00:07:33
Speaker
um Tell me about the kind of, organizations that a scaleless is best suited for, are there certain kinds of use cases that you see getting more benefit from your platform than others?
Target Audience and Market Differentiation
00:07:46
Speaker
Yeah. So, i mean, our 10 year vision is to you know be everything for everyone in the same way that, you know, an indeed a LinkedIn is, but obviously we won't get to that point by starting out as being everything for everyone.
00:07:58
Speaker
So we really subdivided it into three categories like SMB, mid-market and enterprise. and try to determine which one made the most sense for us to approach first.
00:08:09
Speaker
When we looked at SMBs, we're a great value and use case for them, but the contract sizes are smaller and the amount of data that they're putting into the system is not as exciting from a training perspective in terms of like a cross platform.
00:08:24
Speaker
So the way that we get those types of businesses on is through our partner program. We have about 47 fractional talent consultants and recruiters signed to our partner program.
00:08:35
Speaker
They work with a ton of SMBs, you know, think under a hundred employees who are just getting started with recruiting and they look to them for the recommendations.
00:08:47
Speaker
And so we've gone that approach for SMB, not doing like direct outreach necessarily to that group, because it's harder to identify need um at that stage.
00:08:58
Speaker
With the mid-market organizations, They are the sweet spot because the budgets are ah you know higher and the amount of data that they're processing is greater. i mean, they're going to be hiring at least 25 to 100 at a minimum roles per year.
00:09:14
Speaker
And they also have a willingness to move that is greater than the enterprise. So we're primarily targeting mid-market organizations that are on some of these legacy ATS providers.
00:09:27
Speaker
More often than not, they're using anywhere between two to five extra third-party tools outside of just their ATS to facilitate what Scaleless does in one place. So our whole value prop for them is you're throwing everything out, consolidating into one.
00:09:40
Speaker
And a lot of C-levels are asking their teams to do more with less. And so Scaleless is a perfect fit for those companies. Why are they willing to move more than the enterprise? The enterprise internal decision-making, know, sort of flows are just the longer, more cumbersome.
00:09:56
Speaker
It's not as clear what the approval flow actually is in some of those organizations. And more often than not, they're stuck on much longer term contracts. So I've even seen five year contracts at some of the enterprise organizations.
00:10:12
Speaker
And the systems that they're on are also ah lot more difficult to use, and not as friendly when it comes to like data migration.
00:10:25
Speaker
And so more often than not, that really is where the rubber meets the road is a like the contract might not end for quite literally another four or five years.
00:10:36
Speaker
And then B not you know, having the time on our end to be able to work through, you know, that year and a half sales cycle through all the different stakeholders and whatnot. And then three, the actual ability to migrate the data cleanly into a solution like Scala. So we have a lot of those relationships, nurturing,
00:10:57
Speaker
They'll come to our dinner events and whatnot, but it's not our our core ICP at this point.
Transition to HR Tech and Product Development
00:11:02
Speaker
I want to hear more about the story that brought you into that ah HR tech space coming from you know Shopify. um Tell me about some of the the the different challenges that you had to, that you went through, you experienced that were different from you know what you had before. you know Specifically, I guess, getting into recruiting, applicant tracking, right?
00:11:27
Speaker
lot of different pieces of technology, right? A lot of different challenges that you're having to now overcome. What was that journey like and what were some of the biggest differences? Yeah. so I mean, I learned a lot building the first business, though it did have a couple of key distinctions. it it was a services organization. So it was very much so a people business and we are also profitable from from day one.
00:11:51
Speaker
And and you know, second is totally different ecosystem. So that was Shopify. This is more general HR and recruiting tech. But to the first part, you know, being the people business, still a people component within Scalus. There's just different.
00:12:09
Speaker
It's not the same where I'm adding a head and then expecting a certain revenue new amount to like come in via that. So the financial modeling and whatnot is a little bit more challenging with a SaaS organization, especially pre-profitability.
00:12:21
Speaker
And then ah Second, as relates to the network, I had a pretty sizable Shopify network towards the end of that, but you know could have gone the route of starting a business in that ecosystem and would have already been tapped in in a way that I wasn't within recruiting, but took a lot of the learnings and lessons that I gathered while building that Shopify network to sort of like 10 exit when it comes to the recruiting landscape.
00:12:46
Speaker
So that was a top of mind for me as soon as we started this to just try and get in front of and get connected with as many recruiting leaders as humanly possible. And so what that looked like to begin with was actually hiring them internally.
00:12:59
Speaker
So like a big thing for me was I brought the SMB owner experience to hiring and recruiting, but I wasn't a VP of talent at a organization with a team of 20 recruiters hiring 100 roles a month across the globe.
00:13:12
Speaker
They obviously bring insights and experience that I do not have in any way whatsoever, especially as it relates to like day-to-day workflows and the pain points that exist in the tools that they're using. So our VP of product was the director of recruiting in people ops at greenhouse and Workday shops for the last 10 years prior to joining Scalus.
00:13:32
Speaker
And then we surrounded her with a group of nine super user advisors from, know, Gem, Ashby, Lever, Greenhouse, Team Taylor, Workable, sort of the core solutions that you would expect to see when you think of ATS in the market.
00:13:45
Speaker
And that was really critical for me. not only to get more sort of networking and awareness exposure, but most importantly, having the actual practitioners build the product because I was definitely not the right person to you know build the day-to-day workflows of what a recruiting team would want in need in an end-to-end AI native solution.
00:14:05
Speaker
So that plus you know the learnings I had from building network in the Shopify ecosystem is how we're able to you know, now have all these partners in our partner program, how I can have a dinner event in pretty much any city, you know, without a doubt, we'll have at least, you know, 10 attendees there.
00:14:21
Speaker
It's just sort of been like brute force knocking on as many doors as humanly possible over over the past two years, pre us actually going live to make sure that we're ah known commodity and something that, you know, we're still very focused on.
00:14:36
Speaker
That's really, that's amazing. And that's a really creative and and clever, I think, way to go about building your team. I like what you said about how we had the actual HR or you had the actual ah HR practitioners building the product, um which is, um you know, not, I mean, not traditionally how it's done and probably one of the reasons why, you know, adoption can fail in so many places, right?
AI in Recruitment: Bella the Assistant
00:15:00
Speaker
um Tell me, i know a big part of Scaleless is Bella. Tell everybody what what is Bella? Well, Bella is my dog.
00:15:13
Speaker
And so naturally I had to name our AI agent after her and in the prior business. She was littered throughout all of our marketing materials and whatnot. actually the cursor on our website was an emoji of her face just to have some fun. Really?
00:15:31
Speaker
Keep it a little lighthearted. and Now, having named the agent her though, I literally bring up Bella probably 50 times a day on sales demos. And so she's always just sitting here in the corner looking at me like, you know, what the heck are you talking about? I'm right here.
00:15:48
Speaker
Bella is a recruiting sidekick, basically a recruiting assistant that helps facilitate sourcing, prescreening, interview scheduling, all the end-to-end sort of steps within the Scaleless platform can either be done completely by Bella autonomous,
00:16:04
Speaker
autonomously or augmented by her support. And so we launched her earlier this year. The reason why we're able to facilitate so many things with her is because we own the full recruitment lifecycle and have all the data there.
00:16:18
Speaker
So that's how we can do, you know, AI interview note taking plus AI sourcing plus, you know, the AI scheduling and then all that data stitches together to be able to provide some chained workflows in the back end. So when a client opens up a job requisition, which they can have Bella help them do,
00:16:33
Speaker
Once that job rec is open, Bella can actually run the search, create the talent pools, generate the outreach sequences all automatically just in the backend, because we already have all the data from the job rec that was created within the Scateless platform. So we're definitely still in the infancy of all the things she can do though, because there's just so many opportunities and ways that we can continue to innovate with her.
00:16:55
Speaker
We currently have a nine page document of every action we'd like her to be able to take over the next six to nine months here. And a lot of it is getting into more ah predictive and proactive um analytics and messaging within the system.
00:17:13
Speaker
So right now it's conversational, but the recruiter you know chats with Bella versus logging into the system and Bella is chatting with you. And so what I'm most excited for is a lot of the forecasting things that we're working on where you can log into the system and Bella will tell you, Hey,
00:17:30
Speaker
you know, Curtis, you need to go source 50 more candidates for this role or you're going to miss your time to fill requirement. Oh, by the way, here's 50 candidates that I already sourced. These are the 10 I'd recommend you pre-screen. Do you want me to reach out to handle scheduling with them?
00:17:44
Speaker
So you can do that right now from the system, but it's not as you know proactive and it's not being suggested by her based on the data. Wow. So, okay. um You know, just to, for folks who are listening to just maybe, maybe let's talk a little bit about how sort of this, like an agentic recruiter works a little bit. um So somebody will go into the platform and engage with this agent, right. To presumably, you know,
00:18:17
Speaker
discuss a little bit about what they need, what they're looking for, right? With all the you know different things in a particular job, et cetera. What happens next? Yeah. So once the job is defined, Bella will extract out from that job description, your ideal candidate profile.
00:18:38
Speaker
So that'll obviously be based off of skills, but there's other criteria that goes into that, like years of experience, industries worked in, company size, company funding stage, location, average tenure, on and on and on. There's a lot of different criteria that into collaborative with the actual person who's setting it up too?
00:18:58
Speaker
Correct. so you can either tweak the filters yourself manually in the drawer, or you can chat with Bella to adjust it up or down. And as relates to like our outbound sourcing um offering,
00:19:14
Speaker
It'll actually show you in real time the number of candidates that meet that criteria as you adjust the filters or as you chat back and forth with Bella. um And so that sets the ideal candidate profile, which is what powers the AI match score throughout the system.
00:19:30
Speaker
So not only the inbound applicants that you're receiving from job boards into the Scaleless ATS, they'll be provided with a match score. but also all of the outbound source candidates that Scalus is pulling in from our global database of over 700 million profiles.
00:19:44
Speaker
They're also provided a match score. It's the same model. It's really defined by that ideal candidate profile in the job creation process, but where it really all stitches together is in legacy systems, your outbound sourcing and your ATS are separate.
00:19:59
Speaker
So the outbound sourcing could have a match model and the ATS could have a match model. With Scalus, Let's you're sourcing somebody, you source John, it says he's a 90% match score.
00:20:11
Speaker
He makes it into the application flow. You do a quick pre-screen call with him and you actually end up rejecting him. In that rejection flow in the ATS, you're going to provide your rejection reason, a medalist designation of applicable, and then any other additional details and notes.
00:20:27
Speaker
Historically, that feedback would just die in that requisition and is purely used for the purposes of reporting and analytics. Within Scaleless, it's not only going to update the match score for all the other applicants in that pipeline, but it's actually training the sourcing because clearly that person should not have been a 90% for the sourcing agent if they didn't even make it past the pre-screening process.
00:20:48
Speaker
And so having that closed the loop, sourcing and ATS in one place is enabling an environment where there's so much more data that can be leveraged for training. And a lot of this is indirect training. So like the ATS,
00:21:03
Speaker
Recruiters do not have to go out of their way to take a manual action that they wouldn't have done otherwise in order to train the system. Because every interaction that they take on the platform, every candidate progression, candidate rejection, every scorecard submitted by a hiring manager, every interview conducted, we own and aggregate all of that data internally and in turn are able to use it to train Bella.
00:21:25
Speaker
Awesome. That's, um yeah, that's and that's an incredibly powerful. So what are some of the benefits that you're seeing for organizations using AI in their recruiting and
AI's Role and Limitations in Recruitment
00:21:33
Speaker
hiring process? Like what are the pros to leveraging tools like, you know, Scaleless? Let's talk about that first.
00:21:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, first and foremost is just a cost savings, like right out of the gate. Because of the fact that you're consolidating, you know, multiple different functions into one platform, your, you know, total cost of ownership is going to be lower.
00:21:53
Speaker
Second is ease of use. mean, you're in one system doing everything versus having 12 different tabs open. And then third is going to be time savings. So think about sourcing.
00:22:05
Speaker
Historically, that would have been done more manually. Within Scaleless, you just open up the job and you can have Bella automatically do the search, actually source the candidates, reach out to them and get them to apply into the pipeline.
00:22:17
Speaker
So we've cut sourcing time by up to 93% for some organizations because of the fact that they're able to just ah set and forget it. And then it just sort of trickles on down the way from sourcing to offer a letter sign.
00:22:31
Speaker
Even as relates to inbound applicant review, in legacy systems, you could get thousands of applicants. You're stuck with Boolean searches or going one by one for each resume to choose you want to move forward or not.
00:22:42
Speaker
Within Scaleless, we take the app applicant's resume, push it through natural language processing, parse it into a standardized structured Scaleless profile for each of them. So it gives our employers over 50 different data points they can use to segment their inbound applicants beyond just the screening questions that they put into the application flow.
00:23:01
Speaker
So they can filter out everybody who has less than two years of average tenure in their past three roles, who doesn't have these four different skill sets, who isn't within a 25 mile radius of a particular zip code, who doesn't have more than two years of experience in a particular industry.
00:23:17
Speaker
So that can literally take a thousand applicants down to a hundred, in the span of 15 seconds. Then from there, you can look at each of those profiles, leverage the match score to choose which ones you want to go forward with or not, but huge time savings there as well. on the um On the other side of the coin, I mean, there's there's so many ways in which AI and the hiring process has really come under fire.
00:23:41
Speaker
what do you What do you see as challenges and maybe potential hurdles in using AI for recruiting and hiring? Or even ways that other companies, right, we don't have to name, drop or whatnot, are not quite nailing it and possibly creating issues?
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah. So ah two main things there. One is that most of the AI entrance to the recruiting landscape are point solutions. So they just do sourcing or they just do scheduling or they just do interview intelligence, which is great for the businesses that are you know stuck on a longer term contract or aren't ready for a wholesale like infrastructure change.
00:24:22
Speaker
Those solutions can provide them temporary relief to the pain point that they're experiencing with whatever their current legacy ETS provider is. Obviously at an additional expense, but you know they're not ready for a full work and replace to something that's quite scaleless.
00:24:37
Speaker
The issue with being a point solution is that you lack data and context throughout the rest of the recruitment life cycle. So your AI sourcing tools are limited in the training data that they have because they don't have access to anything that happens after that candidate clicks apply.
00:24:51
Speaker
Same goes for all the other point solutions throughout that process. And so that's where I see long-term them running into some potential challenges.
00:25:04
Speaker
Though for us, as an early stage company, our sales cycle is longer than what their cycle is going to be because we're not plugging in into what already exists. We're replacing what exists. The other component that I see is there's a lot of hype around ai just like totally taking over everything. And of course, to here's the candidate that is signed.
00:25:24
Speaker
That's never going to happen. One, because of rules and regulations, you know two, probably because it shouldn't. And three We've set up scaleless in a way that AI is there just to support and augment, you know not replace.
00:25:38
Speaker
So how do we turn one recruiter into three? Or how do we turn one recruiter into five? But as an example, that match score, we don't allow it to be the end-all, be-all decision maker within a process. So like you cannot set up an automated rule where if a candidate falls underneath a certain match score, you know move them, reject them. Or if a candidate goes above a certain match score, approve them.
00:26:02
Speaker
You can bulk select all the candidates who fall underneath that. The human still has to go in there and take that action because of the rules and regulations around what AI can and cannot do. So this idea that you'll be able to have ai post a job, screen the candidates automatically, and then ultimately choose which one gets hired.
00:26:22
Speaker
I think we're pretty far away from that because of rules and regulations and also the comfortability that legal teams have with what AI can and cannot do within their recruitment process. I mean, especially as you work your way up market, i can't tell you how many times we've been asked if they can use scaleless, but like without the AI in like more than half of the areas where it could be leveraged to support them. Yeah.
00:26:45
Speaker
yeah Um, I do see it making that, that really significant impact across the entire employee life cycle. Um, you know, beyond Scaleless, I mean, are there are there other uses for AI and human resources that you find interesting out curiosity?
00:27:06
Speaker
i think there's a lot in the admin and like manual route tasks of HR, really just every business aspect in general. So I think of, you know, payroll tax and reporting and things like that.
00:27:22
Speaker
I also think of post-hire sort of engagement and upskilling opportunities, being able to leverage AI within that. But there's pretty much, it'd be hard find, in my opinion, to find any sort of ah business function or activity that can't use AI in some way.
00:27:42
Speaker
whether Whether or not it's truly that impactful or meaningful really depends on what it is. We've definitely seen AI just sort of forced into some places for the sake of having AI.
00:27:54
Speaker
which like, well, I mean, long-term, first of all, it's pretty expensive, you know, to have AI just littered throughout the entirety of ah of a platform. um And so we really like to think about of, you know, think about what is truly going to be impactful versus what is more gimmicky.
00:28:14
Speaker
Gimmicky isn't necessarily bad, but, you know. When I think of AI, I don't think of AI job description generation. I mean, we do that, but like, that's not what I think about when I think of AI.
00:28:26
Speaker
And so I think there needs to be a distinction between, you know, generative AI and everything else. um I think that that's a good kind of distinction there.
00:28:37
Speaker
um And I mean, it kind of leads me to this question, not to be too cliched, but when I do think about the future of HR, right? I mean, you know, we're kind of here, it's now.
00:28:48
Speaker
um If you think about Scalus maybe and and and other platforms in this space, frankly, what do you see as the next big thing in HR tech?
00:28:58
Speaker
Is it more use cases for AI? Is it more evolved technologies? Is it something else?
Future of HR Tech and Workforce Trends
00:29:05
Speaker
Is it policy? I think policy is starting to catch up. I mean, New York, Colorado, a lot of jurisdictions have started to come out with new rules and regulations. And so we work with a variety of third party auditing firms is really opening up a new area of opportunity for startups to help with compliance, help with support on that side of things. um
00:29:31
Speaker
And I think there's a lot of acquisition happening in the ah HR landscape as there's a rush to be that all in one solution and claim it for whether it's like the enterprise vertical or for high volume recruiting unclear who's going to actually sort of end up being that all in one choice.
00:29:51
Speaker
don't think it's going to be just one player. I think there might be a player for, you know, a particular vertical or a player for a particular market segment, but the TAM is just so ginormous that there's a lot of room for for everyone.
00:30:06
Speaker
I think the evolution of HR tech you're going to see a lot of point solutions start to bolt on other features and functionality like, you know, an interview intelligence tool just released AI sourcing as an example.
00:30:21
Speaker
I'm not sure what that's going to look like once it, you know, matures, because i don't really see the synergies necessarily between some of the additional features that are getting bolted on. But I saw this firsthand in the Shopify ecosystem about you know, three years ago when you had reviews platforms that grew to like five, maybe 10 million of ARR.
00:30:41
Speaker
And then they sort of flatline because there's so much competition. It's just a point solution. If you were to go on the Shopify app store, I think there's like 700 reviews tools. So then they added like loyalties and referral. Well, it's like, well, there's already 50 point solutions that do loyalties and referral. Why do you also need loyalties and referrals or any benefits there?
00:30:58
Speaker
And so we started to see a little bit of a desperation you standalone solutions to add on additional product offerings to be able to increase that revenue to keep justifying the VC valuations and the continual need to fundraise.
00:31:12
Speaker
I think we're going to see more and more of that here. And then also a i know what the right term would be, but sort of a settling of the funding that happened in that 2020 to 23 period, where you had a couple of these players raise pretty significant rounds at rather generous valuations.
00:31:31
Speaker
And the ripple effects of that are still have still yet to fully play out. And those will start to materialize over the next two or three years here. I mean, I think you're probably right about that.
00:31:44
Speaker
um You know, I'm curious, just to pivot a little bit, you know, off of the technology side, not not only is is the tech evolving, but the world of work as a whole is, is evolving.
00:31:58
Speaker
um I'm curious, like, you know, do you, in doing what you do, building the, you know, this recruiting platform, this, this, you know, end to end, right.
00:32:09
Speaker
Pre-hire platform. um What do you, what do you think is going to be important to people in the workforce in the near future? Right. You're, you clearly have a pulse on not just those people trying to trying to find candidates, but also the candidates themselves, right?
00:32:27
Speaker
mean, you do incredible amount of sourcing. Do you see certain things that are becoming really important to them? Are there any trends that are going to emerge that come to the forefront? I mean, it it couldn't, I mean, beyond just the tools we use, but what about where we work? Compensation, benefits, culture, engagement, anywhere else you want to examine?
00:32:46
Speaker
Yeah, i mean we're definitely seeing a return to work more and more. And that even as a means to like combat AI as well. um yeah In the interview process, it is getting more and more common for there to be fake applicants or AI-generated applications.
00:33:03
Speaker
And really the 100% foolproof way to solving that is a final in-person interview, which we've heard from multiple employers at this point as something that they're now requiring as a part of their application process.
00:33:18
Speaker
I think a second, there's a shrinking of the level of entry ah positions that are available in the market because of AI. I think some of it is a little bit of an overcorrection because I've met numerous companies at this point who you know reduce headcount and go more like fractional or try and hold off on entry level.
00:33:42
Speaker
And then ultimately they go fractional, but then they're asking the fractional for even more support and resources. And so this ends up like netting out um even. But I think there's going to be a demand for alternative forms of like education or upskilling from younger career professionals, because they're not having like, you know, internship programs are getting cut by some organizations. The entry level positions are getting slashed, but it's like, who's going to be doing that middle manager role in five or 10 years once this current cohort ages out, if there's not anybody in that entry level pool getting trained.
00:34:15
Speaker
I think that's going to be pretty interesting as well.
Leadership in Remote Work Environments
00:34:19
Speaker
what about What about leaders? I mean, you obviously found success in not only what what you're doing right now, but in your prior role.
00:34:28
Speaker
So you know in the near future, are there other skills that leaders need to have in order to create an empowered and engaged and and and satisfied team or workforce? you know Are there tools that they need to be successful, that you know did they need to use to be successful for building and retaining their people?
00:34:46
Speaker
Yeah, I think if you're remote, It's different than if you're in person. Remote, I find it more challenging. And there's a variety of platforms that have come out over the last five years to try and combat that problem, making sure that there's still that connection amongst the team, even if in a remote environment.
00:35:06
Speaker
So that would be my number one focus as the as a leader of a remote workforce is how are we still creating that authenticity and and those relationships Because if you're not, you know, it's it's so it's so much easier to not feel like a part of the team and to you know feel like you're involved with it. If you're just sort of signing on, it's totally virtual. You don't have that one-on-one. It's the same way I think about like sales and and and prospecting.
00:35:35
Speaker
yeah i don't have the numbers in front of me, but my close rate on the prospects that I've met person has to be almost double what it is for the first person. Same even goes for you know customer retention.
00:35:45
Speaker
and It's just way different if you've met in person, you have that one-to-one relationship. So there's a lot of platforms that have come out that help with that. And I think that would be one of my biggest focuses as a remote leader.
00:36:01
Speaker
Is your team at at Scaleless remote? Yeah, we're remote. Were you guys remote at your past ah at the past company too? No. and We evolved into it a little bit.
00:36:15
Speaker
but we grew primarily in like the LA San Diego area. We were probably 70% in person, 30% remote, maybe 80, 20.
00:36:27
Speaker
So it was a lot easier to have the relationships and the connections and to feel a part of something when you were you know showing up.
00:36:38
Speaker
And you also get a lot of advantages outside of just the day-to-day work. I mean, the quick drinks after dinner or, you know, or just, you know, things that aren't going to happen organically if you're not in the office together.
00:36:53
Speaker
What do you see, you know, some of these leaders doing, you know, doing right. The ones that are really nailing it, like, um you know, whether they're working with remote teams or in person,
00:37:04
Speaker
Tell me about some of those things, some of those qualities that they have and some of the things that they do to really make that team, you know, work like a unit. And then the other side of the coin, what's the quicksand that you see a lot of folks falling into that ultimately, you know, destroys their culture or even potentially their business?
00:37:26
Speaker
So the best leaders I've seen, and I had to learn this myself at a previous company was having conversations and asking questions to your direct reports that maybe you would not have thought of otherwise. Like a good example for me was I wanted to take one of my direct reports and increase their level of responsibility and, you know, title bump them into a director position versus being an individual contributor.
00:38:03
Speaker
Ended up not working out, could have been alleviated very easily by just asking them if they wanted, like their career path wise, like, did they want to continue being an individual contributor?
00:38:13
Speaker
Or were they interested in moving into like minute minimum man and um into a managerial role? That would have solved everything because they would have said, I just want to really be a really great individual contributor.
00:38:25
Speaker
have those conversations versus making assumptions. And, you know, everyone doesn't want to be the CEO. Everyone doesn't want to be the founder of a company. And so what I've started to try and do myself even is get an understanding of both personally and professionally, what the goals are of that team member and try and help them map to that and how like Scaleless can help support them in achieving those.
00:38:47
Speaker
I think that's really important. And to show that demonstrated interest in the team members success, both you know professionally and personally, and then try and mirror that to scaleless is going to produce significantly better results for both, not only the employee, but also the company.
00:39:05
Speaker
Yeah. um any ah I'm curious, and again, no need to sort of name any any names are you know or or companies, but I'm curious if you've seen or i had experiences with leaders who really just kind of bit it hard and wound up destroying either a company or a culture or something you know like that just as a result of their actions or inactions?
00:39:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think i had internships before I started Electric, which was a previous business. And those internships actually me want to start ah Electric tur because I could clearly see that
00:39:51
Speaker
merit was not like promotions and whatnot were not based on merit or who got a seat at the table and who got to bring ideas was not based on merit.
00:40:01
Speaker
It was based off of who had been there the longest, who had you know done all the corporate sort of rhythm and roll. and that's not always the case though.
00:40:12
Speaker
But I think a lot of those corporate environments are, you know they just breed lack of accountability and and and ownership. And, you know, it got to the point where you would bring things forward.
00:40:26
Speaker
And because of the fact that a, they had been doing something the way they had been doing it for like 30 years. And there wasn't really the desire or this appetite for continual improvement and optimization, which I think is really critical.
00:40:39
Speaker
um But two, just not having the ability to make any change or have any impact or just like a cog in the wheel. That's really discouraging and disheartening for somebody, especially like a,
00:40:51
Speaker
a younger, know, go getting, you know, new team member that's starting, why not give them the reins and let them, you know, run with things and take some ownership and prove that they belong versus pigeonholing them into these like very specific set of requirements and basically trying to like turn them into a robot or into AI.
00:41:14
Speaker
Like I always stressed whenever I hired anybody, know, we're not hiring you to just like check these boxes. if If we did, then we would just automate it or have ai do it. We're hiring you for you and for your ideas and insights.
00:41:27
Speaker
Setting up ways for people to feel heard. Like we, but at the end had, you know, the over 50 team members and each one, every quarter would submit three ideas around things that we weren't doing that we should be doing.
00:41:41
Speaker
And then we'd take them. We at the end had 150 in total and would have like a 45 minute alt, uh, all hands meeting where I'd go through each one and talk about how we were addressing it, how we were addressing it in the future, or why we couldn't address it, or perhaps how we were addressing it in a different way.
00:41:59
Speaker
And some of them were silly, like pay off all of my college debt, which obviously we could not do, but others were really impactful. And then we also didn't have them be anonymous because there's definitely certain things that should be anonymous, but I felt like that was one that definitely should not be because we had created a safe space where people could, you know, voice their opinions.
00:42:22
Speaker
And then that way, when we did take one of those ideas and ran with it, I knew who had brought it forth. And so they could take ownership and accountability of actually seeing that through and letting their vision come forward within how we actually created and deployed whatever it was that they had suggested.
00:42:39
Speaker
I love that. Right. And then, and then obviously they can feel good knowing that their, that their voice was heard. um So, you know, we talked a lot about, aspects of people dynamics that that might change, you know, as the business landscape evolves, um whether remote or or not, how do you see your own work evolving in line with all this? I mean, you already led one company, right? You grew it, you built it, you exited it, you're onto the next one.
00:43:06
Speaker
What does that future look like? In terms of AI? ah Yeah, i you know, Sort of open-ended, how do you see your own work sort of evolving with the changing landscape of work, with your growing remote team, with you know addressing all these needs in in this sort of HR tech space with AI, et cetera? Yeah, I think as a founder, like when you're first starting out, you just have to do everything.
00:43:35
Speaker
And everything's going to get done, but there's certain things that will get done, you know probably not as well as they should. You know, you're just checking the boxes because they have to be done by somebody, but there's only so much time in the day. And so as we continue to grow, choosing what and how to delegate is really important.
00:43:55
Speaker
And then certain things that didn't matter so much when you're 10, 20 people will matter a lot more when you're 50 people. And the one-offs that you can handle with a team of 10,
00:44:07
Speaker
At 50, those one-offs start to add up. And so making sure that you have SOPs and procedures and processes in place to help facilitate those is really important.
00:44:18
Speaker
So that's my main focus as we continue to grow is making sure that some of these things don't fall to the wayside as I pick up new and different responsibilities.
00:44:28
Speaker
Having lanes in place to either delegate or make sure that I'm owning them fully is is important. and making sure that nothing falls through the cracks. So as I've learned is I'm very focused on go to market and sales and events and whatnot and building and like creating community, not only externally, but within the organization itself.
00:44:52
Speaker
But you know, when it comes to like, don't bookkeeping, payroll, some of these other stuff that I would have to do myself in the beginning, like- All the HR stuff?
00:45:05
Speaker
Pretty much. Pretty much. Aside from recruiting, because now I can just use scaleless to recruit and it's so easy. but There you go. oh You know, one last ah one last question. You know, I'm always curious, you know, if if you're if you're with an entrepreneur asking you for your single most important piece of advice about identifying the right talent or or building a team, I'm sure you have these conversations already.
00:45:33
Speaker
all the time. ah Maybe you're on an elevator up to the top floor and they're really looking for that one piece of advice so they can nail it the first time around. What is it that you tell them? Yeah.
00:45:45
Speaker
The number one thing would be yeah delegation. So one of the things that I did with the previous company, i took ah month and wrote down every single thing that I did that month, how much time it took,
00:46:02
Speaker
And then look back at it after that month and went through it and was basically like, okay, what's the level of importance here? And what's the level of effort to execute against that?
00:46:15
Speaker
And then sort of a third column, which was, do I like this or not? Which is important because certain things I didn't like, but I had to keep doing because the level of importance was really high.
00:46:27
Speaker
And it really could only be done by me at that point. Other things, you know, I didn't like and level of importance was low. And so you obviously get off with this, but basically took that matrix and then determined, okay, these are the things that I must own and will continue to own.
00:46:40
Speaker
These are the things that I don't need to own forever, but I'll still own for now. But let me to make sure that I'm setting up and documenting processes that I will have the ability to train somebody else to do it. And then here's all the things that I can go delegate now and Is it somebody internally that I can delegate to or is it somebody externally? And then the second fall onto that would be just have those conversations like I mentioned earlier in this interview or in this podcast is talking with that team member and making sure that they actually want to do whatever it is that you're thinking of looping them in for.
00:47:12
Speaker
And I'm very much so a proponent of like autonomy and delivering goals to an employee. versus delivering tasks.
00:47:25
Speaker
Like, I don't care what the actual tasks are that get done to achieve the goal. And so I'm here to support the team member in identifying what those tasks could or should be to achieve that goal.
00:47:38
Speaker
But I'm not here saying, oh, you need to 100 of this every week. It's more so this is where we're trying to get to. Let's you know create and and ideate to getting to that stage. And that just builds even more autonomy and buy-in from the team member that they're working with. So I think that's just the number one thing. i mean, you're only going to, in order to be a successful entrepreneur, that's not a solopreneur. You're going to have to be able to lift up your team and they'll lift you up as well.
00:48:03
Speaker
Right. So um i love all of those things, by the way, but learn to delegate, talk to your team and focus on outcomes.
Episode Conclusion and Key Takeaways
00:48:13
Speaker
Yep.
00:48:14
Speaker
I like it. Of all, be all, have your end goal in mind. Why the hell are you even doing this to begin with? Yeah. Your why, guess. shaped Why and how I built electric and why I sold it.
00:48:27
Speaker
And that's also shaping, you know, why how I built scaleless and why i would not sell it. I mean, definitely not at this point, but like, I think even having that in mind is important when you're thinking about you build. Yeah. I mean, definitely one hundred percent. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Brandon. Listen, I really appreciate it I think we've got a lot of great stuff out of this. It was great.
00:48:47
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you for having me. It was fun. Thank you all for tuning into Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. Please like and share this episode. Drop by mustardhub.com to learn how we help companies become destinations for workplace happiness and turn culture into a competitive edge.
00:49:04
Speaker
And be sure to sign up to be one of the first to get started with Mustard Hub for free when you visit the site. Until next time.