Leveraging Outbound Recruiting to Compete for Talent

This episode of the HR Happy Hour is brought to you by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement, and software solutions for businesses of all sizes. 

Financial capital has long been established as a key driver of business performance, but today, business leaders are increasingly recognizing the importance of their human capital in driving success. Download Paychex’s latest guide to discover why breaking down the silos between HR and finance can result in better business strategy and growth, as well as 14 simple HR metrics your teams should be tracking, and why. 

To download the e-book, visit payx.me/FDMresearch.  

This week, we met with Steven Jiang, CEO and Co-Founder, and Shannon Pritchett, Head of Marketing and Community, from HireEZ to discuss the leave and wellness revolution and how caring for your employees has taken on a whole new power.

– What are the problems facing recruiters today?

– Why outbound recruiting is the new future

– Hiretual’s rebranding – introducing HireEZ

Thank you, Steven and Shannon, for joining the show today!  Remember to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript follows:

Steve 0:23
Welcome to the HR Happy Hour Show with Steve and Trish, sponsored by our friends at Paychex. First we’ve got a great show, we’re going to be talking with our friends from Hiretual about their Outbound RecruitCon event, and about outbound recruiting in general and why it’s important, and why it’s the future of recruiting. And gosh, every every organization I know or read about is having trouble finding people. And so we’re going to learn a little bit more about how they can help organizations with that incredibly difficult challenge that is just happening literally all across the country, every industry, every company, and I can’t wait to get started with that conversation, Trish. But first, Trish, as you know, there’s a question of the day as we record this it’s National plan your vacation day. I don’t know if you knew that?

Trish 1:11
I did not know that. I like where this is going.

Steve 1:15
Tell me where, if you were planning it, you’re doing that today? Where are you planning your next vacation, Trish?

Trish 1:21
That’s really hard. Because I think all of the places I would want to be able to go that we’re not able to go just yet. That’s a challenge. Okay. And I don’t know if you’re like this, and maybe our guests are like this too. But once you’ve gone somewhere, and you really want to go back and then if like the whole world has turned into a pandemic and you cannot go back it makes you want to go back that much more. So I’m going to go either Shanghai or Singapore because I have been just like, looking back through my photos. I am gonna say Shanghai like I miss it. I miss the food. I miss walking through the gardens. I miss riding the little tram under the river. I miss every single thing about it. That’s where I would go.

Steve 2:04
Yeah, I probably would almost pick that too but I won’t pick it again. Well, I won’t pick the same answer as you, I’d love to, as well. But I’m gonna pick Germany, Trish. I’d like to go to Germany and go see a soccer game there. One of my pandemic habits or past times I picked up right once we locked down a couple of years ago.

Trish 2:25
I know right? Like you’re a long term fan. Now.

Steve 2:28
I adopted German soccer as something to watch like early on Saturday mornings and Sunday morning. So I’d love to go to Germany and see a game now that would be my thing.

Trish 2:35
You know what, I think we should do a whole separate show on like, things that we’ve started during the pandemic that like I have turned into someone who watches pro bowling all the time. Like I cannot give it up. So yeah, on another show.

Steve 2:48
Nice. Well, we’ll see where our guests, maybe they want to weigh in on that too.

Trish 2:51
We will have them weigh in.

Steve 2:53
Let’s get them on the show. We’re very excited to welcome our special guests, Steven Jiang and Shannon Pritchett, both from Hiretual. Steven is the CEO and co-founder of Hiretual, an AI driven, global talent platform that helps recruiters strategically source and engage with the most relevant job candidates up to 10 times faster, significantly reducing the time to hire as an advocate for the recruiting industry. Steven believes in empowering recruiters with the resources they need to succeed. In the ever evolving hiring landscape. Folks probably know Shannon. Shannon Pritchett is the current head of marketing and community at Hiretual. She remains passionate about growing that community and connecting companies to their most valuable asset their people. For more than two decades, passion, growth and community have shaped Shannon’s career and contributions in the talent acquisition space. Welcome both of you to the show. Steven and Shannon. First Steven, how are you today?

Steven Jiang 3:46
Good. Thank you for having me here. I’m very excited.

Steve 3:50
Great to see you. Glad you’re with us. Shannon, great to see you again, too. How are you?

Shannon Pritchett 3:55
I’m so excited to be here. Especially talking about vacations.

Steve 3:58
Where are you going to go Shannon? I’ll throw to you first, like pretend you could go anywhere to forget COVID.

Shannon Pritchett 4:06
So this is we have the upcoming years that we are having that milestone birthday. You know, most people would assume it’s you know, our 40s. But really, it’s our 30th. It’s funny how that works out but we’re going to Italy and St. Lucia.

Trish 4:22
Good choices. Have you been to either?

Shannon Pritchett 4:25
Italy yes. St. Lucia no. But I will say Trish my favorite place to visit in the world is Singapore. So maybe we’ll go to Shanghai and then Singapore together.

Trish 4:36
I know, I think it’s just because of the little things I want to go back and just like relive and really re-appreciate. I think of some of the travels we’ve had in the past so awesome.

Steve 4:49
I’ve been to St. Lucia to that’s a great place. Steven, giving you a chance before we get into the meat of the conversation. Where’s your vacation, where would you head?

Steven Jiang 4:58
Um, so it’s very simple. I want to go back to China to see my parents. So I’m the only son in a Chinese culture family and is especially the parents. Right and you didn’t see them for almost a year. That means something is very terrible. Okay, so I need to go back to see them,

Steve 5:21
What part of what part of China are they in?

Steven Jiang 5:25
It’s called Fujian Province. That Trish I also visit Shanghai, Beijing very often, before pandemic Okay, so Right, right.

Steve 5:36
Yeah, we were lucky enough to do a few events over in China, prior to the pandemic. And yeah, I’d love to go back. Alright, we can cover all that on my other podcast, exquisite vacation destinations today. But for this podcast, we want to talk about recruiting, recruiting technology and helping organizations with an incredibly difficult hiring climate that they’re in right now, before we get into some of those specifics, maybe Shannon, I’ll throw to you. Can you give us a minute or two on Hiretual, just give us an overview for folks who may not be familiar with the solution and the technology?

Shannon Pritchett 6:08
Yeah, really, we make outbound recruiting easy. It’s a very difficult task. Right now, you just mentioned that. And we tried to remove all the hurdles and obstacles and help you find candidates, you know, as you said, 10 times faster. So that’s what our product does. We use many different data sources, we have over 800 million candidates in our database, that really, really strive to help you find that talent faster using artificial intelligence. So we take you just above and beyond just sourcing. We also have engagement, insights, and just a ton of different features that many companies are demanding the recruiters achieve. And so that’s pretty much a product in a nutshell.

Steve 6:50
Great, thank you. And I guess, Steven, I’ll ask you this first kind of kick off question. What is I mean, here’s the setup. For me, it’s always been this, I’ve been around the HR tech space for a long time, we used to do sessions at HR tech about how many years technology has been thrown at recruiting and how many literally, I used to say millions, I’d probably call it billions of dollars at this point probably have been thrown at this problem from a technological perspective of, of helping organizations hire faster and hire better. What would you say? Just if you could you look at recruiting today? What are the one or two or however many problems that you see. And then of course, that you’re trying to help organizations solve?

Steven Jiang 7:28
Yeah. And when it comes to the talent acquisition, I think today, the problem must be upgraded to see the talent acquisition, combined together with tenant retention, okay. So because of the retention issue, the acquisition problem is getting worse and worse. In the past half a year, you know, the venture capital market, and they dumped probably more than $3 billion into this space already. Okay, and this is a crazy, very crazy I am but good for our technology and our industry. Okay, and we needed that money to develop better technology and product. So back to the pogroms, I think the tiny accusation? Does there’s a space to primary problems we need to solve number one, and how to make recruiters more productive, more proactive, okay, and see, many people say, hey, AI technology is going to replace recruiters. That’s BS. Okay. So very clear.

Steven Jiang 8:40
And it’s more about augmentation. Right? We we created a product and technology to augment instead of a replace, and that should be the right vision. And then back to, we still need to be back to the basics. And this industry, we indeed very productive and very poor, active recruiters to bring the jobs to the people, right. And the second problem we need to solve is about how to do the better profiling, embedded match and better between the employers and the job candidate. The candidates, okay, there’s the two sides and think about the candidates as the greatest except for our society. And we need to do much better technology and better understanding on those profiles, and also match with the right jobs and give that dignity back to every person, every family, right, they need to have a heavy jobs, right, and then requires a lot of technology at work.

Trish 9:47
You know, I love that answer, Steven because it really goes beyond I think, maybe 20-30 years ago where we we didn’t think of recruitment and sourcing in this way, especially outbound recruitment and I love that you’re bringing really just that human side to it as well, right? You’re talking about AI and how that can augment. But it’s also incredibly human when you’re talking about the relationship side of it, and how people are made to feel. And that really, we’ve struggled with driving engagement, for example, but doing hiring in this way, also will help drive engagement and retention, as you mentioned. I’m just curious, before we go too deep into this, like, what inspired you to create this solution to begin with? I mean, I’m fascinated. I’ve been a recruiter before. That’s how I started my career. As a matter of fact, both in college recruitment and external experience recruitment. So what what inspired you to create Hiretual? And I believe it’s 2015 is that right?

Steven Jiang 10:47
Yeah, actually, Hiretual was born in the late of 2016. When I worked at a Samsung ind center, actually, I met my co-founder, he was my boss. Okay, so we, we observed, the fast growth, often data center, and we grew from about seven people to over 200 people, the engineers, and I think if 30 or 40% of them are PhDs, okay. And we definitely saw the big problems in recruiting. So that motivate me to think about how to make it more productive, right, how to make it better. So and then I, I had several ideas, I discussed the researching when my co founder, and and we decided to pick one idea and we thought, oh my god, that was so great idea. And that was going to change the world. But of course, leader failed very fast. Okay, so anyways, I quit my job. And I started.

Steve 11:58
That must have made the parents really excited and happy when you inform them of that, by the way, Steven.

Steven Jiang 12:04
They were happy with me for the first 20 years of my life and later on, never happy again. Back to how we started, and the first idea was about building a internet platform for people to refer the job to each other freely. Okay, and in a public internet perform. So that was, that was the reason why I was born into this industry. And before Hiretual, we failed, we failed and pivot for four times. Okay, this, this is the fifth idea, and we were lucky that we didn’t give up. So then we quickly scale up Hiretual business and product. Okay, so that was the story,I thought I was a very genius person. And they don’t realize now only failures and lessons I took to drive me here today.

Trish 13:10
You know, thank you for sharing that. Because I think a lot of times, regardless of what jobs we’re in, we think that everything might come easy. And everyone’s going to see our genius, right? And you’re right, it does take sometimes going through some different failures or barriers to get you to pivot and turn and be agile and in creating something great. So I love that you share that that’s what really is kind of the backbone of what you’re bringing to market, you know, right now, and that there is that much thought and care put into it. So, Steve, I know you’ve probably got follow up questions.

Steve 13:44
I wanted to ask Shannon a question. But mainly because I know she’s so dialed in and has been for a while now to the overall recruitment community. I’d love for you maybe to share with us if you could just in especially in the last couple years here, it is a little US centric, but that’s okay. Like, what are some of the pain points, recruiters and the folks in your community are telling you personally or just sharing in the community? Like, what’s really I know, hirings really hard? Okay, that’s kind of the obvious one, but what, you know, a layer may be deeper than that. What are the recruiters that that are in your community or in the community kind of sharing as okay, this is really hard for me right now.

Shannon Pritchett 14:21
Right? Well, besides you know, hiring being hard, it’s the lack of responsiveness coming from applicants, I think applicants are getting easier to find. And so lack of responsiveness, ghosting has become a serious issue. Salaries, amongst other you know, companies, some seems like they find the candidate but then they just can’t compete on the salary level. And then the biggest thing I hear is the lack of investment back into their careers and no career growth. And so those are a lot of the pain points that we’re hearing right now. I take my own overall stance on it. You know, when I look at recruiting You know, and I think I have traveled the world and spoken at conferences and told people how to do this and how to do that. And here we are in a completely different economy than when I started, at least speaking publicly, and we’re still doing the same things. You know, we haven’t changed, we haven’t evolved. And so recruiters, you know, want, you know, things to make their jobs easier. But when I look back, and I challenge them, I say, well, you’re still doing the same things. In a employer driven market, why haven’t you changed? Why haven’t you involved? Why are you using the same techniques? And it’s, they don’t have a response to that. And the leadership doesn’t understand that either. And so we’re gonna, we’re seeing, you know, I don’t think when people people look at the great resignation, and you know, the pandemic, and you know, yes, that’s feeling this, but no one has taken a step back and say, How do I need to change my job to fit what matches today’s economic needs? How do I need to evolve to, you know, answer to a candidate driven market, you know, if you look at forecasting, it’s not going to get any better. This is just the start of it. So we are in a new era of recruitment, we’re in the new era of people and talent acquisition. And, you know, unfortunately, we’re all creatures of habits, but we got to break those habits, we need to change and we need to evolve. And I hate that ta always has to play catch up. Yeah, I think Steven said it best when, you know, recruiters need to be proactive. It’s a word we say constantly. But time is an issue right now.

Trish 16:30
I’m glad to share that one thing as you were talking about it. I mean, even Steven, as you were kind of telling us how this all evolved and came to be, you know, being a recruiter is a very difficult job, and even in good times, right when the market is going very well in terms of the organization. And now I can’t even imagine going back and and trying to do that right now. Steven, could you maybe talk a little bit about specifically, what are some of the ways that Hiretual helps recruiters maybe take some of these practices that we’ve all been doing forever, and really augmenting them with AI and modernizing that outbound recruitment approach? Because I think we’ve we focus a lot on inbound recruitment. But there’s not a ton out there about outbound recruitment. So I’d love to just hear your perspective on how do you see your solution, really taking AI and augmenting that recruiter experience?

Steven Jiang 17:26
Sure, sure. Very happy to share my personal opinions. I think we are going to talk about something related to our upgraded mission a and that’s many about why we regret okay. So our new newly upgraded mission is all about how to help recruiters get their job done. Easier. Okay, so our mission statement, clearly say, outbound recruiting, Made Easy, easy as our value. Okay, so we want to take the hot job, then our users, our community, members, may well have an easy job easier, at least. Okay. So easy, it’s not about okay, then I can be lazy. And now it’s more about we get more things done. Okay. So, for the outbound recruiting, I think, three big hurdles we have to remove in the current recruiting process, so that recruiters can be truly proactive and also persistent. And Steve and Trish, if you go to LinkedIn, go to indeed, wherever you search, outbound recruiter, how many results you can find? Very, very few. But if you go to the same place to search, outbound sales, outbound SDR, a lot. Right? Oh, why? It’s about proactiveness. And also because of that, tool, technology and product to empower it. So we want to bring the album there’s a mindset as a process, there’s a productivity to our industry. When we talk about outbound number one, it’s about how to make the search easy, simply, right, search is the actual step out of the inbox. If this is the inbound, you just wait, you post to the job, people will apply, right? Hold on, you need to go out to find the finding process needs to be simpler and also easier and also accurate. That’s number one. Number two, engagement, conversion, right? And we need to get responses in a very simplest way.

Steve 20:11
That speaks to what Shannon was talking about, about ghosting and responsiveness being a primary challenge that she’s hearing right out in the community.

Steven Jiang 20:19
So the engagement function in the outbound process must be powerful. And we need to bring the responses to people to recruiters, and also persistently, continuously consistently bring the results, bring the responses, then people will enjoy the album process, right. And the third is, look at the whole tech stack for the recruiting process. It’s a very our inbound driven, then the outbound process will be the due process, that additional process for recruiting operations, and we need to make the integration very seamless, very easy. Okay, so then outbound recruiting actually will be embedded into the mainstream of the recruiting process, our impact no defects, then people will pick up on because this is a more scannable.

Steve 21:15
Steven, thank you for that. And I love how like you’re responding with the technology solutions really, almost directly point by point to match what’s happening in the real world, right. And the problems that recruiting and creative organizations and well really businesses of all types are having right now. I you sort of hinted at sort of an update admissions and rebrand. I want to get into that in a second with both Steven and Shannon. Trish, I want to thank our friends at Paychex, of course, one of the leading providers of HR Payroll retirement insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes, financial capital has long been established as the key driver of business performance. But today, business leaders are increasingly recognizing the importance of their human capital and driving success. You can download Paychex latest guide to discover why breaking down the silos between HR and finance can result in better business strategy and growth, as well as 14 Simple HR metrics your teams should be tracking and why To Download This eBook, please visit payx.me/fdmresearch and thanks to our friends at Paychex.

Steve 22:14
You know, I was reading that ad for Paychex Trish and I’m thinking we’re talking about all the problems that recruiting is having right now. Right? And I’m thinking, oh my gosh, like payroll, and finance is big. There’s like 80,000 problems like HCM in general has right now. Right? Like between pay. And performance management, a little little behind the scenes story attrition, I had like an hour and a half argument about performance management over the weekend. So like, there’s so many real going on, there’s so many problems. So I guess we’ll do our best this year on this show to try to help to surface a solutions like Hiretual, you know, that help organizations and sort of meet some of these challenges, which are, are enormous and immense. And hopefully, we can be of service in that area. Okay, I don’t know who wants to take this. I’ll just throw that openly. We do want to allow have Shannon and Steven or both either to take turns. There’s some news, right? There’s some exciting news and Steven hinted at at some shine, I’ll throw it to you first. You’re nodding. And maybe just tell us about what’s happening. What’s what’s new, what’s maybe changing. And what’s exciting from the Hiretual perspective.

Shannon Pritchett 23:24
Yeah, but you know, like Steven said, we’re entering a brand new chapter, and we’re starting off with a brand new category. You know, I think one thing Steven hasn’t said yet is, you know, is it our mission to make outbound recruiting easy, but also, we want to create the environment where jobs find people, not people find jobs. And so you know, and that’s the way it should be right especially in a candidate driven market, right, let the job start finding the people. And so to do that, we are went through a completely rebrand model exercise. And, you know, drumroll, please, we are so excited to launch today on the second as HireEZ and so that’s going to be spelled H I R E capital EZ, so easy, and then our solutions will follow from there. So we’ll provide easy sourcing and easy engagement easy integration, you know, and so much more. And so we’re very excited about the new brand name, we feel that people will be able to pronounce our company a lot easier. That’s the one thing. It’s a name that completely aligns with our mission, you know, was to make outbound recruiting easy. And so, again, we’re not trying to make recruiters lazy we’re trying to give them you know, take more off their plate, focus on the things that we all got interest interest industry for. I don’t think any recruiter or sourcer got in this industry to mind job boards and mind LinkedIn and stuff like that all all the time. So we want to basically say You know, out within and without. And so in being inbound and also other companies that might begin our end their names with the word in. So it’s our new mission. We’re super excited about it. And we know we want to lead this this change the shift in our industry.

Trish 25:18
You know, can I just say that so that’s the first time we’re hearing this new branding the new name, I love it because I’m a huge fan of when you when you buy any product, and it actually says in the name, what it is what it does, right? So, immediately if I’m the recruiting leader, I’m the CHRO the CEO buying technology, I will know what HireEZ means, right? I know what I’m getting right off the bat. So that’s exciting. I love it.

Steven Jiang 25:48
Thanks so much. I hope that when you when you were released this video, right? And repeat what Trish just said 100 times. Okay, so thank you for your in those men. And we are also very excited about a new name. And we we bought the domain HireEZ. We want people to see, easy. Easy, it’s a it’s a greatest value, in my opinion about technology. If technology cannot make the people’s life and work easy. It’s not a meme. Porn advert is a technology. Okay, so we love Easy, easy, so and our product will be easy sourcing, easy engagement, easy integration, easy match many easy things.

Shannon Pritchett 26:49
Instantly, Steven said it’s, you know, we’re not, you know, outbound recruiting has existed, this isn’t a new concept. Right? You know, it is a concept that doesn’t get talked about a lot, that’s for sure. You know, and now that I’m in a marketing role, you know, and I’m seeing the whole bringing in leads into an organization and then passing those to our outbound team to to actually convert to sales. You know, I completely understand this mission. But, you know, it’s the best way to think about what we’re trying to do is look at recruiting in the past as taxis, right. You know, taxi served a purpose, you walk out the airport, they’re right there, you get in them you go. But what happens when you need a taxi at your house? You know, calling waiting, you don’t know who if they’re going to show up? You don’t know when you know, we all remember those crazy times actually funny story. Last time I took a taxi was actually at HR tech. And the whole time I’m like live tweeting, everyone’s tweeting me back there, like, what are you doing? So, but you know, now we want to be like the, you know, the rideshare the right apps, you know, Uber, Lyft. All those? You know, it’s that’s where we see the shift happening, right? You know, there was a process that, you know, we didn’t understand back then. But now, we would never walk down the street with our hands in the air trying to get a taxi, we would never call one, we would just simply use our phones. Why? Because it’s easier. And we know what we’re getting. And you know, and there’s so many great things that have been added on the technology front that’s made our lives easier. And then we’re taking that same mission mission and applying it back to TA teams.

Steve 28:20
Yeah, I love that comparison, right? Because the taxi analogy is a great one. Because when you get to get out of the plane, in Vegas, it’s great when there’s a line of taxis right there, you just get on with it. That’s kind of easy. But there have been times you get out of that plane, and they’re not there, or there’s 20,000 people in the line before you that’s not any fun either. So I think it’s similar in some of these recruiting analogies. Yeah, sure. And other times, you could just throw an ad out on one of the big job boards and get 1000 applicants and 10 of them would be really good. That was yeah, you could get pretty complacent, right in that kind of environment. Because there was pretty inexpensive, pretty efficient, you probably got a good enough hire, right? For the most part, those days are pretty much gone and or gone completely right. So it is pretty exciting to hear that you guys were taking that approach to try to solve this problem that I you know, it sort of 20 minutes ago, I said, Man, we’ve been throwing lots of investment. Lots of smart folks like Steven and the team that HireEZ, I’ll say the new name had been thrown at this for a long time. And let’s hope that, you know, this really catches on right in a big way. It’s exciting. Seems to you maybe just for a few last words about how this change and this rebrand and this shift kind of what it what do you think it’s going to mean for both existing customers and then maybe potential new organizations that you might engage with in 2022 and forward will it mean at their organizations?

Steven Jiang 29:49
So actually the most of the TA leaders and also HR leaders and they understand the poor act of the lists and the productivity, and must be there in a new year in 2022. And all the years are from okay. And they definitely would love this message about recruiting made easy jobs, find the people, okay. And the outbound recruiting, and there’s a new category we defined, was motivated by our existing customers and users. They said, Hey, Steven, your product is much more than just sourcing tool. And you probably need a better definition about what your product is serving. Okay, so a that was a very challenging question to me. And to be honest with you, it’s ridiculous. As a CEO, you didn’t have the scope about what your product is doing. Sometimes users and customers in a specialty community folks, they know better than me. Okay. So a, I was challenged. And I think about hey, saucing. What is bigger than saucing best still have the sample active mentality. That’s all gone, including, including, okay, so I think outbound recruiting is a mindset as an outbound PR activities should be adopted by all countries, if your country is growing, as your TA team wants to grow, and it must be there. It’s just like, you need to have this apple activities to have the competitive advantage.

Steve 31:38
Yeah, totally agree.

Trish 31:40
I’m really excited about all of this. Because having been in that recruiter chair for many years, and someone who loved outbound recruitment efforts, I think what I would sort of quantify this that I’m hearing is you’re actually bringing in applying science to that art of the search. And, you know, when we talked just a few minutes ago about how busy people really are right with whether it’s your payroll, or your performance or recruitment. We’ve all had those jobs, where were maybe the head of HR or the head of talent, and we’re sitting there with all these other priorities too. And we might have had very creative ideas about how to do that art of outbound recruiting. But without the technology behind it, I can tell you, it’s like it was very hard to to actually do that consistently. And proactively, and it was very difficult than to measure the results. So what I’m most excited about higher easy is, is seeing how you take artificial intelligence and the technology collectively to help companies do those things. Because I think a lot of recruiters would say we’ve wanted this for decades, that ability to have that, and we just haven’t really had that. So I’m not going to say I would want to go back to recruiting totally. But I can, I can appreciate and I think anybody listening to this, who’s ever done recruitment, I think you can appreciate the level of productivity, you would gain from something like this. So kudos to both of you and to the entire company for for really thinking about outbound recruitment in a really different way, than what we’ve all been striving to do. And we want to be creative, right? There is an art to this outbound recruitment, right? So I love that you’re bringing science to it.

Steve 33:28
Shannon, I want to wrap and throw to you to kind of help our audience who wants to maybe learn more about this get a little bit more engaged with your you and the team at HireEZ, where shall we send them to to learn more?

Shannon Pritchett 33:41
Yeah, of course, we are obviously launching a brand new website today, Steven said the domain is HireEZ.com. And, you know, we’re launching a ton of different content, which talks about the problem and the mission and what we’re trying to do. So keep checking back on all of our social channels. We’ll have some really cool videos coming out and, you know, just a lot of really good, you know, playbooks for recruiters to get behind what we’re building. I just want to pass it to Steven real fast. One thing we forgot to mention was, a lot of people are making a big investment into this mission. And so Steven, you know, would you mind making that announcement?

Steven Jiang 34:22
Yeah, right. We we did close a PTC meet 10 round for fundraising. And we didn’t, we didn’t need to raise any money because our team is phenomenal. A we are very capital efficient. I’m very proud of by folks and they, we we use the cash and the capital in the best way. But we I was driven by the gross at Hiretual today. That our product needs more investment. A our user community is more investment in our new brand HireEZ, right? And this requires also much more investments. So then we raised about $26 million from a VC firms in Silicon Valley and led by conducted VC and also several big names in individuals right in in Silicon Valley. But the most of the money we were put in a product and technology development and also community building on recruiting is not only about technology, and product and process it’s also about the whole community and more and more people join our movement and to bring the creativity, great ideas and also in encourage each other about activists. Okay, I want recruiting we want to see more and more recruiters. They put their title outbound recruiter. Okay, so and in their Facebook, popup message, okay, their profile. I am outbound recruiter.

Steve 36:20
Yeah, I love it. Well, congratulations, Steven and Shannon and the entire team. That’s pretty exciting. We did mention a couple times on the show about how much time, attention, investment have been coming into the space for a long time. But let’s be really optimistic and hopeful that we’re finally going to turn the corner and make this easier for both recruiters and for candidates. And I love jobs finding people like to me that’s like my, one of my big takeaways from the show just that that three word phrase, which was awesome.

Steven Jiang 36:51
Steve, you want to have a T shirt? We said jobs find people.

Steve 36:57
Absolutely.

Shannon Pritchett 36:58
We have plenty of gifts in store for them next week.

Steve 37:02
All right, well, great stuff. So we will get the links that Shannon mentioned in the show notes as well. We’ll help folks find the new website. Get to the resources, the community that you guys are building. Steven and Shannon, thanks so much for joining us. This is great, great announcements. Exciting. Congratulations. Once again, we really appreciate you taking some time to share all that big news with us and our listeners on the HR Happy Hour Show.

Steven Jiang 37:24
Thank you very much, Steve. And happy to be here. And thank you so much.

Steve 37:31
Awesome. Good stuff. Trish, I love that. Love it.

Trish 37:34
I love it. I’m so excited to see how this all plays out in the remainder of this year.

Steve 37:38
Absolutely. So stay tuned. It’s gonna be great 2022. We’re optimistic we all talked about our vacation seems gonna get back to China for business, Shannon’s going to Italy and St. Lucia. I’ll go watch Wolfsburg play a soccer game Sunday. So yes, yeah. All right. Good stuff. So I want to thank everybody for listening to the HR Happy Hour Show. Of course, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts the links to all the show archives at HRHappyHour.net. For our guests Steven Jiang and Shannon Pritchett and for Trish McFarlane. My name is Steve Boese. Thank you so much for listening to the HR Happy Hour Show. We will see you next time. And bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai