The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
Welcome to The Breakthrough Hiring Show! We are on a mission to help leaders make hiring a competitive advantage.
Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
You will learn how to:
- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
- Leverage data, process, and technology to achieve hiring success.
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 167: Revolutionizing staffing through network intelligence with Brad Beach, CEO & Founder of Tailored Management & Jobvious
Join host James Mackey as he chats with Brad Beach, Founder and CEO of Tailored Management and Jobvious. Brad shares his journey from the early days in staffing to building a cutting-edge platform that’s reshaping contingent labor.
They dive into the challenges of traditional hiring models, the power of network-driven recruitment, and how technology is transforming the industry. Whether you’re in staffing, HR, or just curious about the future of work, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss!
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Hi, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Mackey, very excited about today's guest. We have Brad Beach on the show. Brad, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Yeah, very excited to have you here. Brad is the founder and CEO of Tailored Management and JobVius. We're very excited to learn about both companies and really dial into what you're building at JobVius and why you decided to start the company. But just to start us off, it would be great if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and how you wound up to where you are today. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I graduated from Ohio State University degree in economics. My first job out of college was working for ADM and I was doing agricultural commodity buys on the Chicago Board of Trade. And I lived in Cincinnati at the time and I was desperate to get back to Columbus because that's where all my friends were. I looked in the newspaper at that time that's what you did for a job and I found an ad for a staffing manager at Robert Half and I applied, got the job, realized I loved working with people, loved the business, stayed there for six years, Couldn't really wrap my arms around the large company culture and so I decided to leave and venture out on my own, and that was in 2000.
Speaker 2:And that's the founding of Tailored Management, and we have been around ever since. Luckily, I've had a lot of success with tailored management. I grew it from a one-person shop to having over a couple hundred people across four different countries and been able to provide contingent labor services and RPO services for Fortune 500 organizations, and I feel very lucky. But again, I noticed a decline over the last five years, which is why I ended up coming up with the idea of Javius, and so that's my newest passion project.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's very exciting and I was happy to learn that you started off at Robert Half very similar to how I got started in staffing over at K-Force.
Speaker 2:Yeah, similar, very similar cultures. I know that back in the day we were big competitors, so, yeah, very familiar.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there was a lot of turnover, at least when I was there probably still is, yeah. So the organizations, at least at the time, were probably incredibly similar, because you had people going from one of them to the other and it seems like you had sales reps who had worked at every major staffing organization. If they had more than a few years in the industry. It seems like the turnover was so high.
Speaker 2:It was exceptionally high and I think that was it was expected in that large industry. They didn't try and solve that problem, so they just kept hiring and anticipated people would be leaving within a year, because the metrics that they held you to were very difficult and very hard to achieve.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, mine, we were talking about this earlier. Mine were. I had a hundred cold calls a day plus three in-person meetings a day. Yeah, I don't know how to.
Speaker 2:first of all, that's not unless there are two of you. That's not even humanly possible. I think that we used to have 10 or 12 out face-to-face visits that we were required to have and we were calling every friend we knew that worked anywhere to say, hey, can I come out, maybe I'll take you to lunch? Just to mark it on our sheet that we got to visit and to keep people at bay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it was a wild time for sure. I just remember as an SDR running around in my suit with a tie it's 90 degrees in DC, so it's hot as hell and humid Running around all these government contractors trying to get in front of CFOs, and I was like 21, 22. And it's like okay, I got to find a way to add value to this like 50-year-old CFO of this big GovCon. What are you going to do when you don't know what the hell you're doing? Right? You're just smiling. You learn on the fly, right?
Speaker 2:You learn and you get better with every meeting. It's funny. You talk about running around in a suit and tie. I remember those days, and now the majority of your audience probably can't even conceptualize that right, because who wears a suit and tie anymore, except for maybe Jamie Dimon and other Fortune 500 executives? It's virtually outdated. Nobody does it. But it was a requirement back in the Robert Half Days, probably at K-Force too, and you had to wear a suit and tie every day to the office.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah On a pretty on an SDR salary yeah exactly, I can't even.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you didn't. That was a long time ago. It's not like you were making huge sums of money regardless, but it was an incredible learning experience.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, for sure it made me really toughen me up and it just got me in the motion. Being good at business development, I don't. I didn't really see myself as a natural salesperson, in fact I almost had. I was telling you, they did. They created the SDR role for me because they didn't have one. They didn't want to give me the AE role because I didn't have the experience. So they were like all right, you have six months as an SDR. Either we promote you or we let you go.
Speaker 2:That was your incentive. If you want to continue to pay your rent yeah, you're going to. You're going to have to do this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cause it's like a lot of SDRs are in that role for years that they become an AE For me. They were like look like we don't know if you can do this, but if you want a shot, you're saying you want a shot, we're going to give you one for six months and I didn't close a single deal, man, until at the six month point. And then a bunch of deals closed months. I had closed nothing. I was stressing out.
Speaker 2:I was so stressed I bet that that that probably is an event that you remember so vividly now that gave you the courage and fortitude right To know that you could go out on your own. If I can pull it off over at K-Force, I can certainly do it on my own.
Speaker 1:Oh, for sure, I'm sure that was your experience. Was that one of the reasons you started Tailored Management?
Speaker 2:Precisely. Yeah, I knew I couldn't work in that large corporate culture. I knew I wanted to go out on my own Call it maybe a little ignorance and youth, but I was like what's the worst thing that could happen? I fell flat that my leadership style was what they had always hoped to have in their career. I'm more of a servant leader. We don't have a big hierarchy here.
Speaker 2:I believe everybody is equal. I have an open door policy. I believe in autonomy. One of the things I knew I would never do is micromanage. I believe that innovation comes from the bottom up, not from the top down. I encourage people to try new things, to be bold. That's a line anybody here will tell you. Don't do things the way that they have always been done just because that's the way they've always been done. We get better by giving people the autonomy to explore different options and know it's safe to do that and it works. It works for me and it's worked for everybody here in the organization and it's great that my philosophy on that that I didn't know if it would work Actually it did. It worked and so that was reassuring.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome. And now you're doing, you're building JobVis, which I think you started. Was it about four years ago? Yeah, we started developing it.
Speaker 2:We've only been live for about nine months, but what Tailored Management does currently is we are a vendor in many Fortune 500 contingent labor programs, and we integrate with their VMS tools. We get the RECs imported into our system, we recruit on them and then we submit people, and over the last four or five years, I've noticed a trend where direct sourcing came in, and direct sourcing I'm sure you're familiar with it is when an organization allocates a certain portion of their contingent labor spend or opportunity to a direct sourcing team. It could be internal, it could be another company. The challenge, though, is that all of those recs go to all the vendors and to direct sourcing. When direct sourcing has candidates, they look at their candidates first, because they're at a much lower rate, and then they cancel the ones that are distributed to the vendor population. So we, in some cases, have seen rec cancellation rates as high as 30, 35 percent.
Speaker 1:That got passed through to you as an agency because they have 35% yeah.
Speaker 2:So let's say there's a hundred recs released this week and let's say that there are 20 vendors, and then you have direct sourcing.
Speaker 2:Those recs are going to direct sourcing as well, and all of the vendors are working on it, but direct sourcing provides candidates at a significantly lower cost because, they have first dibs many times where they get them before us, and so what happens is we work on them and then we submit candidates and then the rec gets canceled because someone from direct sourcing found somebody.
Speaker 2:In addition, the vendor population exploding. We have clients that have 200 million in annual spend, which sounds like a lot, but when you divide that up amongst 50 vendors, or 60 vendors, 70 vendors, it's not that much. And here's the catch is that company that spends 60 million annually as a participant, as a vendor, we have to submit to every one of those recs, even though on average we might fill one out of five or six or seven, and the margins aren't exactly robust. And so it's become increasingly more and more challenging to be profitable in these large programs, because they have an overpopulation of vendors, and you would think that they would understand that it doesn't make sense, and I think sometimes they do, but the politics within large companies doesn't afford them the luxury of just cutting vendors because of the changes that are happening, and so they remain overpopulated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is a very interesting concept. I think what ends up happening is when you it's just like self-fulfilling prophecy, which they want they work with multiple vendors and then of course, you also have multiple agencies working on that and they also have to balance out the fact that maybe they're only filling one out of five roles or one out of six roles, and so they can't really put all their eggs in one basket and focus on possibly even that customer as much as they would potentially like to, because they're operating in a contingent business model and, of course, when you're dealing with Fortune 500, there's assigned team members and whatnot to certain accounts. But it does. It also makes it harder that model actually makes it harder for the agency to produce great results for the Fortune 500 company.
Speaker 2:You can't reinvest If you're barely making enough money to get by. You can't reinvest in continuous improvement. And that's the biggest challenge, because I think I know we want to provide exceptional service, over-the-top service, but you can't do it if it's going to result in a loss on your books every month. And so these are the challenges that we face. To give you an idea of kind of the mindset, I had a conversation with a client, which I won't name names, but they have a massive program, 900 million in annual spend, and they have 200 and something vendors.
Speaker 2:And this gentleman was saying I've got procurement on this end. They're worried about cost and they want to save money. I've got the end user on this end they don't care about costs, they just want speed and quality. And how do I bridge that gap? And I said one simple way to do it is cut your vendor list in half. Go back to the vendors that remain, tell them that you want a 4% cut in rates. They will be happy to oblige because you just doubled their revenue opportunity and then they'll reinvest.
Speaker 2:And the response is well, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. You need to have vendors in the pipeline, because vendors always become lethargic and complacent. I said no, they don't. The only reason they become lethargic and complacent is if they are just continuing to see diminishing returns month over month for the same amount of effort, money and work that they're putting into an organization, which is essentially what starts to happen right when, every time you add a new vendor, it's one other person you're splitting that pot with. And I thought why can't you, in theory, have the vendors partner with them, talk to them on a regular basis, find out what they need to provide better service, find out what their challenges are, and you have this wonderful relationship, if you can do that, where vendors are bought in and obligated right Because they were their chosen one or their chosen ones, and they see you investing all this time in them. They're going to be very committed to going above and beyond to make sure that you guys are happy.
Speaker 1:You always say the company that's hiring those agencies. You have more leverage where you can push them harder right, If there's a bigger revenue opportunity. When I was in the early days of Secure Vision, my RPO firm, I was billing myself out, and if I was billing myself out as a VP of talent acquisition I would usually get one contingent agency. Give them exclusivity, At least like a three to four week head start. Sure, Because I didn't. I would pick the best agency that I could find for the roles we had open. And I give them exclusivity because I essentially managed them as an extension of my team. We had calls twice a week and I would push them aggressively, but I was able to do that because they knew that they were going to get the return on investment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and see, you were smart to do that right. I. This isn't rocket science. It seems very commonsensical to me, but and I can't explain it in large organizations I don't live in that space and I realized that. So I would talk to individuals and ask them help me understand the obstacles that you encounter, the roadblocks, because I've been an entrepreneur for 30 years and so I don't know what I don't know. I don't know what it's like to exist in that environment anymore, and the walls that they keep running into and competing, competing sets of priorities and all of the other stuff that to me, it just is overly complex.
Speaker 2:To me, it just is overly complex and, at the end of the day, that's why I developed JobVis. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I would love to learn more about Javius. I actually was looking at the website and the LinkedIn page before our call and I actually have the website even pulled up right now too. But for everybody tuning in, would you mind giving a quick overview on the company, what you're building?
Speaker 2:Uber. I'm sure a lot of people say that, but what inspired me was there was a need in the market for paid for hire transportation, and what they did is they empowered the masses to become the drivers that are going to take you to the airport right or home from the football game. And the concept seems very bizarre. If you can step back 10 years and somebody told you that, hey, the future of paid transportation is going to be you calling up a random stranger on your phone and this random stranger coming to your house to pick you up, 10, 12 years ago you probably would have thought that is the craziest thing I've ever heard. No way I would ever let my wife or anybody I know get into that stranger's vehicle. Now it's become commonplace, but at the end of the day, it's created immense opportunity for anybody that has a vehicle and a little spare time. And so I thought how can we apply that to contingent labor, spare time? And so I thought how can we apply that to contingent labor? So what we built was a network-driven platform that is somewhat like if an Uber and a LinkedIn kind of merged right. So you get invited to JobVius because let's say, I invite you and I say, hey, james, you want to join JobVius? It's this new network driven platform that allows you to earn passive income and look at jobs. Great, sure, there's a lot more detail to it than that. But so you join and then you start inviting people. They join and now they are in your network, your team, within JobVius OK, and then, when those people join, they can build out their networks and so on and so forth. But let's just say that one of our clients that is participating in JobVis we integrate all of their contingent labor requisitions populate in the platform. We have an AI matching tool that matches everybody in the platform based on skills, education, geographic, location and multiple other things.
Speaker 2:Let's say a project manager is entered by IBM okay, and it's paying $50 an hour and you have someone in your network. That's a match. You'll get notified, james. Hey, jane Doe is a match for this project manager. Do you want to refer her to this opportunity? Let's say Jane is active in the platform. You can message her through the platform and say, hey, do you have interest? Jane will get a notification as well and say, hey, you qualified for this. She clicks a button, says I'm interested. You refer to IBM. If she gets the job, we handle everything from there. We schedule the interviews, we do everything. If she gets the job the day she starts working, you start earning $5 an hour for every hour. She works on that job indefinitely, forever. So you would earn $200 a week for one referral and if people on the East Coast or the West Coast, it probably is much more than that, because it equates to about 10% of whatever they're going to be making.
Speaker 2:We pay out to the network champion that referred them and that's tracked through your dashboard on JobVis. Everything is measured. You see how many hours there are. You get a direct deposit every Friday, just like a payroll check into your account, and if you get three people on billing that you refer, you can easily make 20, 30 plus thousand in passive income. And what we've done is we have monetized your network of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, and we're saying this has a value. This network has a value. Get them into your platform and we will find opportunities that they may have interest in, and if you refer them, you get paid.
Speaker 2:Now it's not just for actively seeking individuals.
Speaker 2:We have people in the platform that are joined.
Speaker 2:That join job is just because they want the opportunity to make money, right.
Speaker 2:But if you are passive, you certainly want to put your resume in there anyway.
Speaker 2:It's secure.
Speaker 2:It is not visible.
Speaker 2:If you are currently employed and you join JobVis and you have your resume in there, the only people that see you're in the platform are the people that you invite and your network manager that invited you.
Speaker 2:Nobody else even knows. But even if you aren't looking and your resume's in there, what you're going to get is a lot of great intel, because every job that's entered that you qualify for you'll see. They'll communicate with you. You match this job. This is what it pays, and it'll ask you if you have interest. But even if you don't, you're constantly getting updated information information right on the opportunities that you could have if you decided you wanted to look around as well as whether or not you're being paid what you should be paid in your existing job. So it's incredible intelligence that you get that's going to help you negotiate that increase, but also find out what else you might be qualified for that might be of interest. So we've empowered just like Uber empowered the masses. We have empowered the masses for contingent labor because everybody has a network. Why don't we just pay you guys, the masses, to put your network in the platform and then refer them and you get basically 50% of the gross profits it's generated for every hour.
Speaker 1:I got a couple of follow-up questions there. When somebody is referred, does the evaluation occur upfront, or does the evaluation occur after, let's say, the IBM right Says oh, that person seems like a fit, we would like to move forward with them. Just curious like when does an evaluation occur of the candidate skill set, and is that handled by your team at JobVis, or is that the responsibility of the end client company? Who's paying for the contractor?
Speaker 2:So there is an obligation on the network champion to ensure that individual is qualified right and that they are a good candidate because your reputation's on the line right. If you refer a lot of bad candidates, you're going to get dinged okay and then people are going to pay less attention to the people you're referring. But let's say in the IBM example in the event IBM says we want everybody that you refer to us to be verified and assessed, we would say, okay, we have an integration and a partnership with a company called VeriClick and they do facial recognition, verification of ID, so individuals that are taking the assessment, if it's a technology assessment, you don't have one of the situations where the person that's taking the assessment isn't the actual person and so that's the purpose of the verification.
Speaker 1:What's the name of that partner? Again, the partner that does that.
Speaker 2:VeriClick.
Speaker 1:VeriClick. Okay, that's interesting yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then they have an AI assessment tool as well, and so if the client does want to have that, we charge them an additional cost for every submittal that they receive, because there is a cost to that, and I don't know what the cost is. Off the top of my head, I think it's $3 per referral, which is minimal, right. But then they get a verified and fully assessed submittal and so that solves the problem there, of course. Now, if they don't want to do that, then there is no cost unless they get a referral and hire somebody. At which point. If they're going and hire somebody, at which point, if they're going to and most of these they're going to interview everybody. Anyway our clients do, and usually you're going to, you're going to look at a resume, make an assessment of whether or not they're qualified and then schedule them for an interview, and a lot of our clients do that too. So it's just really up to the client and what their preference is that's great, great and so we can totally pass on this.
Speaker 1:But I'm curious, can we talk about your pricing structure on this call, or is that? Yeah, sure, okay, so like how that cause I'm wondering, is it like a base subscription plus, plus the hourly component, plus the evaluation component, or is it what is? What does that business model look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is going to sound very shocking, probably, but there is no cost for JobVis. We will implement and deploy it at no cost to a client. We openly invite all of the associates of that client to join JobVis, which then gives your own employees the opportunity to earn passive income, and we've done that with a couple of clients. We learned how exciting it is for your employees, for a couple of our clients, when they release this to their employees. The employees were ecstatic and guess what? Your employees start referring tons of people because they're going to get paid. Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, they fill your jobs quicker. And if I'm working at ABC company and I refer James to ABC company and I'm making $4 an hour off of you, I'm going to make sure you're happy so that it increases retention, and so you call up your buddy like hey, I think you should stay at this job for the next few years and so it increases retention of contingent labor.
Speaker 2:We have this all documented in white papers. It increases referrals tremendously exponentially for contingent labor, labor, and you end up having a very happy workforce, not just contingent workforce, but your own employees that get the opportunity to, to take part in something larger than their UI UX position or their accounting job.
Speaker 1:So what about does this? If there's like attempt to hire situation, how does that work? And then what about for like perm placement? Right, if somebody wants to hire direct, can they use JobVious?
Speaker 2:A couple of things, and you asked about pricing. But our pricing typically industry standards for contingent labor is. What we see is anywhere from about 40 to 48 percent markups is pretty much what we see in the industry. Jobvious provides contingent labor at 34% to 36% markups, so it's a cost saver as well, and so companies can save money, increase retention, have a very engaged workforce. There's tons of benefits, no cost to implement and deploy and as far as contract to hire, that is certainly allowed. We do ask that they stay on, I think for 700 hours before they convert. But what we have found is, even with clients where we have those agreements in place where they can hire without a fee after a certain amount of time, we're seeing a lot of our clients extend those engagements longer and longer, depending upon the we have. We have contractors that have been out at a client site and for six, seven years, which seems crazy but it happens.
Speaker 1:That's great yeah.
Speaker 2:And as far as direct hire or perm, I get that question a lot and we haven't. We have not deployed that within jobviz just yet, and I'll share with you why. When I first started doing a lot of research on this passion project, I did a lot of studies, a lot of trials, working with clients about internal referral programs for direct hire and what I discovered was in most organizations they aren't going to sit there and rave about their internal referral program because it's lackluster. It's usually here and there. They don't really it's there but it's not like we're really investing in it.
Speaker 2:It just doesn't motivate people to get a $2,500 bonus for referring somebody and then you get part of it upfront. You get part of it after 90 days and then you might not get the last part until after six months. It just isn't motivating and the one payment is appealing but it still isn't incredibly motivating. But when you talk about people with contingent labor having a continuous stream of passive income, it's incredibly motivating for people. Because it's my side gig, I can build this, I can count on this. It's going to pay me dividends. If I have 70 people in my network, it's going to pay me dividends potentially for many years to come, Very different kind of mindset and it allows people to have, if you will, a side gig that is their business, that is going to help them have more financial independence, more financial freedom, and that feels pretty good to be able to try and create something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I also. I like the idea of dialing into the staffing use case. Just get like really good at that use case and that type of customer, versus going too wide and trying to solve everything at once. We're coming up on the toward the end of our episode I, from an adoption perspective, I'm curious if there are specific types of organizations, industry, company size that seem to be benefiting the most or that you think would be ideal, or is it pretty much any type of company? What are you seeing? I?
Speaker 2:think right now, the companies that we are targeting are probably your Fortune 1000 organizations and as far as a specific industry, there isn't one specific industry. Just about every company uses IT, accounting, finance. The positions are very similar from one company to the next. The difference is culture typically, and that's really what people hone in on. But if you have employees in the platform that work there, who better to describe the culture than them to prospective contract labor people? And ideally, what I would love to see happen after we get beyond tackling the Fortune 1000 is I see the 20-person architectural shop down the street being able to really capitalize on this because they don't have the expertise. They probably don't have an internal recruiting resource, they don't have the knowledge, and so they end up spending a lot of money on Indeed or ZipRecruiter or a search partner to find each and every one of those people and so opening up the door to additional resources to them.
Speaker 2:Whether it's an architectural office, accounting office, salon, it doesn't really matter, because I bet, if you think about your own network, it doesn't really matter, because I bet, if you think about your own network, it's probably incredibly diverse. I suspect it's not everybody in staffing. You probably know tons of people of all different backgrounds and that's better for you as a network champion is to have a diverse skill set of people in your network. It increases the likelihood of matches. It increases the likelihood of them being placed in various locations, not all in one, and so I think it will be incredibly useful.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I didn't touch on it, but one of the other reasons we created this was I. Over the last 10 years I'm sure you can attest to this I have seen the fees from the Indeeds and the ZipRecruiters skyrocket, and to an almost unsustainable level. They've got a monopoly on the market. I don't know what happened to the old days when there was like 30 job boards out there, and it seems like now everybody fishes from the same pond, and what used to cost me $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 a year now costs me me 40,000 a month.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Not to say opening up to new channels. Getting as many new channels, different avenues to talent is important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and now that we have AI, I think that's going to evolve and change a lot of things. But a couple of years ago, when I was doing research, I read an article about contingent labor and it said oh, the contingent labor market is ready for a disruptor. There has been no innovation in contingent labor since the invention of the internet and I thought that is so true. I didn't think it, but I'm like that is so true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is. Both of us have started product companies that are assisting staffing efforts in one way or another. Mine is directly working with the staffing companies, yours is working directly with the Fortune 1000. So different play, of course, but I saw the same similar opportunity to you. It's like, when it comes to just the staffing motion in general, there's been such a lack of innovation and it's coming at a time, particularly now with AI, that staffing motions are going to have to evolve and are going to fall by the wayside, and it's going to happen really fast over the next 18 months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, completely agree, because I think that, much like yourself and myself, we took a step back and realized status quo is not going to fly anymore. It's not sustainable financially and the clients want more. There's got to be an evolution, and thankfully there is, and people are more accepting of the changes. When we first started with tailored management, as you probably know, years ago, if you were going to provide contingent labor or staffing, you had to have a brick and mortar office in every geographic location that you serviced and I thought I don't want to have managed a bunch of offices. There's got to be a better way.
Speaker 2:And so one of our clients gave us a test. They asked us to help staff in an Albuquerque, new Mexico, office, and we're in Ohio. I thought I don't know how we're going to pull this off, but we're going to figure it out. And we had success and I thought we can do this everywhere from our central recruiting hub. And we had a lot of pushback how are you going to recruit for us in New York when you're in Ohio? I'm like the internet and because it just was different and it allowed us to have incredible growth. But I knew that others would start adopting that, but we had a good four or five year run where our story was incredibly unique and it allowed us to capture a lot of business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was another time. It was critical to stay ahead of the curve, ahead of the competition, and innovate and challenge assumptions and be able to handle those objections when customers bring them to you. We've done a fair amount of that as well. Different flavors of the remote aspect to delivering solutions to customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because you remember the days when you were providing candidates. You had to have them come in the office and interview with you face to face.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, that was K-4's days for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and those days obviously are long gone. But that was the pushback Like how are you interviewing these people on the Internet? We can interview them, we can do this, that and the other. And it was funny that one of our biggest challengers and it was a Fortune 500 company said there is no way that you guys are going to be able to have success in our program and then but we're going to give you a shot. She was just under the CPO and the CPO said I want to give them a shot and we became the number one vendor. And then she was an advocate for us at different conferences. She's I was their biggest naysayer, but they certainly showed me I was wrong and we ended up getting a couple of clients from her as a result of that. I probably owe her a gift, but anyway, but yeah, stay ahead of what you think is coming down the road and you'll win. And I think that jobvious is certainly something that if I didn't create it, I'm pretty damn sure somebody would have, because it just seems like a no brainer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I think it's a great. It's a great concept and I'm really excited to continue to hear from you on how how it's going, and maybe you can come back on the show in six months or a year and talk to us about progress and more feature buildouts and what you've learned. That'd be really cool if you're open to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Love to Love to share the story. I love talking about this business, as I'm sure you do. You've been in it for so long, you know the ins and outs and what's really needed, and having the freedom to be able to say those things is liberating.
Speaker 1:Definitely for sure, and, Brad, we're up on time here, but I wanted to say thank you so much for joining us today. You've added a ton of value to our audience and I know they're going to enjoy this episode. So again, thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, James. I appreciate it. I had a good time.
Speaker 1:Likewise, and for everybody tuning in, make sure to stay on top of recent episodes. We've had some phenomenal guests, including Brad, here, and we also had Hugo, president of Kelly Services, so we're going to continue to bring you some incredible folks to share their insights on the show. Take care.
