A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:14:34 · Ilya
[00:14:34] S1: Mm-hmm, yeah. It’s true what you said about it always being right there. I had a notion that there could be this recruiting business because a few people had told me that. Actually, when I was working at one of my jobs before, the job I got actually before going to Best Buy, what was worked as a software development company, and we had to recruit software engineers for that job, and it just ended up being my job to do that. I remember working with a recruiter and learning about that space, but I didn't really understand exactly how it worked. I just knew that there's – there could be something there, but it all started when – we used to go to these TechVibes, TechFest events where recruiting – basically, recruiting fairs where a lot of the city startups and a few of the larger companies would get – go into this big conference room. People would network and try and get jobs. Then every startup would also pitch themselves at the – on stage. We would take, actually, a laptop and do a webinar and livestream the recruiting fair to all of our VanHackers, most of them from Brazil but, at this point, a lot of them from other parts of the world too. I would go to every booth and say, “Hey, I'm not just a crazy guy with a laptop. I actually have a few hundred engineers here who are looking for jobs in Vancouver. Would you like to pitch your startup to them?” The HR person would go ahead and pitch, and then I'll be like, “Hey, what's your tech stack?” They say, “Oh, it's Java and React.” I said, “Okay, well any Java and React engineers here? Please say so in the chat.” Then we had 15 people in the chat say, “Hey, yeah, me, me, me, me, me.”
00:16:05 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:16:05] S0: I have to ask, by the way, does that – that's not a normal thing. It's really smart. Was that normal idea for you, or how did you come up with – how did you even think about I’m going to go to this career fair with a laptop? [00:16:17] S1: I honestly don't even remember. I think we just went to one with some of the local VanHackers, some of our community members who are in Vancouver already for the first one. You’re like this is really great, and then we would do a lot of webinars. Webinars were a really large way for us to sell the course because what we would do is we would have a webinar and then be like, hey, everyone who joined the webinar, you guys get a 15% discount if you buy in the next 24 hours. That was a really good sales method for us. We started a lot of digital marketing courses back then, and that was a way that they sold info products. I was like, well, the best content for us is really the companies. Who are the companies? We make blog posts, like the top 10 companies to work for in Canada or something like that, the best startups to join. I don't know exactly how – it’s been such a long time. I don't remember exactly where the idea came from, but I do remember going to two or three of these events. I even went to one in Dublin and did the same thing in Dublin. I was always really interested in this kind of concept of bringing people who can physically be there to be there virtually.
00:17:20 · Pablo Srugo
[00:17:20] S0: The East Side Games was your first hire. I'm sure that was a pleasant surprise. What do you do from there? I mean, you're still running the school. Do you start right away focusing on recruiting and earning more from recruiting, or do you have a few of those other kind of serendipity – serendipitous moments that really awaken your – awaken you to the opportunity that exists in recruiting?
00:17:42 · Ilya
[00:17:42] S1: No, we went – started going pretty strong on recruiting because realized – because we were making, I think, at the time – I forget exactly how much it was, but I remember the Thinkific hire. We made more money that – from the Thinkific hire than all of the new ARR that we added that month for the English school, and there was a lot more work for the English school. I was giving all the classes. I was doing most of the sales. I was in Slack 24/7 chatting with people on DM. It was a lot of work to service that, but to hire, we just did a webinar. Then the money came and then that's it. There wasn't any other work there. I was like, you know what? Let's go all in on the recruiting side. Then we also changed the price to 15%. We since changed it to 20% of annual salary per hire. I remember making our first 15% hire, happened really in a funny story. I was just waiting for my wife to get ready on a Friday night to go for dinner, and I was like, huh, I got some time. I remember there was a Java developer I just met and this company Traction. The man was hiring Java developers, so I just sent an email connecting Anthony and Fernando, didn't think much of it. A few weeks later there's – they said again, “Hey, we hired Fernando. ” The salary was 100K, and so we made $15,000 from that. I was just like, damn, this is incredible. Yeah, it just opened my eyes. This is a big side of the business.
00:19:04 · Pablo Srugo
[00:19:04] S0: What were some of the unique things that you did? I mean, recruiting is an old business, and one of the challenges with it being a services business is it's pretty hard to scale. You’re only as good as the recruiters you hire and these sort of things. What were some of the things that you were doing that were unique that you felt like were maybe either more tech enabled or, at the very least, more scalable?
00:19:28 · Ilya
[00:19:28] S1: I think the biggest thing for us was the community side of things so building the community. For example, I think I mentioned this a few minutes ago, but our candidates, they call themselves VanHackers, so there’s really this feeling of we’re in it together. I think that started because we have that English school or education in our DNA of we're all students in the same classroom working together, friends, and trying to learn and get to the same success outcome. What I think that did is that made people really want to invite their friends to VanHack, tell them about us, and believe in us. We have a Slack group with about 90,000 people in it where we chat with our engineers and candidates pretty often, education content. Creating that community vibe, which makes it so that candidates are applying to jobs quickly, and we can get candidates that are really good. Yeah, I think that's a big thing. Another thing I think that's important is we did build a software platform, right? We ended up hiring from ourselves. Our CTO Tiago was actually our first employee still with us today, built out this combination of a learning management system and an application tracking system and did a lot of tech work to automate the processes.