Connecting Employers and Job Seekers in Minutes

I could remember the pain in volume recruitment of frontline staff during my recruitment days.

We were tasked by one of the large supermarket chains to find interim staffs to help in the festive promotion of mandarin oranges as Chinese New Year was looming.

There were 50 roles to fill island wide and it was painstaking work as you attempt to source, screen them, schedule them for the vaccination that is mandated for food handlers.

In the end, we only manage to fill up 12 of the roles but probably spent 70% of our bandwidth on the work.

Which is why a platform that could help optimise such recruitment is not just appreciated but completely necessary.

I speak with Emmanual Crouy to find out more about how his platform aims to solve this pain point.

 

For the readers who are not familiar, could you give an introduction?

I’m the CEO and co-founder of GrabJobs, a Recruitment Automation platform.

As CEO, apart from supervising each function, I’m in charge of Strategy, Product Roadmap and Investor relations. I also get very hands-on when it comes to opening new markets.

Prior to GrabJobs I was the co-founder of Aster Lion, a recruitment firm focused on Technology and Financial Sectors.

I’ve been working in the Recruitment industry since November 2010. Prior to that, I was a Software Engineer and I have a Computer Science background.

 

What motivated you to start GrabJobs?

As a recruiter, my biggest pain point was the time spent sourcing, screening and scheduling interviews.

These are very low value-add tasks, yet are the most time consuming and repetitive.

I always wanted to develop technology to automate these tasks.

The trigger came when a number of businesses I invested in were facing big staffing issues.

These were F&B and Retail businesses across South East Asia.

It made me realize there was no Job Portal focused on these industries.

Digging deeper into the subject, I realized these industries conduct mass hiring campaigns and could benefit from recruitment automation as well.

That’s when my business partner, Mark Melo, and I, decided to create a Job App that would focus on industries that were underserved and develop tools that would automate recruitment.

 

How exactly does GrabJobs work?

For Companies, we innovated the traditional job board by developing value-add recruitment automation technology to cut down hiring time.

Key features and benefits:

  • Multi-channel Job site partnerships: your jobs get reposted to over 25 other job sites, schools and advertising partners, in order to reach millions of job seekers.
  • Interview Chatbot & Scheduling Automation: our bot asks your screening questions to applicants over chat, scores them, shortlists the top candidates and invites them for interview. This is our core feature which saves companies hundreds of hours per month.
  • Actionable Interview Reminders: applicants who are invited for an interview receive actionable reminders 24h and 3h before the interview and are prompted to reconfirm, reschedule or cancel. This has proven to increase the interview show-up rate of all our clients.

In summary, our solution cuts down the time-to-hire which in turn cuts down cost-per-hire.

For Job Seekers, we innovated the traditional job board by getting rid of the CV and creating a Dynamic Profile Creation Chatbot that speeds up recruitment while creating applicant profiles on the fly.

Job Seekers don’t need CVs to apply for jobs, they only respond to interview chat questions, which takes 1 min on average.

After that, they know instantly whether they are shortlisted for the next round or not.

The data from their interview answers are dynamically added to their profile.

The more jobs they apply for, the more data their profile has, and thus the better the job recommendations we send to them.

We are currently working on an “Employee Welcome Pack” for which all job seekers who get a job via GrabJobs receive a package of vouchers for F&B outlets and gym/fitness studios near their new work location.

 

How did you get funded?

We have been funded solely from Angel investors, most of whom bring value-add from their network of industry experience.

 

Who do you see as your close competitions?

In Singapore it’s FastJobs, in the Philippines it’s JobStreet.

 

Who would be your current biggest customer?

Our biggest client is Uniqlo.

They were previously using a form-based screening system that was not customizable and did not automatically score applicants.

It wasn’t really helping them speed up their hiring process.

Moreover, they were getting a high applicant drop-out rate.

We won them over by showing how our solution is customizable and could fully automate their process end-to-end.

As a result, their HR team saves hundreds of hours per week and they have also increased their interview show-up rate > 80%.

They have now engaged us to further develop tailored features to fit their hiring process.

 

What has worked well for you in marketing your solution?

For Companies, it’s (of course) enticing them with a free trial.

For Job Seekers, doing multi-channel partnerships is the fastest way for us to grow a user base at the lowest cost.

 

What is your proudest moment in the history of GrabJobs?

When Uniqlo told us they hired over 100 people using our portal within the first 4 months of using it, and that all their recruitment metrics were better than the previous solution they were using.

Team GrabJobs

That was a big win for us and a confirmation that our solution is world-class. It was worth all the hard work we put in!

 

The path of an entrepreneur is full of ups but mostly downs. How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

Ironically, even though Mark and I are ex-recruiters, one of our main challenges had been building a strong Sales team.

Given our limited funding, we were inclined to hire inexperienced Salespeople with potential and groom them.

That, unfortunately, turned out to fail 80% of the time.

We finally resolved to hire more expensive experienced Salespeople which immediately bore its fruits.

After going through so many failed attempts, we now know exactly the type of Salespeople we need.

 

Do you have anyone that is a major professional influence?

I wouldn’t say I have a single person that influences me, I’m influenced by all entrepreneurs.

Anyone I hear about who has decided to become an entrepreneur gives me the inspiration to continue working hard on what I’m doing.

I have a special respect for those who started from scratch and built massively successful products and businesses, these are my real influencers!

 

Any book or books that have greatly influenced your life?

1) Rich Dad Poor Dad: the book that gave me the Entrepreneurial Bug and also opened me to the investment world.

2) Scaling Up: a bible on how to structure and grow a company.

3) Blitzscaling: gives you the ingredients and recipe you need to scale hard and fast!

 

In the last 12 months, what new belief, behaviour, or habit has most improved your life?

I’ve learned to delegate key tasks to my trusted staff which has enabled me to be less hands-on, take a step back and focus on the big picture and vision of the company.

This has the impact of giving me a renewed boost of confidence!

 

 

Any part of your work that you are putting in extra hours to improve on?

I suck at Accounting Reporting!

My background is Computer Science and I’ve never learned standard accounting methods.

Thankfully we have an external account + a number of investors with Accounting & Finance background that take care of this 🙂

 

What’s one productivity hack you can’t live without?

I love using Microsoft OneNote.

It’s great for writing all kinds of notes, from task lists to notes on the go, to strategy notes.

You can combine images/tables, it syncs with your phone and also works offline.

Satya Nadella should hire me as a Brand Ambassador!

[callout]To learn more about GrabJobs, visit http://grabjobs.co [/callout]

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