We’re here today with Mike Haywood Founder and Growth Director of LiveHire. Mike thanks for your time. The company has experienced some great momentum. What do you put that down to?
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Mike Haywood: [00:00:20] Oh I’d say it’s three years of building technology and product in isolation with clients until you get product market fit. And from that point onwards you’re still not scaling you’re testing in beta phase with with a handful of clients or a couple of handfuls of big enterprise clients until you’re really comfortable with the kind of scaling and growth metrics of the platform you’ve built. And then once you come out of that beta phase is when you really start to put the foot down but you can’t scale too early. You’ve got to be really comfortable.
David Tasker: [00:00:51] And you’re now in that scaling phase. How do you attract the resources and build the resources necessary for that scale?
Mike Haywood: [00:00:59] Yeah. So we live by I guess hit product market fit you know 13 quarters ago and we’ve been since then growing compound 20 percent quarter on quarter on quarter of 13 quarters. It doesn’t really show any signs of slowing down. And we as I said we build the technology to be able to do that so it’s kind of like we’ve created this snowball that we can’t really stop which is a good thing but the business has got to scale to keep up with that growth. So for GG and I in particular and Grant the other director it’s the challenge for us is how do you build different areas of the business to infinitely scale. You know we’ve got an ecosystem and a software that can effectively infinitely scales. Our purpose is to empower the flow of the world’s talent into organisations. That’s always going to change and evolve how that happens. As the world grows. So it’s kind of one of those infinite purposes that we can never really achieve. So we built the technology to do that and continue to evolve. We need to build the sales team, the customer support team, the customer success, the development team everything to be able to scale infinitely and what is the ways of working in the culture and the environment and the level of alignment autonomy that just allows you to infinitely scale. That’s that’s our next challenge.
David Tasker: [00:02:19] And you’ve been able to attract some amazing brands as partners and users of the product.
Mike Haywood: [00:02:24] Our product naturally attracts the best brands because they are a magnet for talent and their biggest problem is how do they process all the people that would like to work for them in a way where they’re not rejecting them. Candidates are also customers and consumers and 39 percent of people that apply to a job ad and are rejected try to never buy that company’s product or service again. So these big brands realise they’re doing a lot of brand damage with the constant rejection style recruitment that they have so they naturally gravitate towards LiveHire because it fixes a lot of those problems. So we are fortunate enough that we do pick that up and then they of course bring a whole bunch of talent to the ecosystem which allows the smaller players which haven’t got as strong an established brand to really be able to grow their own talent communities as part of the shared ecosystem. So a lot of these big brands are really paving the way for flipping an entire economy over. So ultimately when we do maybe achieve our purpose one day it will be because of the big brands.
David Tasker: [00:03:27] And how do you disrupt the HR space?
Mike Haywood: [00:03:30] I wouldn’t say we’re disrupting at all. We’re making it far more productive. So you know like Salesforce dot com is productivity and a collaboration tool for sales teams and Atlassian and the Atlassian products are a collaboration and productivity tools for development teams and LiveHire is really productivity and collaboration software for recruitment teams, hiring managers, h.r. teams and all the candidates that want to communicate within that ecosystem. So there’s a huge wave of you know the next digital wave is not around classifieds in marketplaces. It’s really around ecosystems where people collaborate in a far more productive at doing what they do. And we see there will be a shift in the total spend in the industry. So at the moment you know in the US 400 billion is spent on recruitment of which 1 percent is technology. And in any mature market technology accounts for about 20 percent. So whilst you do disrupt the market you don’t really disrupt the people you just you just go on this shift with them where they become more value add in the work that they’re doing and we’re really helping recruitment teams and HR teams go on that journey to become much more value and strategic part of the organisation.
David Tasker: [00:04:50] As a founder you must be proud of what you’ve been able to achieve but really excited for what lies ahead.
Mike Haywood: [00:04:57] Oh absolutely and look I’m proud of every all 50 people that are in LiveHire today across Australia and obviously the growth of the business to keep up with the growth of the business in the years to come means their is going to be a lot more people joining the business. You know where we’re at day one here and we’re just rolling up our sleeves and getting started. And I think that the proof in the fact that every client that we launch with becomes an advocate which then becomes a referral for a new talent community. About 95 percent of the new communities we launch come from a referral from a client that’s super happy with the one that they did. And so we’ve just got this momentum that we’ve just you know we need to deliver on that very exciting.
David Tasker: [00:05:43] Thanks very much for your time.
Mike Haywood: [00:05:44] Thank you. Good to be here.