Business as Usual: JazzHR

Transcription: 

Okay, so good afternoon, everyone. This is Audrey Russo, President and CEO, the Pittsburgh Technology Council. And it's Friday, but it's another great business as usual, very excited to speak to our guests today. And I think all of you will be very interested in the story and the development of JazzHR. I will introduce Pete in one moment, but before we do, I want to make sure that I'm giving deep appreciation to our sponsors, which is Huntington bank, they've been with us right from the beginning. And they've helped through the pandemic and making sure that people get access to SBA loans and all the things that we all continue to grapple with. They've been great partners also 40 by 80. It is the 501 c three affiliate of the Pittsburgh Technology Council, and we're leading many of our efforts there to support entrepreneurship and workforce development in the region. So we've muted your microphones want to make sure that no one that we don't hear anything in the background. And we also have a chat so that we can ask questions of our guests, which is, which is Pete Lamson CEO. And those questions and comments in the chat are not meant to sell. They're only meant to ask questions of our guests. So I want to thank everyone for being here. And I want to thank Jonathan kersting, who's with us. He's vice president of all things media and marketing at the tech Council and tells lots of stories. And you may have seen just a recent launch of a microsite, which is called get PGH, which includes many of the stories that we're going to continue to talk to tell over the next many months ahead. So I'm very excited to have Pete Lampson CEO of JazzHR, who's joining us today, and welcome to the program. Pete really happy to have you here. Thank you for taking the time. I know you're busy, but can't thank you enough for the time that you take with us.

Delighted to be here, Audrey. Thanks so much for having me.

Well, let's just talk really quickly just talk about Pete, yourself, like who is Pete, what's been your journey? How did you quickly get to, you know, the role that you're doing now in terms of jazz, HR, and maybe just a little bit of some of the roots of jazz HR in Pittsburgh? Sure.

So I joined JazzHR five years ago, and prior to my tenure here, I've spent the majority of my career in technology based businesses typically early stage or emerging growth. Almost always, at least initially venture backed, some hits some misses purge immediately prior to jazz HR I was with a company called Carbonite that was a venture backed business based in Boston and terrific Ron and we had great growth we went public along the way and, and, and left there as I said five years ago to join JazzHR and which was sort of a typical career step for me again, really promising technology and underlying product going after an underserved market small businesses trying to help them improve recruiting efficiency, built by Don Charlton from who was in Pittsburgh and and stays active in the Pittsburgh community to this day remains on our board to this day. So the company was founded in 2009. And and with the idea that that that small businesses who typically recruit with some hodgepodge of either Microsoft Office tools, Excel, Word, email, inbox, and so forth, or G Suite tools, could perhaps use the same type of assistance in improving the efficiencies of the business that we've seen in sales with all the different CRMs you know, Salesforce and others and marketing. You've got HubSpot and Marketo and others and every vertical area has improved the efficiency of their business and HR is is a unfortunately often the kind of the last to the party and certainly recruiting fit in that bucket. So there's a big market opportunity that Don attacked and and that we've been pushing hard against ever since.

And so the title back then was resonator, right? It was name of the company was resonator. And then what about the switch to this new title? When did that happen?

That happened and it was before I arrived, I believe it was in the beginning of 2015, maybe late 2014.

Okay, okay, so we know you now all is jazz HR. So So can you tell us a little bit about jazz? So before we start talking about all the information that you're actually privy to in terms of what's happened in 2020. Tell us about you know, give us your pitch to Tell us what jazz HR is why people should use it, and what problems you're solving. Sure, so,

so our target market are small businesses with between 50 and 500 employees. And typically, those businesses use very manual recruiting processes that that they can be effective, but they're very time consuming and cumbersome. And again, it's, it's we probably all have the experience of you post a job on on a job board, you get a flood of resumes you need, maybe you get 100 applications for a role you're trying to fill, you want to get back to everyone, even if you're not interested to be respectful for them, you've got to call through all the resumes that you might want to talk to, you've got to schedule interviews, you got to go through all the background checks and skills assessments, and it's a hiring is a tough, tough thing. And arguably, it's the most important thing that any company does, we all can't be successful without having the best people and in the roles we need them in. And so what jazz HR does is we, we don't necessarily take away the decision making capabilities of that hiring manager or that HR person or that recruiter, but we make their lives a lot easier. So So for example, if you wanted to post a job on 10, different job boards, you'd have to go to each job board and post that job, maybe it takes 10 or 15 minutes for each one. If you're a subscriber to Jaz, HR, or our competitors, as well, you post at one time, through our software, press a button that automatically goes out to 21 different job boards. You can set up automatically, what we call screening questions or knockout questions so that every candidate who's applying, maybe they have to answer three or four simple questions. And then you can you can really focus your time on reviewing the resumes from those candidates that the answer the questions that are going to be indicative of the type of background, that that you'd see in a candidate you're going to be interested in hiring, or at least talking to more and, and the folks who perhaps don't fit the profile you've you're ideally looking for, you can set up an automatic email, that's a very polite professional Thanks, but no thanks, and what that goes out to that person. And so all these things are, I'm just giving a couple of examples. But all these things that are so time consuming, you can do in literally seconds once you're kind of set up. And and the same is true for offer management and background checks and, and skills assessments and interview scheduling, which is oftentimes the bane of everyone's existence, because it's, it is a goat rodeo trying to get everybody on the same page when they can interview a particular candidate. All of that becomes automated through through our software. So it's a big time savings, which means it's a cost savings, it means you get better, ultimately, hopefully you'll hire a better person. And it's a better candidate experience. So it helps your employer brand as well.

Yeah, that's, that's really great. It helps with consistency.

That's right, exactly.

And I and so your sweet spot, in terms of company size, so people are listening to this and thinking about their companies, where Where's your sweet spot in terms of size of company, or it doesn't matter?

Yeah, so well, you know, again, we say 50 to 500, I would say ideally, and our pricing, we're priced to be affordable for that small business. So you know, for that 50 person company that is still going to be very budget conscious, you can get into jazz HR for as little as $39 a month, right. And then we have, if you will call it a good better best pricing plan. So you can if you're if your budget and your needs warrant, you can you can get a little more advanced capabilities from our product solution. So I would say the sweet spot is is really anywhere in that 50 to 500 ranges, we laser focus on that, having said that a company with 500 employees is really, really, really different than a business with just 50 employees. So that's why we have different products to meet those different the different needs of the organizations with those different different sizes.

Well, actually, we have a partnership with JazzHR for our member companies. And Taylor will put some of that information up for people to say, so we really appreciate that your commitment to Pittsburgh has been considerable. So are you let's talk a little bit because you have some expertise. And that expertise allows you to understand what's been happening in 2020 when it comes to people by eight in terms of hiring. And there have been just some what I think are some permanent, you know, changes and you know, to hiring to staffing to where people live, etc. What are the trends that you're seeing like if you just flip back the past

year, I mean there's there's there's which markets are which industries have the been the most impacted, which have, I wouldn't say necessarily benefited but which have flourished and the difficult And then there's of course, the, the notion of, of how we recruit and hire people is in all likelihood permanently changed to your point Audrey. And, and, and so maybe I'll touch on both. So with a benefit now of we've all been kind of in this period of of COVID work COVID work environment for about nine months and it's enough time that you can have some spirit some perspective and some of that fog of war that we felt in March and April, when we didn't know what was happening is now a little more clear. And there's both there, there's negatives, clearly, and there also are a lot of positives, though and, and, and the industries that had been most negatively impact. And this is not new news. But it's really the service industries. And there's a couple of exceptions, but it's, you know, restaurants, its hospitality, its health clubs. And then some things that aren't service or service related like education. Right. And, and because with so many schools now working remotely and so forth, that is impacted hiring in the education vertical, but overall, it's the service economy that has suffered the most. And, and at the same time, concurrently. We've seen tremendous hiring in the health care of verticals in technology verticals that are enabling all of us to work from home, in nonprofits, interestingly, and in manufacturing. And that the sort of tragic thing about all of this is that, and this is true, nationally, it's certainly true in Pittsburgh, is that there is a dichotomy of the skill sets between those that have suffered job loss in the service economy, and where the jobs are, where the jobs with a higher the industries with the highest growth rates are today. So let's say I'm a trainer and a fitness club, and I might be the best trainer in the city of Pittsburgh. But this the health clubs are suffering right now. And in many cases, they're closed. And, and unfortunately, if the healthcare industry is hiring technicians, well, my skill set as a trainer might not necessarily fit with what's being hired for in the industries that are growing. And that's the tragedy of this is where we have seen high unemployment, the skills aren't necessarily a good match with the industries that are hiring. So that's been a real challenge. Early on in the downturn, we saw in kind of March and April, we saw a big drop in new jobs being posted in the aggregate of 60% drop of new jobs posted in March and April from where we were previously, that has since rebounded from the end of April until end of November by about 200%. So that's the positive. But again, it's not in every industry. And that's that that's the kind of heartbreaking thing about this for is that is that in certain industries, it's still really hard to find talented people, given the kind of the markets they could they service and the employees they're looking for, and and the folks that are now suffering through through higher unemployment may not have the skills that those companies are looking for some kind of macro level, that's what we're, we're seeing both nationally and in Pittsburgh. And then and then in terms of your question on has, you know, has employment changed, and therefore has hiring changed? You know, we don't know what it's going to look like when we all go back to the office, you know, hopefully later in 2021. I would my personal perspective is that is that it will not look like it did before. But having said that, I also don't think it's going to be a complete pendulum switch shift the other way to where everyone's working remotely, I think remote worker can probably be more common. But I think people are also are looking forward to getting back into the office, there's that important, you know, social component of work every day, that's enjoyable. And there's also the shared organizational learning that we all benefit from when we're all together. That's, you know, zoom and, and other tools we use are are terrific, but it's not the same as being with folks. And then as a result, we know, we certainly are seeing increased usage in some of the recruiting tools that are available to, you know, to a hiring manager. So whether it's self scheduling of meetings and interviews, we see a much higher adoption of that now through JazzHR

use of of E documents and E signature capability as you're hiring someone that has spiked up from where it was before. We talked before we before the call started Audrey on on interviewing and video interviewing and, and the importance of that we're certainly seeing adoptions there. So I think that that some of these tools because they are more efficient will continue Post COVID. But I think though, you know, I still think the human interaction and the face to face is going to be important as well.

So let's go Jonathan. There's two questions. One from Zack and one from Robin, if you can ask them. Yeah, we'll start with Zack

Zack wants to know, what is jazz hrs view on the staffing industry?

And how does jazz HR online or work with staffing firms? So we work with we do work with the staffing industry, we are seeing a large increase in job postings to the staffing industry right now. So I think that that, you know, as the as the economy begins to recover, and right now, you could there's a case to be made that, you know, hopefully only in the near term, we're going the other way, as you know, the economic news and the labor markets are going to follow the Health News, which is not good right now. My personal belief is I think it's going to stay choppy through the first quarter of next year. And then hopefully, we begin to emerge. But we are, you know, staffing industries are another way for, for businesses to to bring on workers be they, you know, kind of short term or temporary in nature or full time. And so just as we're seeing a lift in jobs posted by direct employers, we're seeing a similar effect, maybe even a larger increase in staffing industry participation right now. Interesting. And so Robin Davidson wants to know, have you seen a change in entry level positions being posted? Less in senior being hired? So great question. I actually don't have the answer to that. So I want to I don't want to miss state either way. So I'll pass on that. But it's a good question.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. So you know, the other thing that I wanted to touch upon this whole hiring remotely, right, so I live in Pittsburgh, and my team has been in Pittsburgh, but now, since COVID, I'm I can hire Pete, who's living in, you know, Nashville in New Hampshire? Are you seeing are you seeing those trends? Do you see that through your engagement? And if so, what do you think about that?

We are seeing that, and, and I think it's it you know, I think as businesses that previously, as we talked about it a minute or so ago, where, let's say close to 100%, in office, I think that's going to start to change. And as that change changes, you know, whether the person is 30 miles from my office, or 300 miles doesn't really matter. So I do think that changes, that also means that recruiting will need to change with it. Because all of a sudden, you can you could be seeing seeing candidate flow, not only from a geographic area around your office, but from anywhere in the country, maybe anywhere in the world. And so that can cause its own challenges by just a flood of candidates. We have some examples of jobs in Pittsburgh, not so much on the service side that have opened but in in the kind of the art space and, and some other categories in Pittsburgh, I've got my cheat sheet here. That uh, that are seeing as much as 1000 candidates, here we go arts, entertainment and recreation, as much as as many as 1000 candidates per open job. So you know, one job and you're getting 1000 candidates. So all of a sudden, you need as a hiring manager tools to sift through that because if you're getting 1000 candidates odds are there's, you know, a handful that are going to be really well suited for what you're looking for. But that means you get to sift through 900 and some odd others to get to those people. So there's technology that can make your life easier both in terms of keyword searches of resumes, and some of the knockout questions or screening questions that I referenced earlier and, and things that you can do to make that process easier, but technology as remote work becomes more prevalent. Remote hiring is going to also have to change in the use of how you get there through improved technologies.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai