EnticeLabs. John Sumser calls this a "Game Changer" in the Recruiting Industry

Congratulations to the CEO of EnticeLabs, Ryan Caldwell, in raising $2M in a strategic seed round led by First Advantage.

Ryan Caldwell

"The reality is there are great candidates that are active and there are great candidates that are passive. And there are horrible candidates that are passive, we call them dead-wood candidates, they just kind of drift inside of a company...and we have horrible candidates that are active... so we have good and bad in both categories... what you want to find are the good quality candidates. The good quality candidates are typically improving their skills in some way shape or form."

"A huge section of our network involves work related sites. So a perfect example is that when a java engineer is researching how to do some sort of Oracle implementation... when that ad comes up across our network it actually scrapes that page, it looks at the content, it looks at that person's profile... we look at their browsing history and we say this person has visited 20 technical sites that were highly relevant for this job... and they're currently researching what we consider a high-level article on this topic, this is a great candidate: display that ad to them." Ryan Caldwell

Welcome to an Inside Recruiting podcast on Total Picture Radio. This is Peter Clayton Reporting. Joining us today is Ryan Caldwell, CEO of EnticeLabs, based in Provo, Utah. I met several members of the EnticeLabs team at ERE Expo last month, and if you’ve listened to our podcast with John Sumser and Jonathan Goodman, you’ve heard the EnticeLabs name, because Sumser thinks this company is a game changer in the recruiting industry. That, of course, got my attention, and got me to set-up this interview.

Real time results:

20 Min:

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New! Full interview transcript now available.

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Talking Points:

Give us your backstory. I checked your profile at Linkedin and saw you attended the Air Force Academy, flew around in F-16’s and studied Mandarin Chinese?
How did EnticeLabs get started?
You’re backed by Omniture?
How did you get hooked up with them?
Your primary offering at EnticeLabs is called TalentSeekr - what does it do?
Who are your competitors?
What results can you tell us about?
You have two other recruiting products - one is called CareerAds - what’s that about?
ReferMe - for Job Candidates and Friends?
So it’s no surprise to anyone that we’re in a pretty nasty recession. It seems a lot more people are getting laid off or fired than are getting hired. How’s your business?
As you know from hanging around the recruiting industry, the operative word is “passive candidate,” have you seen any shift in the stigma toward unemployed workers?
Are you hiring?

Podcast Transcript:

Peter Clayton: Ryan, welcome to Total Picture Radio.

Ryan Caldwell:   Thank you.

Peter:   You were, I guess, one of the few members of the EnticeLabs team that was not at ERE. Can you give us a little bit of your back story. I checked your profile on LinkedIn and saw that you attended the Air force Academy and flew around in F-16s and studied Mandarin Chinese.

Ryan:   The background varies a little bit back then. Yeah, my background is I’ve been in startup for quite a while. Education wise, my education started at the Air Force Academy. I did have a chance to fly F-16s at Hill Air Force base while I was there and decided that I loved flying but I really wanted to take the business path. So, I started getting involved in startups and started attending the Marriott School of Business. While I was getting my undergrad there, I actually sold my first startup a few weeks before I graduated. Then from there, just started consulting. I consulted with Microsoft and Visa, did some work for them in London and Singapore for a few years. I wanted to get a little bit of a better feel for the corporate world. Got together with a team here and we saw a pretty strong need in HR for stronger data and a little bit of a better tool to use the new mediums to get across job openings to the right candidates, and EnticeLabs was started.

Peter:   So, you’re backed by Omniture, is that correct?

Ryan:   We are backed by some of these founders of Omniture; the company itself has not backed us, but the two founders, John Pestana and Josh James, who is currently the CEO of Omniture, are part of our financial backing, as well as some of the original investors who funded Omniture, are some of our investors as well.

Peter:   Well, that’s pretty exciting. How did you get hooked up with them?

Ryan:   Some of our investors early on who were part of the forming of the idea, actually were in close contact with Josh James and actually had invested in Omniture early on as well. They saw some huge affinity early on because they saw what Omniture did in their spaces – they took a space that was in pretty strong need of a deeper analysis. Technology needed to be applied to a better degree, and so Omniture really came in and properly applied technology to the space and then just flourished underneath that. So they brought such a huge value to one of their customers, that they went from, I believe, that they were towards the lower end of the company’s in their market size wise, and they ended up being number one in just a matter of years.

So they saw that in HR, there was a huge need for data driven results. And so when we apply technology into this space, we’re starting to see the same results; we’re starting to see companies are very thirsty for knowing where their money is being spent, how it could be better applied and seeing technology be a part of that.

Peter:   Ryan, your primary offer at EnticeLabs is called TalentSeekr, what does it do?

Ryan:   What TalentSeekr does – what’s really interesting is we found at all the conferences and experts and the companies we’ve worked with, we found that they have this common complaint. Their complaint is that over the years, they have attended conference after conference where experts and people have told them, a lot of what they already know, which is that the older methods are not getting them the results they need and that they need to pursue all of these new methods that are becoming available as online environments and networks and avenues and blogs and user groups evolve. So experts have been telling them well you really need to get on these user groups and you really need to get across these blogs and you really need to get across the social networks and all the new mediums, and it’s a more efficient, more effective way to reach candidates. Not only can you reach really good quality active candidates, but you’re going to be able to reach passive candidates you couldn’t reach before.

HR directors and recruiters have said, well that’s great, we agree with you, tell us how. And so we see classes after classes of telling them how they can go hire two more people, three more people, four more people, 100 more people … and start creating blogs and user groups or go out there and involve themselves in all these different avenues. It’s just overwhelming.

What was really interesting is when we met with Intermountain Healthcare; they told us that they were already doing that. It’s almost a sigh of relief when they realize there’s a company that can finally help them through this. Because they came to us, said we’ve gone across to several blogs and user groups and tried to put our jobs out there, but to negotiate the pricing, to figure out what sites work, what sites don’t work. So they found that after weeks of investment, they were live on one blog and they were close to getting a contract on another, and it was just an overwhelming task. They came to us and said could you really speed this up, and within days, we had them going across thousands of sites.

So what’s really interesting is that now for the first time, a customer can come to us and say, get me across all the user groups, all the blogs, all the niche sites, all the large sites, all the large ad networks, all the job aggregators, all the job boards, all the social networks, the LinkedIn, the Facebooks – I want to go across all of them. Now for the first time, not only can we get them across all of these sites on one platform and one medium and the system will automatically create all those different types of ads; ads that are text based for maybe an AdWords campaign, or ads that are graphic or flash based or roll out or video, for different mediums and it will create all those on the fly and it takes basic pre-approved content that the employer provides to us from their marketing department. And then from there, it enables us to actually score what’s working.

So TalentSeekr now tells this HR department that is now going across all the mediums they wanted to go across, hour by hour, day by day, telling them this is what’s working, this is what’s not working. But then it takes it a step further and it actually tells the HR department, not only what’s working, but where they should adjust spend, if they wanted it to spend more effectively, and it can even make those adjustments for them.

So for the first time, HR departments are finding that they now feel like they’re in control, they feel empowered. They have the data right there in front of them and they have the reach and the ability to get across the sites they’ve been told for years they should.

Peter:   So, basically what you’re doing is, you can take a specific job req – let’s say somebody is looking for a biologist in a particular niche, and tell them based on your data, where they should be advertising that job, put that job out there using the various formats that you were telling us about, whether it be text or flash or whatever, and then real time start aggregating results from putting those ads out there on the various networks.

Ryan:   That’s exactly what we do. What’s interesting is we have what we call a fingerprint. So for each different type of job or each different – it could be a state, it could be a country, it could be a region, it could be a section of the world, it could be whether you’re advertising in India or if you’re in China – we’ll say okay, for those specific jobs in that area, we already know, we have a fingerprint that’s maybe 70% clear. So we’ll start out with that fingerprint to make sure that from hour one, day one, that spend is being spent efficiently.

The system is able to the very second that it starts serving out these enticements to reach these potential job candidates, it’s already learning who’s clicking, when they click, how long they stay on the engagement page, do they view one video, two videos, did they click through and immediately leave, did they click through and bookmark it, did they click through and actually go through a couple of the steps. And so from all that data, it finds out well we’re getting a lot of clicks over here, but these clicks over here, they’re clicking and staying longer, they seem to be more valuable. It actually has algorithms that make those adjustments on the fly.

What ends up happening is that an HR department can sit back and relax as if the thing is on autopilot and see it improve the spend. CFOs love this, because when they see this, they finally realize, okay that money you’re asking to go across some sort of marketing campaign, you wanted to go drop, $5-10-50-100,000 in a campaign across a couple of user groups or blogs; now they’re able to drop considerably less, but they’re able to send it across many more sites and get real-time feedback on that it’s being spent wisely. So the CFOs and HR departments are getting along a little bit better with the product.

Peter:   In describing this, it does sound an awful lot like what Omniture does in website optimization.

Ryan:   Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean I think that’s part of the reason why Omniture early on saw some real potential here, is that they realized that in their market, that there was the need to apply this technology to get richer data and then make sure the money is being spent efficiently. They saw that in HR, it was needed even worse. So, I think that they saw the value there, and the market here is just incredible, how huge it is and how much it’s needed. The amount that’s being spent and not tracked is a travesty in HR. So, being able to now spend it more effectively and to use that analytics to do that is a pretty powerful approach, but it’s definitely complicated. This is not an inexpensive technology. It’s been several years in the works. It costs millions and millions of dollars just to develop the very core part of the technology and to design all the extensions, because it truly is a platform. So many things connect into this platform to optimize it.

It’s quite a project to take on, but once it’s developed and as it’s turned live and as we’ve seen the results come in for the customers over this last year, it’s been a pretty exciting ride.

Peter:   I bet it has. Now you have a couple of other products as well; one is called CareerAds. Can you tell us what that’s about.

Ryan:   So CareerAds comes on a publisher side. What we found is that a lot of publishers, they want to make sure that they’re maximizing whatever money they can make off of their site. So you may have publishers that have a very niche user group. They may be a San Francisco Oracle user group, or they may be a Boston Java user group, or a healthcare related site or something. So they’ll want more than just what a normal advertising network would give them. So they can actually log into our interface and put our content directly on their site, which we have a pretty large publisher network that will do that. Then it enables us to serve content that’s highly relevant for the readers.

What’s really interesting about this is we found that certain sites that are very protective over their site, specifically a user group, they will not allow advertisements on their site, but we have multiple publishers that will allow out content on their site because they don’t see it as advertisement; they see it as an offer into the readership. So it’s a very win/win relationship between the two because they’re actually able to make money but not have to actually have advertising, or what they would consider advertising on their site.

Peter:   What is the ReferMe platform?

Ryan: The ReferMe platform enables – if someone sees an advertisement because it’s highly targeted, so we may have targeted who is a perfect job candidate for that employer, but when we target them, they’re just not quite ready to move. Now we’ve enticed them, they’ll come back, they’ll look at the landing page or the engagement page, but since they may be at a position where they’re just not quite ready for the move but they may know two or three other individuals that are ready for that move, that they’ve worked with in the past, that they just know happen to be leaving another company or whatever might be going on. In today’s economic times, ReferMe is very powerful, because the best referrals come from people who’ve already worked with someone else or already know someone else. So they can actually take that – when they click on that advertisement, that enticement, they’ll go through the landing page or the engagement page. From there, they’ll look at the job and they can click one button and send that to one, two, three, four, or hundred of their friends. Then from there, they can actually pass that job onto people who may be a good fit for that job, and so the employer is able to increase the power of their spend. They may have only spent for one impression, but that impression can lead to multiple people being exposed to their job.

Peter:   Back to something you said earlier, Ryan. You were talking about passive candidates and of, course, that’s code in the recruiting industry for people who have jobs. Obviously, there are lots and lots of highly qualified people today who do not have jobs because of all of the layoffs. Are you seeing any shift within the companies or the people that you’re speaking with in the HR community, away from this bias of just looking at passive candidates and ignoring all of the people who are actually looking for jobs?

Ryan:   Here’s the reality. We’ve heard a lot of different views here, but the reality is there are great candidates that are active and they are great candidates that are passive and there are horrible candidates that are passive, we call those dead wood candidates; they just kind of drift inside of a company and they kind of keep their heads down, so they make sure they don’t get fired but they’re not really adding any value. So you can have bad candidates that are passive, and you can have bad candidates that are active, that are constantly bouncing between jobs and not really adding any value. So we have both good and bad in both categories.

What we see though is the point is you want to find the good quality candidates. The good quality candidates are typically improving their skills in some way, shape, or form. A huge section of our network involves work related sites. So a perfect example is that when a Java engineer is researching how to do some sort of Oracle implementation or something like that, as they’re researching that and they’re reading that article, when that ad comes up across out network, it actually scrapes that page, it looks at the content, it looks at that person’s profile, any profile information we may have, whether it’s from a LinkedIn or from a Facebook, we look at their browsing history and we say this person has visited 20 technical sites that were highly relevant for this job. This job it needs both Java experience and Oracle experience and they’re currently researching what we consider a high level article on this topic; this is a great candidate, display that ad to them. Now that candidate could be currently looking for a job but just wanted to better their skills. They could be miserable at their current job and looking and they’re bettering their skills, or they could be happily employed, but they just didn’t think there would be another company that would be hiring for that need.

So we have the whole range there, but the point is is to target the candidate with the right skill set, whether they’re active or passive. Our system doesn’t differentiate between the two.

What it does do and what’s really important to remember is that it enables employers to reach passive candidates, that they really can’t reach otherwise. We do reach active as well, but the passive candidates that we reach typically can’t be reached via any other method, short of somehow finding their number and trying to call them. But to do that, the spend on that for the thousands and the hundreds of thousands of candidates that we reach for an employer, is just not cost effective.

Peter:   That’s what’s called hiring an executive recruiter to go out and find a specific candidate, right?

Ryan:   It’s just too expensive. To give you an example of that, I’ll give you actually a couple of cases here.

A senior search architect for The Generations Network, the company that owns Ancestry.com and Myfamily.com, they had been looking to fill that position for quite a while with no success. They had turned to job boards, they had even turned to recruiters and offered a percentage of the first year salary and so forth, and still, they could not find someone with the right skill set. But over our network, they spent less than $600, and they were able to brand their company and brand that job position to over 73,000 potential exposures, potential impressions, and they were able to receive a hire who was the perfect set. What’s really interesting is that person only lived a few miles from where that office was; they just had no idea that TGN was actually hiring for that position.

Peter:   That’s wild. That’s a good story. In listening to this, it seems to me like you could take this technology to, let’s say, Ford Motor Company and say you’re spending money on all of these different … The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine – all the different places that they advertise, we could do this a lot more efficiently for you because we can tell you exactly, track who’s clicking on your ads, where they are, if they go to a dealer. I mean this is really sophisticated stuff.

Ryan:   It is. What’s interesting … it’s funny that you mentioned Ford because Ford actually proactively called us last month. What was interesting is you think with Ford, they’re doing much better than the other two, but what they’re realizing is even if they’re not hiring a lot right now, they know right around the corner for them to continue to stay relevant, they’re going to have to hire for those hard to fill positions. And the hard to fill positions will be like sync engineers, people who will work on their hybrid cars, that will develop a new technology that enables the entire new series and the new evolutions of cars coming out. Those jobs are actually in high demand and hard to fill. So Ford actually started conversations with us on how they could better do that.

Now almost every company we meet with – it’s funny – they’ll pull in their marketing people at the same time and we definitely do have discussions with their marketing individuals. We’ve met with companies like IBM. IBM has pulled in their marketing people and said how could this be applied to other avenues in the company. So this is definitely something that the marketing departments get and they understand. But what really needs to happen is HR is different than marketing; it needs to have the ability to do the detailed and the data rich marketing that EnticeLabs can do, but it needs to make sure that it’s HR focused. It needs to be able to integrate with their ATS. It needs to be able to have the right graphs and the right reports that empower an HR department but don’t over complicate their lives. That’s where people who are simply doing pure marketing in this space, that’s the huge gap that’s missed there, and that’s where EnticeLabs really fills that void.

Peter:   Are you hiring?

Ryan:   We are. In fact, we’ve hired three people this last week.

Peter:   Are these jobs based in Provo, Utah?

Ryan:   They are. We’re working with people outside of the state. They're typically on our BizDev department in that area. So we have worked with them. We've found that a lot of the competitors in this space, in the HR space, a lot of their top business development people and top salespeople are finding that their products are a little bit more difficult for their customers to buy and re-buy and they’re looking for the newer products that are an easier sell, that will be able to have a future a year out, two years out, three years out, where they’re seeing their current businesses trend downward. We’ve seen a lot of this with the job boards and so forth. So outside of the state, we’re hiring for those positions, but development is usually, typically in the state.

Peter:   It’s really been great to have an opportunity to meet you over the phone and to speak with you about this really exciting new platform that you’ve developed. One last question for you, Ryan. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you think would be valuable to know?

Ryan:   That’s a good question. I think one thing that might be really valuable to know is how the system brands. It’s not just about finding the job. We’ve been able to perform at a very high level there, but what a lot of employers really like about this, is that it brands their company to an audience they couldn’t get to before. So the best fits for our company are the people who yes, they want to make sure their cost to hire is very low, they want to make sure their cost to source a candidate is very low. But they also want to make sure that they're building a pipeline, or a talent pool, of people that they’re exposing their opportunities to over months, that when the move is right for them, that passive candidate, it wasn’t right for them to move a month ago but now it’s right for them to move, or next month it’ll be right for them to move, that they have their jobs, their opportunities branded to those high quality individuals. So that when they’re ready to jump, they’re not just turning to their friends, who are saying, hey you should come work at this job, because most really quality candidates always have two or three job offers on the table. So now they’re able to be right up there in front and say, hey we’re hiring too. And that’s one of the first time that companies and employers are able to actually get ahead of the gun and not have to wait until someone’s looking for a job, but brand to them proactively.

Peter:   Ryan, again thank you very much for taking time to speak with us today on Total Picture Radio.

Ryan:   Well, thank you.

Biography:
Starting before he completed his senior year in college, Ryan Caldwell founded, grew and harvested several successful startups and then went on to consult for some of the largest Fortune 100 companies both domestically and internationally. Ryan currently directs EnticeLabs' strategic vision and leads its talented team as their CEO. EnticeLabs has been honored as one of the hottest startups to watch as well as the most innovative company in its space. Ryan is considered a thought leader and innovative business mind and has spoken and presented at educational forums, government economic development committees and Senator's panels and frequently volunteers his time for startups and entrepreneurs. He has consulted in the US, Singapore and London for large corporations including Visa and Microsoft. Ryan was educated at the United States Air Force Academy and the Marriot School of Management.

Resources:
EnticeLabs
Total Picture Radio interview with John Sumser & Jonathan Goodman