Customer Intelligence with Joel Passen of Sturdy.ai

Announcer (00:01):

You’re listening to the Recruiting Daily Podcast. We’re recording from HR Tech in Vegas. Thanks to our friends and partners at Joveo. We are talking to some of the best minds in HR and business and digging into the most pressing issues in the workplace. So you don’t have to. Here’s your host, William Tincup.

William Tincup (00:19):

Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup and you’re listening to Recruiting Daily from HR Tech. We’re broadcasting line from Joveo’s Booth. Joel Passen’s on as a guest and he has extensive experience in TA. I’ll let him explain what he’s doing right now, and then we’ll ask our question. So Joel, would you introduce you to us?

Joel Passen (00:38):

Well, William, thanks for having me. I do have extensive experience in TA, not only as a hiring manager, but also somebody who’s built a couple of TA focused companies. And today I’m here in the booth at Joveo and at HR Tech and talking about a new product, a customer intelligence product that we’re bringing to HR Tech vendors to help them listen to their customers better and better understand the insights feature requests, expansion events, that sort of thing. So we’re using some AI and automation to do it.

William Tincup (01:06):

So it’s interesting, those things are unlocked by the technology because they’re trapped in different systems. Trapped in Slack, trapped in email, whatever else. And so it’s pulling those things out and helping people with churn, like customers are upset about, or potentially they want to buy something else, buy some more stuff.

Joel Passen (01:23):

Absolutely. It’s also good for product teams, because you get the authentic voice of the unbiased, authentic voice of the customer.

William Tincup (01:30):

Unvarnished.

Joel Passen (01:30):

Unvarnished. So the people talk about customer health scores. We’re actually answering a lot of the questions. Why is the customer health score… Why is it green? Why is it red? Right? We’re increasing visibility into references and that sort of thing. I know you’re…

William Tincup (01:43):

What I love about what y’all are doing is it’s not just insight. I mean, that would be great if you stop there. It’s action. You actually bring it forward into, okay, this is what is going on, this is where it’s coming from. Here’s the signal and here’s the action.

Joel Passen (01:58):

And I think about it, a lot of us in the HR tech world or TA tech world, we hire people that aren’t necessarily practitioners. We hire people that don’t necessarily, they didn’t come up in recruiting. So what our software helps people do is listen to the customer in a way and capture those really valuable signals. And it also helps the customer success people or the account management folks do the jobs better, more efficient ones.

William Tincup (02:20):

A hundred percent. So I’m going to end you a magic wand. And now you have the magic wand. If you could fix or change anything in talent sourcing, what would you fix?

Joel Passen (02:34):

I would build [inaudible 00:02:36] sourcing. So I think about it from a people problem. I think about people, process, and product. I think there’s some great products out there, but I think organizing your sourcing team like a high functioning BDR team with the same quality metrics and thinking about it as recruiting qualified leads as opposed to sales qualified leads or akin to that. So I would organize it that way. And I don’t think we’re doing enough of that in the TA space.

William Tincup (02:58):

And what’s great about that is that speed. You’ve built in speed from an MQL to an SQL, right? And we’re thinking about that. We’ve talked about the relationship between sales and recruiting for a hundred years. We should actually pull some of their best practices.

Joel Passen (03:12):

RQLs. And then I think the rigor that comes with that…

William Tincup (03:16):

Nice. Trademark that, by the way.

Joel Passen (03:18):

Trademark. Yep. That’s my magic wall. That’s my magic wand moment, brother.

William Tincup (03:22):

Done. Thank you so much for carving out time for us.

Joel Passen (03:24):

Thanks for having me.

William Tincup (03:25):

Absolutely.

Announcer #2 (03:27):

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