The Muse + Fairygodboss = AWESOME With Kathryn Minshew

This is RecruitingDaily’s Recruiting Live Podcast where we look at the strategies behind the world’s best talent acquisition teams. We talk recruiting, sourcing, and talent acquisition. Each week we take one over complicated topic and break it down so that your three year old can understand it. Make sense? Are you ready to take your game to the next level? You’re at the right spot. You’re now entering the mind of a hustler. Here’s your host, William Tincup.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup, and you’re listening to the Recruiting Daily Podcast. Today we have Kathryn on from The Muse. We’re talking about a recent acquisition of theirs, it’s The Muse plus Fairygodboss equals awesome. I’ve known Kathryn for a long time and so this is going to be fun. Kathryn, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and The Muse?

Absolutely. So thanks so much for having me. For anybody who doesn’t know me, I am Kathryn Minshew, founder and CEO of The Muse. The way I like to describe The Muse is a values-aligned career site for people who care about where they work. The slightly longer version is, I founded The Muse almost 11 years ago to help people navigate their careers and connect with jobs, companies and career paths that align with their values and priorities.

(01:28)
So we have, in any given month, between five to 8 million Gen Z and millennial candidates who are very much focused on the entry and mid-level folks. They come to The Muse.com to search for jobs, research companies and get career advice. And then we work with businesses on the other side from Nike and Meta to FBI and Enterprise Rental Cars and a bunch of other places to help them hire based on the strength of their employer brand. So we give them software to uncover their employee stories and data about what it’s really like to work there and then use that to create better matches that are more likely to get hired, better retained, all that fun stuff, which we can talk more about, but it’s been quite the journey over these last few years.

But you know one of the things I love about you is the excitement that you had when you first founded it. And at different points, you and I would talk, you’re still excited. I mean, literally I could go back to our first conversation and you got the same kind of radiance of excitement about the business that you didn’t then.

Well, thank you. I mean, I love this space, right? I think almost everyone I talk to in this industry is here in some way or other because we recognize that if you get the right person in the right job at the right company, you can change their life. And I think for businesses, really for both sides, like hiring is a big problem. The job search still sucks for a lot of people. Hiring is still very challenging for a lot of businesses. And so it’s this big meaty problem with a ton of impact and opportunity if you get it right. But it’s a complicated problem.

(03:11)
So yeah, I mean think if you told me when I founded The Muse that 11 years later I would still be just totally jazzed and be working on the next mountain to climb, I don’t know that I could have seen that far out. But I do think I fell in love with this problem because of what it means when you get it right and because of the impact that I think companies and products can have. And yeah, I’m always going to be a bit of a fire brand for what the industry could and should be doing better, but it’s because I love it and it’s because I think that the work that we all do is really important.

Well, you are also, I would say ear early, or if not, really early to values-based hiring much far more than anybody else that you would even consider somebody that you would be as a competitor or anything like that like you were talking about and The Muse in particular was talking about values-based hiring well in advance of Gen Z and even some of the younger millennials caring about values-based hiring.

Yeah, I mean, I think it was something that I saw in the market early and tried to wave the flag on before a lot of people were ready to hear it. I remember some of my earliest speaking and writing on behalf of The Muse back a full decade ago was around the desire of more and more early career professionals to get something else out of work besides just a paycheck. Now, I think the challenge is everybody wants a clear list on what is that something else that top talent wants?

Right.

Everybody wants me to say, “Okay, here are the three things, and if you do these things, all the top talent will come to you.”

Magic bullet.

Yes, exactly. The magic bullet. And of course there are trends, there are things we see in the data, but one of the things I think gets lost is that part of the transformation in HR is around people seeking more personalized and unique experiences or matches. And it makes sense, right? All three of us could probably… Like we could go onto Netflix and it would show us different recommendations as far as movies. If we go online shopping, to the extent that we’ve been on that website before, they will curate the experience for what they think we care about. So many of our products are starting to reflect the values, the desires, the preferences that we have expressed to them in the world. And so I don’t actually think it should be that big of a surprise that a lot of candidates are saying, “Well, do you have parental leave? Or, what about learning and growth opportunities?” It’s not that there’s one size fits all way to be a great company, but that people are deciding what they care about and then they’re looking for businesses that are a match.

Now, I’ve attributed this to you and I probably did it incorrectly, but something your vibe attracts your tribe, or your vibe attracts your tribe. And do I have that backwards? First of all-

Yeah. No, no. Your vibe attracts your tribe. You got it right the first time.

Okay. All right.

That’s some old Muse branding right there.

See. See. I think I have a… No, it’s not a t-shirt, but I remember that bit because it’s like, I mean first of all, it’s true in life just in general, your friends and all of the other stuff. So why not apply that to companies and the people you work with? That just makes sense to me. So recent news, you bought another wonderful company, Fairygodboss. What was the impetus? First of all, what did you see in them and what do you see in the combination of efforts between the two?

Yeah, so I’m really excited about this acquisition. The Muse has made acquisitions in the past, but this is by far the most substantial and scale business that we’ve acquired. And I think there were a few reasons I was really excited about it. So for those who don’t know Fairygodboss, I believe they’re the largest online career community for women to find jobs, advice and support. There’s around, I think a million women a month who are part of the Fairygodboss community. They ask and answer each other’s questions. They can look at company profiles, learn more about what employers are like to work for as a woman. They can apply to jobs. There’s a wide variety of different sort of job search and career tools, resources, and obviously intersection points with employers that are part of the community.

(07:51)
I’ve been a fan of Fairygodboss for a very long time. They were founded in 2015, a couple years after The Muse. And I’ve just been watching the business as it’s grown and developed a lot of respect for what the founders built. Also, I think you know this but I don’t know that all of your listeners do, but when I founded The Muse, the original mission of The Muse was actually around values-based career and job search for women.

(08:22)
And then I ended up opening up The Muse to serve all genders about a year in both because we had a lot of men from underrepresented backgrounds who were using the site and asking to be part of the community and because frankly in 2012 it was really, really hard, if not impossible, to raise capital from Silicon Valley VCs for a female focused career site. We had a few early angel investors who wrote checks, but by and large, a lot of people didn’t see women in careers as a large and viable market, which is obviously ridiculous. But that’s a whole nother story on our fundraising journey.

(09:00)
But I’ve always had this deep passion for helping women navigate their careers, frankly, for helping companies build more inclusive and more equitable and diverse teams and the environments that it allow those teams to thrive. And so The Muse has a very strong commitment to diversity. We have an incredibly diverse user base as I mentioned before. And so when Georgene, the founder and CEO of Fairygodboss, and I started talking about the potential for us to bring Fairygodboss under The Muse’s umbrella, I loved it.

(09:37)
And on top of it, I think one of the challenges… I spend a lot of time talking to HR leaders, executives, hiring managers, like the whole gamut of all of the roles and people that sort of make the talent function work and make this space so rich and so interesting. There were a couple of themes that kept coming really to the top in those conversations. One was a lot of buyers were overwhelmed by how many HR and talent products there are right now.

Right.

The innovation that we’ve seen in the last few years, I think it’s exciting because it means that there’s so many problems being tackled. There’s a lot of great tools out there, but as a buyer, especially a buyer who needs to get your budget through procurement and approved, having 37 different solutions, as one of our customers told me, for hiring and a lot of those for diversity hiring, it was overwhelming. And there’s, I think, a desire in the market to be able to have fewer deeper relationships that generate more value and solve more problems. On top of that, I think that with a broader reach, we are… By the way, we are planning to keep Fairygodboss its own separate consumer brand.

I was going to ask you that. So its brought to you by The Muse or something like that, but other than that, leave it as a community itself. Maybe integrate some of the back end and jobs and things like that?

Exactly. Because the community that Fairygodboss serves is slightly different than the community The Muse serves. And so I think that each community deserves its own community, its own brand, its own resources, but the employers trying to reach both of those communities.

100%.

And so exactly. It’s going to be one company in terms of how we function, but very much we are keeping… We’re very much investing in Fairygodboss in the product, in the community. There’s a lot, I think, that The Muse can learn from some of the things that Fairygodboss does really well, particularly around community and events. And there’s a lot of things I think that Fairygodboss can benefit from that The Muse does really well around, for example, like some of our employer data, the employee generated content tools that we have.

(11:55)
There’s just a, I think, really interesting overlap. And so for me it felt like this was a way to really extend our reach, move the business closer towards this very high level mission of helping individuals navigate their careers in a values-aligned way, helping businesses hire great diverse talent that is actually going to fit their culture, their values, their future. And I don’t think it’s going to be the only acquisition that we do in the next year. So it’s a just brilliant brand though, and a really strong product. And I think it was very exciting to me when we got to the end of the process and made it official.

So Fairygodboss on the back end, obviously women, is it skewed in any direction? Do you see more early stage or more latter stage, middle career, people changing careers? Is there anything in the data that says, “Okay, it’s serving women, Check. Got that. But there’s a density here.”

Yeah. I think there’s a few things that we’ve seen in the data that sort of answer that question. First of all, they have a similar focus to The Muse in terms of the diversity in a wide variety of intersectional ways that they focus on. So to give one example, 50% of the women who are part of the Fairygodboss community identify as being a person of color. The Muse, that’s around 58% of our community identifies as a person of color. But interestingly, we have a slightly higher percentage of the men who use the site. It’s a smaller chunk of the audience overall. 60% of our audience is women, but we tend to see an even higher percentage of the men on The Muse who identify as a person of color.

(13:51)
So I think both sites are very committed to diversity along many different vectors. Fairygodboss also has a really strong representation in functions that are kind of notoriously hard to fill.

Oh, interesting

Yeah, so 21% of their users work in technology, which is, that is something I hear left, right and sideways from folks I talked to on the hiring side, they’re looking to increase the kind of gender representation in their tech teams. So that’s an area where Fairygodboss is very strong. They have around, I think, 14% of our users are in sales. So another area that we on The Muse have historically heard is a huge priority for a lot of employers.

(14:38)
And then by and large, I would say that the Fairygodboss audience, there’s a little bit of overlap, but for the most part they’re different candidate pools, which I think is great because again, a lot of the companies we talk to, they’re looking to expand. We found that there are about 40 companies who are already working with The Muse and with Fairygodboss, but there’s more than 10 times that are a customer of just one or just the other. And so I think now we have the opportunity to have those deeper conversations.

(15:14)
I’ve been doing a listening tour, just getting on the phone with company after company, after company, trying to understand more about both on a sort of macro level what are they excited about and what are they seeing in the talent space, what are their needs that aren’t being filled. And then on a micro level, where is The Muse solving their problems or hopefully knocking their socks off? And where are we under-delivering? Where could we be better? What are their aspirations and hopes and dreams for working with The Muse? And then on Fairygodboss, what do they love? What do they value, what could be different?

(15:51)
We’ve got a really kind of great team of folks across product, engineering, operations that is digesting a lot of this information and then thinking about which initiatives we prioritize in 2023. I can’t believe it’s 2023 by the way.

I know. I know.

But we’re starting to stack and say, “Okay, we can make really big progress.” Not on everything, because you can’t obviously ever do everything, but I think we’re in a really great place to make some just very meaningful progress and hopefully go back to a lot of these folks and get them even more excited and so delight them with what we’ve been able to deliver.

Yeah. One of the things I love about Fairygodboss is the… And it was only explained to me so I obviously didn’t have firsthand knowledge, but the way that it was explained to me is women had a safe space to talk about companies. So it was, “Glassdoor is great. Love it. Fantastic. A lot of ifs, but it’s fully transparent. Everything’s out in the open, good and bad.” But this was more of a safe space for people to talk about. What is it like to work at, pick a company, it doesn’t matter, as a woman? And what are the benefits? What are some of the typical things that kind of hold people back, et cetera? What does internal mobility look like? I found that fascinating is… I mean, A, what did you think about that? But also do you see some of that getting pulled over into The Muse in terms of especially early stage talent kind of decrypting what it looks like or what it’s like to work at certain companies?

Yeah, I think that there’s something really interesting in there. It’s very important to me that as we think about this, we are learning from what FGB does, but not disrupting the sort of, for lack of better words, like the sanctity of the Fairygodboss community. Because I think you’re right that one of the things that is so powerful about the product and the community that they’ve built is the ability for women to ask and answer each other’s questions and get that real insight.

(18:03)
During the acquisition process, I remember seeing that a woman had posted a question on a Sunday afternoon and when I pulled it up Monday probably 11:00 am, 12:00 PM noon something, couple hours, like let’s say maybe 24 hours later, there were 42 responses from other women in the community. That sort of engagement and willingness to share and help each other, I think it’s both what draws a lot of women to the platform. I think that we’ve seen some employers are really effectively kind of participating in the company products to understand high level some of those conversations without being able to maybe disrupt them.

(18:51)
I don’t want to do anything to the product that would materially change the user experience because I think there’s a lot of value in it, but I also think there’s other groups that could benefit from similar, separate, discrete communities. We’ve seen a lot of interest at The Muse on what companies are like for parents, and that’s not necessarily gendered by the way. You have moms, dads parents of the same sex, like a wide variety of different parents with interest and desire to understand, “How does this company support parents who are like me? What are the benefits? Are they actually used?”

(19:34)
One of the things that’s been really interesting right now is, you were joking before about that news t-shirt from Days Gone By that says, “Your vibe attracts your tribe,” our first ever awards program is going to be launching in a few months, and we’re calling it the Vibe Awards, but for voted in by employees. And it’s a little bit this idea of a company can say, “We have these great benefits or we do this great thing, but we want to actually ask employees how usable these. Does the kind of public commitment reflect what you’re seeing in practice?”

(20:13)
I’m a big believer in trying to illuminate company culture and work environment without resorting on heavily shame-based approaches, which I would argue is one of the real challenges, I think, of kind of full anonymous forum like Glassdoor. Any time you expose people or organizations to shame, INSTAR review and negativeness, I think you get distorted behavior because it’s very natural for people or organizations. They try so hard to avoid the shame that I think it leads to a lack of information or access in other ways and to companies doing all sorts of things to contort themselves into trying to get the best possible rating versus just saying, “Hey, can we celebrate companies for things that they are verifiably great at?” But think about doing that in a way that maybe doesn’t paint a scarlet letter right away on the losers.

(21:15)
I think it’s just very interesting to me thinking about how to solicit employee feedback and surface it in a way that’s going to really help candidates but also encourage employers to be more open because the cost of that openness is not ostracization.

Yeah, I think one of the things you hit on with the anonymous data is also people are afraid to experiment. And so like because playing with live ammunition, if something doesn’t go well, which most programs, especially if you’re trying something for the first time, it goes sideways. I mean, that’s part of the bit to understanding is like, “Ah, yeah, we’re going to get sideways on this,” and “Okay, well, but we’ll learn from it. We’ll get better from it.” So, A, I think you’re on to something. Have you ever thought about certifying companies? Have you ever walked the dog in your minds of actually putting a stamp on companies?

Yeah, You know, it’s interesting. That is a very active discussion right now internally.

Okay. I think it’s a-

And I think… Oh, go ahead.

No, I think it’d be helpful. I’m looking at it from, especially if someone’s looking at jobs in Indeed or Zip or wherever and then all of a sudden they go to the career site, to have something that’s an independent third party objective, there’s a stamp and it says “This is this.”

(22:43)
And I’ll tell you why I think it’s good. There’s a company out of Australia, it’s called [inaudible 00:22:49] and that’s not really the important part, but the important part is it’s AI product, which actually is AI, it actually is artificial intelligence. But from the jump they hired a third party to every six months tear their AI apart and see where it was working and where it wasn’t. I found that part fascinating. First of all, it’s expensive, but beyond that, that’s like, they owe they’re vulnerable. It’s like, “Okay, we’re going to allow ourselves this vulnerability so that a third party can come in and go, ‘Okay, we’re starting to see some things here that’s showing shaking out in the data. We need to fix that’.”

(23:30)
And so I think candidates shopping for jobs and trying to figure out… Because it’s so hard to figure out behind the veneer of the company, “What is it really like? I got the career page. I’ve been here all night. I’ve done all. I’ve Googled everything, I’ve talked to some former employees, but that still doesn’t explain,” especially for these nuanced groups exactly what is it like to work there.

Yeah. And I think that is a problem that we have been thinking a lot about. What’s interesting too is the challenge… Or maybe I’ll start that sentence a different way. I think that verification of certain things is the direction we will ultimately go in, but I want to be very thoughtful about what we’re verifying.

Right.

So for example, I think again, and not to harp on the one to five star review system, but I think it has a lot of challenges in this area. One of them is like, what if we said, “Okay, we’re going to certify you as a good company?” Well what does that mean? Whose version of a good company? I think that the match between an individual and a company is kind of dating. And the idea of saying, “Oh, you would be a good husband, you would be a good…” What does that even mean? For who, right? It’s laughable. But to me I think it’s an illuminating idea because the type of company that is going to make you fulfilled and motivated as an employee is different for different people based on also it might be different for the same person five to 10 years apart in their career based on their specific values and priorities, which goes back to the beginning of our conversation.

(25:13)
And so I think truly answering questions around what is an organization like to work for is going to be less about saying, “Oh this is a 4.2” because who’s rating it on what access against what questions and variables and more about saying, “Here are kind of certified or verified elements of the company culture that we can show.”

(25:40)
And so it’s so funny. A lot of the early products that we built at The Muse were designed to collect employee generated text and video content, which is unstructured data, which has not always been looked upon in a very friendly way by some investors who would much rather we just do a rating system and get it over with. But I do think there’s something about hearing somebody, an engineer on a team you might join who’s recorded a video on their phone talking about the work environment. There’s a lot of why they like it or why they chose specific anecdotes or descriptors or adjectives that is very helpful to candidates. And I think there is a way to do that in structured data and hopefully you’ll see some more from us in the next couple months about that. But it’s a really interesting question and like you said, it’s a huge problem.

Yeah, because again on the outside you just don’t know. But I think NPS, one of the things I like about NPS, I hate most of it, but one of the things I like about it is at one point you ask the question, “Are you referenceable?” Meaning especially with whether or not you say marginalized or underrepresented or you can split the audience in a lot of different ways and survey those folks, would you recommend a job for a person like you at this company? And at the end of it, that’s it. Period of the story. That’s one of the things I love about NPS, but I hate most of the other stuff because the scores don’t mean anything in general because you don’t know what they mean as relative to their industry, et cetera. So you don’t know if a 26 is a good score or horrible score.

(27:23)
Obviously you did some fundraising this summer and acquisition of Fairygodboss. I’m not going to ask you about what else you’re going to acquire. That’s not really appropriate. I’m of course extremely curious. But beyond that, where do you see The Muse and Fairygodboss? I’ll just going to say The Muse and just kind of include Fairygodboss in that. Where do you see that in terms of a category of software? Where do you see it on the budget for talent acquisition and HR professionals? What are your platypus and a unicorn and a [inaudible 00:28:02] and some type of a Marsha Bill? So what do people then put you as a category? What do they think of you as?

Yeah, I would say that most of our customers have used language like NextGen hiring site, although I know that Fairygodboss also taps a lot of explicitly diversity-focused budgets.

Right.

But I think that I would say we are in the broader talent acquisition bud budget or bucket. I think the question to me, not to overly dramatize, but I think that there’s a real sort of battle going on for what should talent acquisition mean? And particularly in terms of the way that we source candidates, obviously some candidates are sourced by recruiters who go outbound and bring people in, but a lot of companies still advertise their postings, their company culture, et cetera, on a variety of different sites. I think that we’re seeing this big trend where instead of the goal being lowest cost per click or lowest cost per applicant, we are starting to see, I think, this recognition that a lot of really great talent, top talent, diverse talent requires a little bit more investment to attract and bring in, but they are also likely to be your best employees.

Right. Right.

So to give you a more specific example, we often get compared in client budgets, especially if someone new joins one of our customers, they haven’t worked with the news before. Often they come in with a mentality of, “Well, I’ve bought from Indeed and I know exactly what I should pay per click or per applicant. Our perspective is like unqualified applicants give you nothing.” We are not trying to be the cheapest applicant. We are trying to give you the best hire. And so we encourage our customers to look at the applicant to hire ratio, the quality of the hire. We’ve done some early data that Muse hires are 20% more likely to still be at the company 12 months later. It’s a really big deal in the Great Resignation.

(30:23)
So I do believe that we deserve to be categorized as a career community or a hiring site, but I think it is requiring a bit of a industry shift away from, “Okay, I pay to post my jobs and then all that matters is how many clicks I get back” towards a mentality that says, “I want to hire great people and I recognize that the way those people want to be hired is not the same as it was a decade ago.”

(30:53)
And so to get great talent, digital and technical talent, diverse talent, I need to be part of organizations and communities that meet them where they are and I need to show them why they should choose me and why my company is worth applying to. Because if you’re talking about great talent, they have other places they could work. I think companies that do that effectively are actually finding that we had one of our major top, probably 10 globally recognizable names. Clients tell us that we were one of their biggest source of technical hires, but it’s because they’re looking at hires, not just at click for applicants. So that’s really a long answer than you meant, but I think that [inaudible 00:31:40] conversation is.

No, no, no. Where you took me when you is the word attraction, it seems like, “Okay…” First of all, there’s a fail in that word of that, “Okay, well we’ve got to attract,” which again, this is a mutual relationship. This is about fit, et cetera. And it seems like instead of talent acquisition or talent attraction, it should be talent transparency. How transparent can we be with candidates and talent? And in doing so, that gets fit. Again, that both repels and attracts. It does all that stuff. You brought up the dating metaphor earlier. I would never bring that up by the way, because it’s been 30 years since I’ve dated anyone. So a little out of my scope of knowledge, but the idea of just being transparent, just telling the truth. That’ll work for some and it won’t work for others

Well, I think it gets to this core idea, which has also been part of Muse messaging for a really long time, but of relationships over transactions.

Oh, that’s nice.

Look, I think if you hire in a transactional way, you are more likely to get employees that treat you as a transactional destination to give them their paycheck and then leave. I think that companies that understand, “We are inviting people to enter into a relationship with us as an employer, it’s a relationship by the way, that will claim 40, 50, 60 plus hours of their week every week so let’s try and be a good partner, but as part of that, to your point, let’s tell people, ‘This is what you will get if you choose to get into relationship with me as your career. These are the things that people tend to think is pretty great about being in an employment relationship with me. Here are some things that you should know before you opt in’.” Because another thing is, people, especially talented people, they’re not stupid. They know that every job has challenges. They just want to know-

What’s the chances.

… what they are before they join. So [inaudible 00:33:46].

Again, this gets back to dating. It’s like you’d for people to wear t-shirts to the first date and it says all of the things that make them both unique, but also the baggage that they carry just to be able to just sit down and go, “Oh, okay, so you dealt with a crazy ex-girlfriend. Okay, all right. You dealt with that.” Just didn’t know it. Just to be able to know it, like, “Okay, well if I know, I can navigate it. And again, it might push me forward, it might push me away.” Kathryn, I could talk to you forever. Thank you so much for carving out time for us and explaining what you’ve doing both with the Muse and with Fairygodboss.

Well, thank you for having me. I have loved this and really excited to keep you up to date on all the stuff we have in store. So thank you again for having me on.

Absolutely. Thanks everyone for listening to Recruiting Daily Podcasts. Until next time.

You’ve been listening to The Recruiting Live Podcast by RecruitingDaily. Check out the latest industry podcasts, webinars, articles, and news at-