SHRM Talent: The Use Case of AppyHere is to Streamline Your Hourly Hiring Process

Intro: (00:01)

Welcome to RecruitingDaily’s Use Case Podcast, live from SHRM Talent, a show dedicated to the story that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. We’re pulling back the curtain and asking the hard questions. It’s what we do. Here’s your host, William Tincup.

William Tincup: (00:28)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup. Thank you for listening to The Use Case Podcast. Today, we have Serge on from AppyHere. We’ll be talking about the use case, the business case, for why his prospects and customers use AppyHere. So Serge, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and AppyHere?

Serge Massicotte: (00:46)

Absolutely, William. First, thank you for the opportunity. So I’m the CEO of AppyHere, a company we founded in 2018. And actually, the idea came from when I was the general manager of the platform at Taleo between 2006 and 2012. So at that time, we had customers, large customers, and they were using our tools, obviously. But I quickly realize that for hourly workers and blue collar workers, not the right thing. So my background is basically in software, technology used to streamline operations. And actually, the idea of AppyHere came from that moment.

William Tincup: (01:29)

Well, a lot of things came from the Taleo experience.

Serge Massicotte: (01:32)

Absolutely. It was big elements out there.

William Tincup: (01:37)

The hourly market isn’t really addressed as much as the corporate market, right?

Serge Massicotte: (01:41)

Yeah.

William Tincup: (01:42)

So what’s different in your experience with the hourly market?

Serge Massicotte: (01:46)

I think that the things that the white collar and blue collar recruiting share is just recruiting world. There’s nothing that is similar. It’s very different. In the blue-collar space and hourly market, speed is so important. People will find a job within 24, 48 hours sort of thing. They see jobs often as a commodity, so speed is more important than the type of jobs or even the company brand. So if you want to be successful hiring hourly workers, speed is number-one consideration, and that’s what AppyHere is providing.

William Tincup: (02:26)

And with that, most of the folks, an hour later, they’re applying to Taco Bell, Walmart, RadioShack, somewhere in manufacturing. It’s scattered, right?

Serge Massicotte: (02:38)

It is scattered, and it’s a very bad experience in general. Okay? First of all, at least 75% of the job seekers will use their phone, smartphone, to apply. Most of the website, carrier side, they are not well-adapted to that. Actually, when we talk with our customer, our first step is to apply to that position and then show them that it takes about 20 clicks to get to the job, which is not convenient, so that’s one thing. The other thing also is the required stuff, or requirements similar to white collar… I mean, resume, for instance. AppyHere doesn’t require a resume, so it speeds up the process to apply. Most of those folks, sometimes it’s a challenge to write, so if you ask them to provide a resume to provide more information about their background, it’s not going to help.

William Tincup: (03:32)

Right. They either don’t have it or they can’t provide it. I saw a sign, and you’ll laugh. Just a couple weeks ago, I was going through Taco Bell for my sons, and on the display where you order, it said, “Apply today, work today.” Right? So you can tell they’re crunched. But I wanted to get your take on speed because the corporate market is actually now feeling your pain. The pain that you’ve been solving for, for a while, they’re actually feeling that pain now because they’ve been operating in months and weeks and days, and their candidates are having the same experience that they want. They want a rapid response.

Serge Massicotte: (04:12)

Exactly. So I think you pinpoint something very important here at being a business problem. So I think it doesn’t start from being a solution provider. What we wanted was to solve a business problem in the hourly space. So getting companies to hire people, we talk every single day with companies where they are closing working shifts because they don’t have people, so it’s a very prominent business problem.

Serge Massicotte: (04:44)

And then even if they say, “We want speed,” it’s one thing is to say it, it’s another thing is to achieve it. So as we work with customers, we have a platform that automate 80%, 85%, of the work of the recruiter, such that from attracting candidate to prescreening them and then assess, rank them in a fairly fashion, and then schedule them to interview is done automatically. So typically, a recruiter will just put that in their calendar, their availability for interview, and then the candidate will be scheduled automatically for that.

William Tincup: (05:24)

Is that a combination of machine learning and AI?

Serge Massicotte: (05:26)

Exactly. We have different techniques here. We have a patent on our algorithms to do so. But to be Frank with you, it’s as much as this technology help, there’s also a lot of advice we’re going to give to our customers. I will give you a simple example here, is availability for consulting interviews. So often, a company will just provide availability during business hours, which is flawed at beginning often because… For hourly workers, often they’re going to walk in a retail shop or somewhere where they’re going to say, “Hey, I’m going to take a 20-minutes break and then take the call for an interview.” It doesn’t work. So that’s why we have a lot of advice to our customers to streamline their process and maximize the return on their investment with the platform of AppyHere.

William Tincup: (06:19)

How fast can you stand up the solution?

Serge Massicotte: (06:23)

Actually, it’s in minutes. Okay? So we have a two-sided market on the platform. So we have candidates. We are track constantly candidates. It’s a SaaS platform, so we have customers. Sometimes we are doing a demonstration to the customer, and on the fly, we are scheduling an interview for them, for their position. It’s that, the speed we are talking.

Serge Massicotte: (06:44)

To give you an idea, we started to work with a major food distributor Thursday afternoon last week. And then this morning, they had their first employee working shift. Okay? So that’s, when we talk about speed, we talk about hours. Some of our customer, we are working to take it down to six hours between the time the candidate apply to the position to scheduling the first working shift.

William Tincup: (07:16)

And that’s just going to get shorter and shorter?

Serge Massicotte: (07:19)

I think it’s going to get shorter and shorter. Some of the positions, we even think that sometimes interview will not be required, and some of the other positions, it will be required. But really, we think that there are three big elements for our customer to be successful. The first one is speed, as I did mention several times. The other one is predictability. So position we are working on, they show a high level of turnover often, so what we are talking could range anywhere between 50% to 200%. It really depends. Even if you work on retention, it’s going to be high. But they need to hire people with predictability, such that they can keep their working shift open. And the last item is an economic dimension, is reducing cost, so-

William Tincup: (08:11)

Which isn’t as important today, but it will be important.

Serge Massicotte: (08:15)

It will be, and one of the things we are seeing when we talk to customers that we are not an ETS, we are not a job board, and we are not an agency. What we want is to assemble different elements to solve a business problem. So some people will use our system as an ETS. We have even a recruiter to support our customers, and we attract candidates, but it’s all in the same spirit to provide speed, predictability, and efficiency to our customers. It’s what we believe are the three dimension to have sustainable dimensions.

William Tincup: (08:56)

Let’s unpack the other two, so predictability.

Serge Massicotte: (08:59)

Predictability will be how many people can you hire on a weekly basis or a monthly basis to support your operation? The other element about it is since we capture a lot of data to our SaaS platform, then we are capable to kind of predict the turnover you’re going to see or the cost it will be to hire that many people over a period of time. So that helps our customer to basically have their operation ready to have people onboarding people, but also for their budget process also.

William Tincup: (09:38)

It gives them all of the funnel, but also what the operational effect-

Serge Massicotte: (09:42)

Exactly.

William Tincup: (09:43)

… will be.

Serge Massicotte: (09:43)

Exactly. And the third one, William, is of course, efficiency.

William Tincup: (09:48)

Yeah. Speed. All of the things that we used to have people doing, scheduling interviews, you don’t have that cost.

Serge Massicotte: (09:54)

No, exactly.

William Tincup: (09:55)

And right now, you can’t afford that cost because the candidates, they expect things to happen in hours, minutes, seconds, et cetera.

Serge Massicotte: (10:04)

Yes. Well the smartphones have changed expectation much faster, so E-commerce is used to it, not the hiring world.

William Tincup: (10:13)

No. But it’s interesting because people, I think, sometimes think of it as this as a pandemic issue, like all of this is pandemic-related. It’s like, “No.” I think the expectation is set.

Serge Massicotte: (10:27)

You know what? I have some background also in supply chain, and it looks like a supply chain problem, where the issue is not the supply number of people that can work, it’s the demand. The demand has surged in some positions. In others, it has reduced. But the good news, so to speak, is that position in the hourly workers and blue collars, often they are kind of versatile or transferable. So when we talk with our customers, don’t think that your competition for hiring people is your competitor on the market. It’s everyone that this candidate could be interesting. So I think they just see a bigger competition than before. They need to adapt. That will happen. I have no doubt.

Serge Massicotte: (11:17)

Some of our customers, we start the process with them and they don’t have a clear idea of their cost per hire. So we like to have a data-driven methodology to improve the situation, so the first step is a baseline of what is your cost per hire? And many of them are surprised that it’s more than $1000. They really, really underestimate. They think it’s 50 bucks something. And then over time, we can take it down to anywhere to $200, but it takes perhaps several weeks. I mean, three months. It’s not something happened overnight.

William Tincup: (11:54)

That’s all the efficiency.

Serge Massicotte: (11:55)

Exactly. Exactly.

William Tincup: (11:58)

So tell me a little bit about multi-locations. So the roles, I got that, but the industries that you play well in right now, what are those industries?

Serge Massicotte: (12:10)

We have four main industries, this has continued to be larger. We are very strong in manufacturing, very strong in logistic and retail and food and beverage. Those four are very, very strong. We have positions that start from entry-level, let’s say warehouse clerk, up to electronic [inaudible 00:12:35]. Often our customer will even put sometimes kind of a white collar jobs on our platform, which we say we don’t support, but if you want to do so, you can, but we have that range.

Serge Massicotte: (12:48)

And then we see more and more companies in the aerospace coming to us. We were surprised, pleasantly surprised, but I believe that in a couple of weeks, we’re going to have one of those big players in the US. And then we have also another customer called Lion Electric, that they are building electrical buses, and they had a huge contract with Amazon. So they were opening plants, and we’re helping them to find all kind of position for their manufacturing plants.

William Tincup: (13:23)

Well just like you said about candidates being able to apply to different industries, those industries are also looking at that as well. So the industries that a person can apply to, whether it’s food or beverage or hospitality or restaurants or whatever, you’re going to be in everywhere an hourly worker is going to be eventually.

Serge Massicotte: (13:44)

Absolutely. And we reach out in our community for candidates that are relevant, and our patent is designed to not only understand direct experience for a candidate, but also indirect experiences. So to give an example, is if let’s say you want to work in a retail shop, never worked in a retail shop, but you’ve been in the call centers, so you have experience with customer experience, then AppyHere will understand that and will translate that into your ranking.

William Tincup: (14:20)

And you call this transferrable? Or tangential?

Serge Massicotte: (14:23)

Yeah. We called it transferable because it’s a transferable skillset. The other thing also that was major, we just realized perhaps eight months ago or nine months ago, that was quite a stretch [inaudible 00:14:36], is we can help companies in their DNI goals.

William Tincup: (14:43)

Oh. Do tell.

Serge Massicotte: (14:44)

Yeah. Yeah. Because we do by automation all the ranking and assessment of candidates, there’s no human bias. And actually, we look at all candidates, not a subset of candidates. Often our customers, they have so many resumes that they cannot look at them all. And most of those resumes are not necessarily relevant, but our system will look at them all and capture the information, so you can prove that there’s no bias in your funnel and at different steps.

William Tincup: (15:18)

That’s perfect.

Serge Massicotte: (15:19)

So whether it is attracting candidates, qualification questions, screening, ranking, interviews, all the stuff you can see exactly what’s the demographic of your candidate.

William Tincup: (15:35)

What’s beautiful about it, is you’re speeding things up, reducing costs. At the same time, squeezing out some of that bias that we all have.

Serge Massicotte: (15:43)

Oh, yes.

William Tincup: (15:44)

Part of the human condition.

Serge Massicotte: (15:45)

No, absolutely. It’s a human nature.

William Tincup: (15:47)

Yeah. So tell us a little about hourly candidates. What should we know about hourly candidates today?

Serge Massicotte: (15:54)

I think that they are a different flavor, to be honest with you. It really depends. It will depend what’s their goal in life. And when we started, we thought that many hourly candidates had more than one job because they wanted to make more money, and we’ve been proven wrong. And I think that also our research is showing the same thing, is that sometimes they will see a job as a commodity because they want to take experience in something else. So they’ll a make basic revenue, but they’ll say, “I would like to become, someone getting some experience in specific jobs.” Others, it’s just lifestyle. They want to work for some times, and then they want to go for Europe for several months.

Serge Massicotte: (16:49)

So it’s really, I think in some way, our hourly candidates are more open to do different stuff in their lives than white collar, to some extent, and I think that companies have to understand that. And we try to open their eyes to see you should look at those workers in a different way, employees in a different way, in a different lifestyle that perhaps you have for yourself.

William Tincup: (17:16)

That’s right. I met one such candidate yesterday who was my Lyft driver, and he had been in a serious car accident and it actually affected his heart, and he works now because he was hit by a drunk driver.

Serge Massicotte: (17:31)

Oh, wow.

William Tincup: (17:31)

So he’s a Lyft driver and he works when he is not in pain. So when he is not in pain, he turns the app on, he works. When he feels like he’s got an onset of pain coming on, turns the app off, doesn’t work.

Serge Massicotte: (17:44)

Yep. I think it’s all about flexibility, and we see it, that companies that provide flexible scheme, working scheme, it’s just better. I mean, it’s obviously it’s easier to attract, but it’s also it’s a better match with expectation from the candidate.

William Tincup: (18:05)

Yeah. It’s going to be ultimately a way to retain, right? So I’d heard a story, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago, about hourly candidates applying to multiple jobs, accepting multiple jobs, then going to start the job. And if they didn’t like it, they just left and went to the next job that they’d already accepted. First of all, is that normal or have you heard something similar?

Serge Massicotte: (18:30)

We have seen just a few cases of that. Now, the thing is that with AppyHere, we wanted it to be fair for the employees and for the employers as well as the candidate, so we discourage candidates to do so in some way. It’s better off to ask a question and have a very good interview and see if it’s the good culture fit. Actually, we encourage our customers to talk more about their culture and what is great about their company than the task of this. We tell them now the way you expose and pose your position, it’s much more similar to E-commerce, marketing E-commerce, than here’s the set of tasks you’re going to have to do, and it’s a bit boring stuff.

William Tincup: (19:22)

Right. So you had mentioned mobile first, and it got me to think about multi-locations. So have you already dipped your toe into kind of franchise market and working with a store manager type of situation?

Serge Massicotte: (19:37)

We’ve seen different models, actually, and AppyHere is very flexible to adapt and support. We’ve seen companies where it’s very centralized, meaning everything is being conducted by the headquarter of the HR teams. And we’ve seen totally the opposite, that it’s totally distributed, where it’s the store manager that is doing everything, and we have seen the in-between.

Serge Massicotte: (20:07)

So the in-between is a trend we see more and more, actually, where the HR support team or the talent acquisition team will do the prescreening of candidates and everything that relates to attraction of candidates, because they have strategy, they have means and platform for that. And the last step, the last mile of that, is done by the manager or the director of the store, the manufacturing plant. And it turns out to be very efficient, actually.

William Tincup: (20:39)

So let’s switch conversations just a little bit over to AppyHere. Your favorite part of the demo, when you show people AppyHere for the first time, what’s your favorite part?

Serge Massicotte: (20:52)

Oh, it’s the candidate part, honestly, when they apply to a position that we have done some advertisement to Google Ads or Facebook and CDIs of the… And the recruiters or the manager saying, “Oh, is that easy to apply to my position?” And we say, “Yes.” That’s the first part. And then we can show that the candidate has answered the question and then get scheduled automatically. And that’s the other big ha-ha moment, because believe it or not, a recruiter may spend 30 to 40% of their time scheduling interviews, and it’s not exaggerated by any means.

William Tincup: (21:37)

Easily. In staffing firms, they have people used to… That was their full-time job. Staffing coordinators, or scheduling coordinators.

Serge Massicotte: (21:47)

Exactly, so that’s something that AppyHere is taking care. And they chose them, that we want them to focus on relevant candidates, because time matters. And time, you cannot buy time. You cannot borrow time, so you’re better off to do the best out of it.

William Tincup: (22:03)

So that’s your best part when you show the demo. What’s their best part? When they see the demo, when their eyes open up, you can tell that they’re [inaudible 00:22:14]?

Serge Massicotte: (22:14)

Well, the first really has nothing to do with the platform in the first place, is when we start to talk about that space, they get excited because for two things. We are focused on hourly worker only. That’s always come up.

William Tincup: (22:31)

And for the audience, there’s not that many solutions that are just for the hourly market.

Serge Massicotte: (22:36)

And by the way we talk about it, they know we understand the space because of the detail. And I was talking about my background at Taleo, but my partners, where I have three other partners, their background is in HR and recruiting, so they’ve been there before. So I think they get confident. And when we get to the demonstration, then it’s typically an easy process for us.

William Tincup: (23:06)

Because you know them. You know their pain.

Serge Massicotte: (23:10)

Oh, we know their pain and we’re going to do a demonstration in 10 minutes, 15 minutes, one call. And then most of the time, we have a proof of concept or a contract with them.

William Tincup: (23:21)

And you can stand it up fast, which is good for them and good for candidates.

Serge Massicotte: (23:25)

Oh, absolutely. Because everything we are preaching to them, we are preaching to-

William Tincup: (23:30)

You do. Yeah. You do it yourself. So buying questions from this particular audience, whether that’s from HR or for the recruiting folks, what do you love to hear? What types of questions do you love to hear? You know they get it when they ask you this question?

Serge Massicotte: (23:46)

Oh. It’s when they talk about what do we do in the automation that will provide speed? Then I understand that they get it. The other thing is when they understand that, they tell me, “You know what? The quick apply is not enough. And it’s just the first step.” And that always makes me smiling because how many times I’ve been reach out by medium and large enterprises saying, “I just need the quick apply of AppyHere. I don’t need the remaining.” And then what you realize is that you need everything. But these two things are really something that is important.

Serge Massicotte: (24:28)

The other element also is when they ask us, “Can you help with retention?” And then, “Yes, we do.” We do stuff with retention with them, because as they look at candidates, we capture information that helps us to understand the skillset and profile of candidates that is a good match with their culture, again, without introducing bias. That’s very important. But there are elements that sometimes they prefer.

William Tincup: (24:57)

Questions that you’d love to be asked that you don’t normally get asked from practitioners, buyers?

Serge Massicotte: (25:04)

Well, the one that I love above all is when they ask me how many weeks before I see candidate, I hire a candidate? That’s the one I prefer above all. And I do prefer even more so the answer to say, “Well, probably a day.”

William Tincup: (25:25)

How’s 8:00 tonight look? Yeah.

Serge Massicotte: (25:27)

Yeah, exactly.

William Tincup: (25:28)

Too funny. How can the audience learned more about AppyHere?

Serge Massicotte: (25:32)

Well, I think that we made our website, it’s a good place. We have contact information. You can schedule a demonstration. I will suggest to follow our Facebook pages and Instagram because we post content there. We post also kind of eBooks-

William Tincup: (25:51)

Oh, very nice.

Serge Massicotte: (25:52)

… that help companies. We are very open and generous with our advices, want people to be successful so they can learn more. We have heard so often people saying, “Hey, do you have white paper? I’ve tried to find more information about that space and it’s very scattered,” so we are going to spend even more so times to provide material for companies to learn more.

William Tincup: (26:18)

That’s fantastic. It’s actually something Taleo did back in the day-

Serge Massicotte: (26:21)

Yes, we did.

William Tincup: (26:21)

… and they did really well, is educating the market. But from an hourly perspective, there’s just not that much content out there. And so when those folks get into those positions-

Serge Massicotte: (26:32)

No, exactly. And even to be completely blunt here, even when you go to conferences, HR conferences, it’s very much oriented-

William Tincup: (26:42)

It’s tilted.

Serge Massicotte: (26:42)

… tilted to white collar and all the programs.

William Tincup: (26:46)

Right, right. We need to have an hourly conference.

Serge Massicotte: (26:48)

Yes. I would love that. I made that recommendation, so.

William Tincup: (26:53)

Let’s do that. Serge, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on The Use Case Podcast.

Serge Massicotte: (26:57)

Thank you, William. It was a great pleasure.

William Tincup: (27:00)

Absolutely. And thanks everyone for listening to The Use Case Podcast. Until next time.

Speaker 5: (27:06)

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