The Journey of Sean Mallapurkar and Recruit CRM

Our CEO Sean Mallapurkar interviewed by recruitment industry expert - @TheMillionaireRecruiter

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

In this episode of Talent Takeover Unfiltered, Sean Mallapurkar, CEO of Recruit CRM, shares his unique journey of co-founding the company with his father. The duo built a successful multi-million dollar recruitment software business from the ground up, overcoming challenges in the tech space, despite not being traditional tech experts. Highlighting the importance of simplicity in recruitment tools, the conversation also underscores the undervalued role of recruiters and the immense financial potential in the industry. With anecdotes of personal struggle and triumph, listeners gain insights into the realities of entrepreneurship, the recruitment industry, and the value of resilience and hard work.

Highlights

Sean started Recruit CRM with his dad, overcoming hurdles to build a thriving business. 👨‍👦
The importance of simplicity in recruitment tech: sometimes less is more. 📉
Recruit CRM was built from the ground up and is now making millions without external funding. 💰
The episode reveals the underestimated power and financial potential of being a recruiter. ✨
A heartfelt story of resilience through personal and professional challenges. 💪

Key Takeaways

Success can come from unexpected partnerships. 🤝
The journey from startup to success is filled with struggles, but also triumphs. 🚀
Recruiters play a crucial role in shaping industries, and they deserve respect. 🙌
Effective recruitment software should simplify, not complicate, the hiring process. 🤖
Pride in one’s profession can drive success and fulfillment. 🌟

Overview

In this engaging podcast episode, Sean Mallapurkar shares the story of founding Recruit CRM alongside his father. What began as a family venture has grown into a leading recruitment software company. Despite not having a traditional tech background, Sean and his dad bootstrapped their way to success, showing just how critical determination and innovation can be.

The discussion delves into the inherent value and often overlooked potential within the recruitment industry. Sean emphasizes that recruiters are vital to any organization's success, and that the tools they use should empower rather than burden them. His experiences underline a need for simplicity in recruitment tech, to genuinely address the recruiters' everyday challenges.

Throughout his narrative, Sean reiterates the theme of pride and respect in one's work. The conversation not only highlights the potential for financial success through recruitment but also the personal satisfaction it can bring. Sean's story is one of resilience and triumph, encouraging listeners to find pride in whatever path they choose, particularly in the realm of recruitment.

Chapters

00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Welcome The chapter introduces the podcast episode featuring Sean, the CEO of Recruit CRM. The hosts, Brianna Rooney and Taylor Bradley, welcome Sean to the show. They set the tone for the episode by emphasizing values such as hard work, keeping it real, self-care, happiness, inner peace, and time management. Brianna and Taylor highlight their ability to thrive in chaos and present their discussion as a raw, authentic, under-the-hood view on talent takeover.
00:30 - 01:00: Overview of Recruitment Industry This chapter introduces the recruitment industry, acknowledging its often underrated status despite being filled with experts. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing the industry's value and credits existing tools, like recruit CRM, that aid in automating and simplifying recruitment processes for agencies worldwide. The chapter sets the stage for a deeper exploration into recruitment.
01:00 - 01:30: Sponsor Message and Introduction to Recruit CRM This chapter introduces Recruit CRM, a highly-rated recruitment software across all review boards, known for its easy-to-use and intuitive Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionalities. It emphasizes the software's capability to automate manual tasks, which alleviates recruiters from burdensome administrative work. Recruit CRM is recommended for recruiters who manage multiple tasks such as scheduling interviews and screening resumes.
01:30 - 03:30: Sean's Background and Early Career The chapter introduces Sean, delving into his personal background and early career. The discussion is anchored around his role as CEO of recruit CRM, a platform designed to streamline recruitment processes through automation tools like ATS (Applicant Tracking System) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The narrative emphasizes Sean's involvement in promoting the platform's benefits, such as increased efficiency and time savings for users.
03:30 - 05:00: Founding of Recruit CRM The chapter discusses the intertwined personal story of the speaker and the founding of Recruit CRM. It begins with the unique fact that the company was started by the speaker and their father five and a half years ago. Recruit CRM is a family-run software company thriving in the software as a service (SaaS) industry. Notably, it stands out as one of the few successful bootstrap father and son multi-million dollar software companies in this domain.
05:00 - 07:00: Challenges and Growth of Recruit CRM The chapter discusses the personal background and early exposure of the speaker to the recruiting and staffing industry. His father, who worked for Randstad, a leading global staffing and recruitment company, significantly influenced the speaker. From a young age, the speaker observed his father's role in expanding Randstad's business in India, growing from a small team of 90 people to a massive operation with 2400 consultants and managing 100,000 contractors.
07:00 - 10:00: Comparison with Bullhorn and Market Strategy The chapter discusses the speaker's family background in the recruitment industry, emphasizing their expertise in executive retained searches, contingent recruitment, and contract staffing. This experience financially supported the speaker's education in the United States.
10:00 - 13:00: Customer Success and Service Strategy The chapter discusses a venture in the B2C space focused on creating a hyper-local commerce platform for buying and selling video games, with the aim of replacing GameStop. The founders raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars in Angel funding while they were just 19 years old. They graduated within two and a half years and moved to San Francisco to pursue their business. Despite their efforts, the platform did not gain significant traction, and the $200k funding was quickly depleted in the expensive San Francisco market.
13:00 - 16:00: Discussion on Recruitment Technology The chapter discusses the inception of a company focused on developing technology for staffing and recruitment firms. The speaker mentions frequent discussions with their father, who had experience in using various recruitment products and felt there was a lack of excellent options. This motivated them to set up a company in Delaware, USA. The speaker relocated to India while their father invested $80,000 into the venture, humorously noting that they were still utilizing 'daddy's money.'
16:00 - 20:00: Personal Struggles and Overcoming Challenges The chapter titled 'Personal Struggles and Overcoming Challenges' discusses the financial and structural beginnings of a business endeavor. A total of $80,000 was invested over two years, not all at once, with the father owning two-thirds and the narrator owning one-third of the company, while the mother and father own one-third each. The initial team comprised of three developers and some fresh graduates from lower-ranked Indian schools, considering affordability. This setup marked the commencement of this entrepreneurial journey.
20:00 - 24:00: Reflection on Career and Hard Work The chapter titled 'Reflection on Career and Hard Work' discusses a successful career journey. It highlights the achievement of signing up the first customer through an online blog and expanding to serve over a thousand customers in 81 countries. The business is doing well with over four million dollars in revenue without raising additional funds and having a solid financial base with a million dollars in the bank from self-generated cash flows. The chapter reflects on the significance of hard work and personal achievement rather than reliance on external support, emphasizing pride in self-made success.
24:00 - 30:00: The Value of the Recruitment Profession The chapter emphasizes the importance and privilege of working in the recruitment profession. It highlights a success story of growing a business to over 100 employees and hiring globally within five years, contrasting it with typical business investments. Additionally, it touches upon the aspiration of building an applicant tracking system in the recruitment field.
30:00 - 36:00: Closing Remarks and Future Plans The chapter discusses the unique selling point of a new ATS (Applicant Tracking System) developed by a recruiter, which stands out because it is based on real recruiting challenges rather than traditional approaches.

Our CEO Sean Mallapurkar interviewed by recruitment industry expert - @TheMillionaireRecruiter Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 all right another wonderful episode of talent takeover unfiltered with Sean the CEO of recruit CRM welcome hello thanks thanks for having me guys good to have you on the show thanks for making some time welcome to Talent takeover unfiltered when it comes to working hard and keeping it real we know our [ __ ] self-care happiness inner peace and time I'm Brianna Rooney and this is Taylor Bradley hey y'all and we have thrived in chaos and turned it into an art form so Taylor what are we doing here today we're here to give you a raw under the hood view
00:30 - 01:00 of all things recruiting and finally give credit where credit is due to a long underrated industry that's full of quote-unquote experts right well then let's take this show to the road all right before we dig in I just want to take a quick thank you to our sponsor who has been helping thousands of recruiters automate and simplify recruitment finally say hello to recruit CRM currently trusted by recruitment agencies across 80 countries globally which is
01:00 - 01:30 crazy uh they have the highest rated recruitment software across all review boards which is really unheard of um goodbye bullhorn it's easy to use intuitive ATS and CRM that lets you automate all those manual tasks I know recruiters hate admin work and we're all about getting results this helps you get that so if you're juggling between interviews to schedule candidates the screen resumes to say to you know paying all those things we definitely recommend that you use
01:30 - 02:00 recruit CRM for sure let the system do the heavy lifting and save time for better things in life which is making money so to learn more about this amazing ATS and CRM check out recruit CRM dot IO and you you can start a free trial or book a demo with one of their Executives whenever you're ready so head on to recruitcrm.io today um Sean we want to know all about you but we definitely want to talk about the the company that you're obviously CEO of recruit CRM so tell us about recruit CRM
02:00 - 02:30 sure uh and and my personal story and the story of recruits CRM is very very intertwined right uh so it's a it's I think you might not know this but I started recruit CRM with my dad five and a half years ago where family run software company oh my God very cool in the world in the world of SAS right very few Father and Son multi-million dollar software companies bootstrap uh out there uh so fun fun uh so so to walk you through our story is is is is is pretty
02:30 - 03:00 fun so since the time I was about four years old my dad worked for recruiting and staffing company called randstadt or runstadt which is a Dutch Staffing and recruitment company largest on the planet by market cap and value like Revenue uh that was their India country manager so he ran their business in India and so from the time I was in diapers through high school he basically grew runstadt's business in India from 90 people to 2400 Consultants 100 000 contractors because they
03:00 - 03:30 do everything in India they do executive retain searches contingent Recruitment and contract and so that's very deep like Staffing and recruitment background comes in that that is also what helped my dad pay for my overpriced American college education very overpriced yeah yeah so uh you know I wish I should I shipped off to college after 12th grade uh to Bloomington Indiana I've been to Indiana University there I've been to the business school which was the Kelly School of Business I graduated in two and a half years got lucky uh I started a little startup there in the
03:30 - 04:00 b2c space we were trying to do local hyper local Commerce for people to buy video games from each other to try to replace GameStop yeah it seemed like a cool idea back then uh we got a couple hundred thousand dollars of Angel money which was crazy considering we were 19 at the time so graduated in two and a half years moved to San Francisco and then uh that the platform didn't take off in 200k Burns pretty quickly in San Francisco Founders and you're trying to run ads
04:00 - 04:30 and make things work right around that time I was always talking to Dad and we always wanted to do something together long term and I knew Tech any new Staffing and recruitment so we were like let's build technology for Staffing and recruitment firms because he used a lot of the products and he was like there's nothing great here so we set up a company in Delaware in the US I moved to India that put in about eighty thousand dollars so you know I still use daddy's money you know
04:30 - 05:00 yeah yeah he put in about eighty thousand dollars uh total investment over a period of time not not all up front uh over two years to get this started dad owns two-thirds the company I own a third so it's my dad and mom that own one-third each uh between one third and one third so two-thirds and I own a third and we hired three developers and we got started in India development Talent was cheaper and we also hired people right out of college from lower ranked schools who would accept working for us right uh and and that's how we got started uh
05:00 - 05:30 we signed up our first customer who found Us online on a Blog uh today we serve a little over a thousand customers at 81 countries uh and we're on a Runway doing a little over four million in Revenue uh US dollars I and we've not raised any money since then and we have a million bucks in the bank from cash flows that will be generated can we just clap yeah look where daddy's money got you don't sell yourself short there like that's amazing yeah
05:30 - 06:00 congratulations so so you can never forget that you come from a place of privilege to be able to even do that yeah but we have been a lot more successful than most people that have put 80 000 into their business uh within sub five years and so that's where we're at we're a little over 100 people now uh and we're hiring globally that's incredible so I have said I I've been in the recruiting business for like 14 years and building an applicant tracking system has been a dream of mine um and because you're right it's
06:00 - 06:30 not done by a recruiter until now that makes me so happy to hear that finally a recruiter has built an ATS there's other ats's was like we shadowed recruiters for 90 days it's like what no you don't know the challenges there's so many challenges um I love that I love that you two teamed up because the reason why I personally didn't go down that route was like well I'm not a coder I don't
06:30 - 07:00 know Tech like it would have been a nightmare um for me to grasp that so the trust that you have as father and son and you know one owning age specialty is huge that's awesome love that when I have a tech problem I restart my computer that's a very different skill set right being a tech recruiter you can be a magical tech recruiter not knowing how to write hello world on your computer by just understanding
07:00 - 07:30 you know the different spectrums of recruitment uh technology anyway yeah yeah I know it's awesome so what I'm even more excited about to talk to you is about bullhorn um so uh again ats's are just disasters I could rip them all apart um and then I ended up going with at the end um bullhorn and oh my goodness well no it was a disaster it's over complicated it's really difficult and so
07:30 - 08:00 again I always said to myself if I am going to go up against a beast it's going to be bullhorn because they have a lot of market share so want to know how you have fought to do that and how you're tackling just so you know I love I love bullhorn and I love them because of everything you just said uh about uh about 26 to 20 like eight percent of our customers and about 36 of our revenue is people that cancel will horn and moved to us yeah at any point of time we're having multiple like
08:00 - 08:30 this week we have three bullhorn data migrations running just this week well uh for people moving from bullhorn to us uh and that's every week throughout the year 52 weeks here right uh so so I don't I don't dislike the company they're great about it but either someone from their M A Team or someone who works at the private Equity Fund that owns them has reached out to us every single year I would imagine to ask us to be part of a larger platform uh one of one of the
08:30 - 09:00 calls I've actually recorded and shared with my team because we have a laugh about it [Laughter] yeah and and recorded with incentive obviously we have this note taker that joins every call so we tell people sure hey I'm not judging you Sean yeah yeah but uh but but yeah so so we we understand the product and Company and and how we think about it is this right the largest problem that people that work in recruitment have is is a couple things right
09:00 - 09:30 one most recruitment systems tend to be super complicated because over time people just keep folding on new features on them as people ask for features and so basically you could have something that looks cool in 2005 and by 2015 it looks like total crap because like there's been 200 feature requests and they basically just added 200 buttons on it to pick up a book and the second thing is the average recruiter uh forget technical recruiter right there's non-technical recruiters
09:30 - 10:00 and so on are not technical at all right like so in many cases like uh you know they're not super comfy with like crazy technology and it's not you can't just say okay sign this contract wire this money and here's a login figure it out uh and if you want our help we're going to charge you 200 an hour to help you but that that's that doesn't work out right yeah and so what you did and we leveraged some of the advantages we have right so because I'm based in India I have two tanks I have an English speaking populace a large number of young people because we have a pretty favorable
10:00 - 10:30 population demographic and because of that combination we have we have cheaper Talent at the entry level right sure the compensation difference in India between a fresh let's say engineer versus a director of engineering is very different from that in the US right it's 10 there's a 10x compensation differential between someone in year one and year 15. which is not the case in the US right on in an average situation yeah so you can hire a lot of these really young smart people you
10:30 - 11:00 can train them in the business of recruitment over three months so we do three months of training and we can give each of our customers very dedicated support so for the Thousand accounts we have we have 21 people in our customer success team wow every 40 customers or 40 to 50 customers accounts uh via One customer success manager and that's a lot of humans so that that means when you sign up with us there's one human who's who who has to spend four to five hours a month every month
11:00 - 11:30 of their entire career making sure you're successful on our platform we just yeah and that's only possible with the economics we have you you cannot do that in any other part of the world so we really outside of making a simple tool that's easy to use that you can see on the ratings you've just gone on overdrive and like the free Consulting piece where we're like you're buying our software you only have four people on your team it's cool we'll spend 10 out of 10 hours with you to figure out why you only charge 15 and not 25 why are you not good oh you get this because
11:30 - 12:00 oh wow okay it's very that's that is its own separate game um do you ever charge I don't know I'm thinking about monetization I can't myself you don't ever charge you can't even ask like for more help and and then you charge or no it's on it's unlimited help right uh no matter the number of seats you have you get as many hours with us as you want and and there's only so many hours someone wants on live calls right it's not like we're giving you free like back office late where
12:00 - 12:30 we're giving you free Consulting so you can have as much as you want uh and and then we also have best practices on like automations right so if you run a 20 recruitment agency every time you get a new job from a client and in an increasingly remote world world you shouldn't have to like manually send everyone a message on something or an email that says hey we got a new job or we just made a placement why can't you set up automations that automatically inform everyone at the company job to recruit for beautiful placement successfully made or an interview request
12:30 - 13:00 we will work with you to set those automations up using tools like Xavier with other people use for free so we'll give you all that Consulting expertise for free where if you run a five percent recruitment business you don't you don't know any of that [ __ ] for the life of a better word yeah yeah it's a good but that's the best word yeah yeah um yeah it's interesting that you say that because we actually I jump out a product um this week wait actually last week and they followed up again this week so they have a really great product I won't say who it is or what they do but they have this great product but then I'm like they have this video
13:00 - 13:30 on their website that I absolutely love of what the product can do and I'm like I want that how do I get that and they're like oh yeah our product can do that but it'll cost you about two to three k to get it to get basically these analytics that you want that that's really what this tool does is analytics and so I love that you're making the customer experience the focus because that was a complete deterrent like that just I was done after that because it's like you have this amazing tool but you charge me to show me how to fully optimize it that makes it even sense
13:30 - 14:00 and this is a big problem right with most technology right uh if you look at the average Salesforce implementation which a company buys it spends 100 Grand buying Salesforce it takes about nine to 12 months for Salesforce implementation at a Enterprise to be successful from the time they pay the hundred grand so they don't get anything back for the 100 Grand until like eight or nine months in and you end up spending two dollars in
14:00 - 14:30 implementation Consulting for every dollar you've actually spent on the subscription so uh and and this and so I studied Information Systems in college and they sort of taught us this right like when you implement sap at your business uh the average sap Hana implementation can take 12 to 18 months and for for an average 200 000 subscription contract of sap Hana it costs about 350 000 in addition to the app so and the thing is small businesses aren't cool with that
14:30 - 15:00 yeah that's not even the adoption rate because how many like let's get into recruiting Tech and just in general because we've seen a lot of Leaps and Bounds but we've also seen a lot of missteps in my opinion where they're just being they're putting too much Tech into things um and then again when you come to recruiters and you think of like what's something that recruiters hate doing well it's admin work which is typically what a tool is right so how do you feel like um how do you feel technology comes into play with not only your system but into like the
15:00 - 15:30 industry in general sure and and to go back to your point about tech or and like a CRM or an ETS or any right internal external at an agency being an admin tool traditionally how software was built was there was a business owner that owns like let's say a 20 firm and they're like I want to know what all of my people are doing right always yes and I'm going to give all of them this tool that they can only log into from the office and every time they make a placement they have to put data into this tool I don't give them commissions right so if you want commission
15:30 - 16:00 you got to put it in the tool I've heard people say I came from an agency like that yeah my agency had a call counter like he literally would go into the closet and like come out and like read our stats on how many calls we did how long they were all that stuff that's that's ridiculous right and and the problem with that is as a recruiter you're like this this tool is this shitty part of your day where you have to spend 20 minutes talking about or writing about what you did all day and your company is paying you to do
16:00 - 16:30 that it's completely unproductive it adds no value it doesn't make you feel good it just makes you feel like what the hell and the and the reason for that is that that tool isn't really designed to help you gain anything it's just designed to give your boss great dashboards and the problem with that is because it's designed in that way people don't use it and thus the boss doesn't get accurate dashboards because candidates because recruiters or Consultants tend to only add those candidates that got the job and now you need to collect a feces you just put the put those ones
16:30 - 17:00 in uh I remember talking to someone that works at a large Pharma company where they use workday which is uh yeah he has a CRM system they're like we hire about in in that office we hire 40 people a month we get about you know 1500 applicants and people we talk to and we make 40 entries in workday every month we only make entries when we have to make an offer because that's that's all they use the ATS for because you need to make the offer through the ATS yeah skew data everything else happens offline The Fortune 500 company has no clue who's applying where they're
17:00 - 17:30 applying from uh same with agencies so the way to fix that is make sure the tool you use and it doesn't have to be I don't I don't want to like be over like self you know uh do self-marketing sort of actually if you got a rocket yeah you know there's a bunch of tools they can do this recruit CRM can do it but there's a few other tools that can do it too you need to get a tool that actually saves your recruiters hours every week just by using it and reports are just something that's
17:30 - 18:00 extra that happen and you like but you need to get the tool because your Consultants are able to reach out to two extra candidates or two extra clients with the same level of personalization because because another extreme you see now is tools that say Hey you just put in 100 names and emails and we'll just automatically send them 200 emails a day for the next 20 days that's spamming and then that gets you flagged and that that's not what the technology is supposed to do what the technology is supposed to do is if you're able to reach out to 20 people and have 20
18:00 - 18:30 conversations today a day or maybe less the tool is supposed to help you get an extra 50 or 30 in conversations so if a recruiter makes let's say builds two hundred thousand dollars a year and you can spend a grand or two getting a tool that helps them make 220. that's great that and that's what you're going to want to focus on the problem with most people buying tools is like they're like hey how can I hire hire everyone in my company take a database put it into this tool and make
18:30 - 19:00 millions of dollars I've had people ask me those questions but don't pay anyone anything I just have a database and it emails these one million clients and then some of them reply back and say Yes I want candidates and then I put jobs on them then I email a million candidates and then I automatically set up interviews and I'm just sitting in the machines rolling I'm like then you don't need a recruitment agency right like uh yeah you know that's on a sustainable business model that's not gonna work long term that may be what this
19:00 - 19:30 individual doing it's not even you know it didn't work for him at all it's a fantasy this is good normally the people say this stuff they've never done Recruitment and they're starting a new business and they're like hey I I've done and they're normally from the more technical side right they're not really done Recruitment and they're just starting a business and they're like hey I talked to all these recruiters Technical Recruiters recruiting Engineers like me they're so stupid man they don't even know what I'm talking about I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna write code and I'm gonna automate all of this and this recruiter makes 200 Grand I want to make like
19:30 - 20:00 a million doesn't happen because if you're it's a sales job right if you're not good at convincing the candidate a high quality candidate to go do an interview with a client it's not gonna work yeah if you're on it yeah that's it nobody thinks that recruiting is a strategy a job that's that like you said all these Engineers are like I touch these recruiters they're so stupid I could do that I could do that job it's really not that easy and they can't I I've actually had an engineer tell me
20:00 - 20:30 um that a monkey could do my job like literally to my face tell me that and I was like and you know the crazy part uh the best recruiting Consultants uh make a lot more than the average engineer a Fan Company yep I know recruiters that make a million bucks a year because a lot of them use their Tech it's not it's not that they make a million bucks a year just because they use our Tech Maybe 10 or 20 of that extra 100 Grand on the 900 on us but like they're good already they're killing it already
20:30 - 21:00 and that's more than the average engineer makes at Facebook or Google because then you're making 50 Grand a placement but that's it adds up if you're good at your job yeah yeah and then your tool just makes them more efficient so therefore they can make more money they can either make more money and or they can just work less well there you go so that's what I'm all for so go ahead forget I was going to ask a question about uh I just would love to know like what's
21:00 - 21:30 your biggest struggle starting recruit CRM what's your biggest struggle so give us the real [ __ ] give us the real [ __ ] tell us the real of course of course so the biggest struggle was was two things right uh the first thing was my dad's completely non-text people but he knows the industry super well right uh I am technical as enough studied information systems but I'm basically a product manager I'm not like a hardcore you know back-end engineer and if
21:30 - 22:00 you want to build a full-blown SAS application that people in different countries are going to give you money for with a payment portal like everything baked in you need to be a hardcore engineer you can't be like a light engineer like me just writing SQL queries right so I can do code I can write code right but I can't quite write production grade code uh but I can do pretty decent product management so the hardest part in the beginning as a non-funded right uh because even in India 80 grand is not that much money right
22:00 - 22:30 especially when you're trying to launch a company uh the biggest challenge was building something with folks that had never done it before none of my Engineers had ever worked at any other company before that's like their first gig right uh I had never built a SAS app right and I had never had success previously and my dad had success in a completely non-tech pure recruitment setting so the first year and a half we really like literally fumbled and fumbled and fumbled till
22:30 - 23:00 we got a product out so like every six months like six months in I was like hey are we even gonna get anywhere we're just going to blow up or that money and I'm gonna be like unemployed again right CEO startup to an employee not fund right so and that was probably the pressure that like this forced you to persevere and make it happen right think or Swim but that was that was a very real stress right going bankrupt is a pretty uh interesting uh stress point to happen in your life yeah what's interesting is one way to put it yeah scary traumatizing yeah
23:00 - 23:30 I don't know I had a pretty rough pace so so when the first start and this this has nothing to do with this but when the first startup didn't work out I was like really depressed because like when I like graduated from college in two and a half years and like raised money uh from angels and gone to San Francisco to run a startup I thought I was going to be in a Lambo in a couple of years and then you like declare bankruptcy for any bankrupt the startup basically with a lawyer
23:30 - 24:00 and then you fly back to India it was I was so depressed I had uh at alopecia at stress-induced alopecia so there were like little spots on my head and my face hair stopped growing uh so you went to the doctor and I was like what's going on they put some steroid shots right like injected yeah and it it was fake then I just had a pretty bad time during that phase because I also had a humor in my neck like the same thing [ __ ] time like around those three months I'd cut it open you have to check if it was cancerous it wasn't but we still have to remove it so we removed it so that
24:00 - 24:30 was just a shitty phase of my life yeah versus now when you're making millions of bucks right it's pretty contrasting the crazy thing is I wish this [ __ ] was made up but I had stitches in my lately yeah it was it wasn't fun yeah you know what Sean I I need to go back to the fact that in earlier in the conversation you said you were lucky to have graduated in two and a half years no you were just a badass and you worked really hard so first of all take that and you know enjoy it but you probably didn't feel it at the time yeah yeah but but I wasn't like a 4.0 student
24:30 - 25:00 graduating in two and a half years I was a I was a 3.8 that dropped to a cumulative GPA of a 2.95 through graduation because I just made sure I got at least a c in every class that you could I could just finish the number of credits I needed to get the degree and get my student visa because I wasn't legally allowed to drop out because I'm an international student so I dropped out admission back to India right so the only way for me to like get my company to sponsor my own Visa
25:00 - 25:30 was for me to like pass college yeah but and that's basically what I did but that's why you're you're you're you're you're a winner you are a born entrepreneur like that's stuff that only entrepreneurs think to do you know most are just like hey I'm just gonna chill here for four years then I'll figure out who's gonna get my Visa and you know whatever um but I mean you accomplished a lot um that takes Grit so I I love also that you share that like kind of the rags to riches because like that's what it is like that's that's the hard work
25:30 - 26:00 no one talks about you know people love talking about reaction riches but it's not right my dad was a CEO right I can't I can't picture actually read the story it's not fair right to a lot of people that do go through the real struggle you know I've had a good life growing up sure you know I've had a comfortable life uh we did work hard we did work 80 90 hours a week the the few years that we were launching this making this work and so on but I thought that's a lot easier than people that are struggling sure there's different degrees of rags to riches but you are literally
26:00 - 26:30 down and out you were depressed you were having a hard time where it's like you were you were a shooting star and then now it's like wow like you kind of had like this reality check like wow my my [ __ ] does stink okay let's figure this out well yeah and I agree with what you're saying we're gonna have with where you're like I get what you're saying the rags to riches your health decline Sean I mean you could have had a Lambo in your garage but your health decline like what the [ __ ] does a Lambo matter you know so it's kind of like I get where you're going with that it's like you did the strategy part was the shitty part was I didn't have a Lambo those batteries
26:30 - 27:00 so money does once I get it I just feel like having a Lambo in any scenario is not a bad thing even if I can't drive it if I'm just looking at it whatever it's not I'm just taking pictures with it yeah yeah I'm just laying on top of it yeah taking pictures of it exactly that's a different reality show that's funny no I was just gonna say like I I know that we're we're definitely over time
27:00 - 27:30 on how what our normal podcasts are but this is that there's some such great stuff here um love that there's uh literally a an actual database made by a recruiter lifetime recruiter um and uh and the the father-son duo that's just a cool story in general but um no that like they get it that that doesn't have need all the bells and whistles that like a monster bullhorn has um because the fact is is like not a lot of people use it and sometimes it's there just
27:30 - 28:00 for looks or just for the CEO to feel better um I totally get that um I love that and actually it reminds me of do you know who uh Max hire is like it's an old database [Music] yes so like I was thinking of that when you were saying it because I used to use max higher I loved Max higher I would use like it was just so simple like you could just go in and rock out whatever you needed to do um and then they transferred me to Bullhorn and I was like nope nope give me Max
28:00 - 28:30 higher back I can't do this and they were like but we're not update upgrading it I'm like it's okay I'll go there until you burn it down um so the fact that there's something like this that has come out and that kind of has in my opinion the max higher strategy like less is more um and that you know there's no such thing the Bots are not going to take over this industry Bots can take over a few Industries and do a few things but not this one yeah it's about using technology and leveraging automation
28:30 - 29:00 to do the stuff that's boring yeah for example instead of saying send a candidate these 10 emails back to back and then if they reply let me figure it out you can create an email sequence but when you create that email sequence it needs to include actual physical touch points for example send this email but then remind me to call this person and if I call them and leave them a voicemail remind me in two more days to send them a LinkedIn message and then email them
29:00 - 29:30 again so yeah you're still taking out a couple emails from like the whole typing experience yeah let's smoothing that out but you're not just saying select a thousand people press a button and just pray for like somebody to reply to you the spray and pray yeah yeah yeah yeah that's not getting you your 40 or 50 000 fee right that's not what the client is yeah right uh and as long as you're honest with your job and you're like hey I'm a recruiter my job is finding the best talent for this job I've gotten and if I do that right I can make 40 Grand in two weeks
29:30 - 30:00 if like that's a crazy amount of money right think about it an average recruiter right this is the only industry in the world and as a agency recruiter it's the only job in the world that you can do without any degree you know as long as you have a phone and a computer and a tongue to speak and I'd like Facebook you can make millions of dollars amen and I know people that have made millions of dollars unlike maybe say becoming a professional like doctor or lawyer or CP or
30:00 - 30:30 something where you need to get a certification degree here is literally you could you all you need to do is you just need to grind and hustle and you need to be smart about it and you can make a shitload of money yep absolutely it's an awesome industry I love it I'm going to work in this for the rest of my life right love it I hear you me too you know I I think we've all gotten chills during this conversation um just because it resonates so well and I'm I'm a die-hard agency recruiter you know we have a couple of different solutions and now we start you know we're we're
30:30 - 31:00 training recruiters because it's like let me train you to make millions of dollars let's do this like um I've seen it I've had lots of employees that have have hit that that threshold so that's cool love that um let's uh Taylor you want to take it away to to end this restaurant so you've listened to our episodes before you know at the end we hit him with a broke to boss tip of the week so what would be your rug to boss tip for our listeners thank you if you're if you're listening listener is a recruiter which I guess most of them are right yeah take more pride in what you do right
31:00 - 31:30 this is one of the most important jobs on the planet you are helping Talent move to the right opportunities and if Helen doesn't move to the right companies at the right time you're not going to have Innovations in different industries from Healthcare and pharmaceutical space everything right like if Steve Jobs didn't get his designers and Engineers you wouldn't have iPods and iPhones and airpods or whatever right and so a lot of times recruiters are pretty like you could you could have a recruiter making four 500 Grand a year and unlike a software engineer who's like I'm a software engineer I'm a lawyer oh I just do technical recruitment oh you you know you're just
31:30 - 32:00 talking on the phone no I do recruitment right I kill it you need to have a little more confidence right most recruiters I talk to especially in a public setting never talk about their job with the absolute confidence and like hey I need to totally tell you about what I did today right and I I got this company a new VP and it's going to change their direction or for example have more confidence right and a lot of recruiters have confidence while talking to candidates or
32:00 - 32:30 clients where they're pitching their service but when they're by themselves or in a Social Circle take more pride in what you do it's it's impressive work yeah I love that I love that so many people and Taylor I'm sure you can relate to this like I felt like it took like my parents at least five years to figure out what I did and even then I'm like do you really know what I what I do like are you sure and then it's like you know something silly like when will you get a real job yes oh I've heard that I totally heard that like like dude this is a real
32:30 - 33:00 job I make three times what you do right it is as real as can be you know a real job isn't like needing to dress up and drive and going to a corporate office right you you could you could have a real job at your desk and you could make a million bucks on your desk today that's possible yeah I love that job is not Optics it's not the Optics it's the dollar sign like you yeah you have but I think with anything it doesn't even just have to be recruiters take pride in what you do but I love that always saying that specific to recruiting because you're so right
33:00 - 33:30 when it's talking about what you do like I even find myself in talking about what I do it's like you kind of have to downplay it because people don't really understand it and it's not that hard to understand but it's like get a real job mentality you guys are so right I mean take pride in what we do what we do is hard it's not easy and it it shapes some of the companies that change the world exactly like so um my ex-husband is a chef so he gets invited in to talk at the kids school go be a chef I'm like what about me I've owned my own business for how long like I'm a recruiter it's like nope that's not that's not relatable they're like sit down
33:30 - 34:00 and you know what a career and no offense to Chef chefs are great right but a professional recruiter over their career makes more and more money than the average professional chef of course just that yeah right but but chefs are like oh my God he's a chef he must be awesome oh you're a recruiter oh like you know you're just a crazy salesperson and and that's not cool right now it's not cool his impersonations are the best by the way his impersonations uh I love it you
34:00 - 34:30 the drama and the the impersonations you do when you're talking about different people is amazing but my my mother's an actress that produces movies in in India so I have like a little bit of the yeah I can't help it it just it's just that drama the drama is like going through I'm so pumped I feel like picketing but I don't know where I'm gonna pick it give us respect oh my God what you do mic drop take pride of what you do I love that I absolutely love that I think our listeners will
34:30 - 35:00 too and this is such an empowering episode that I didn't realize it was going to be but it actually really is yeah so thank you so much for taking the time to join us today we really appreciate it love learning about you and recruit CRM and why recruiters are [ __ ] amazing I didn't know it but you know thank you yeah yeah like this is gonna set the tone for our day to let's go kick some ass Brianna yeah I love it I'm super super pumped and I want to talk to your dad let's let's
35:00 - 35:30 get him on here I want to hear all his crazy stories thank you Sean there's a lot of them love a lot of them so before before he went to b-school and went to start working at Randstad he was in the anti-terrorist squad oh god wow in the Army so he was he's actually killed terrorists and stuff like actual like wow that's a totally different direction I wasn't expecting yeah his pre-recruitment stories that are also fun and then recruitment stories that are fun
35:30 - 36:00 because he's an old school recruiter like that's the stuff like I I got half of my careers old school recruiting and now it's kind of funny now but anyways uh thanks thanks so much everyone thank you for listening uh you know every Tuesday for sure we drop a new episode but this one was an extra special one with Sean the CEO of recruit CRM