Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Rahier Rahman, the founder and CEO of Turn Technologies. Their platform provides capabilities in recruiting, screening, and onboarding hourly workers. We’re going to get into what specifically Turn does, how it tries to rise above the industry’s buzz, and the role AI plays all on this edition of PeopleTech. Hi, Rahier. Thanks for being here. First, can you tell me about Turn? Who are your customers? What do you do for them?
Rahier:
Yeah. Turn is an autonomous hiring platform that streamlines the sourcing, screening, and onboarding of hourly workers. So we work with high volume employers, so employers that require a lot of hourly hiring in their labor force and that can span almost every industry. So, today we support companies in over 30 industry verticals, ranging from last mile logistics, all the way to healthcare and nursing platforms, elderly care platforms, et cetera, and everything in the middle so.
Mark:
And that’s more than background checks and that sort of thing.
Rahier:
Yeah, much more. So, we have three products that are live today. We have advise, which is an talent intelligence platform, which helps employers understand where talent lies, how much to pay, what the competitive landscape is, what will incentivize them to move, change opportunities. Ready, which is the true autonomous hiring platform that allows us to source the candidates, bring them, communicate with them, onboard them, and then screen, which is the background check component of that process that allows us to screen them to FCRA standards and get them approved to work for any major employer. When all those three tools come together, you have the first truly autonomous hiring solution.
Mark:
Well, I was going to ask you, is that unique, the approach that you’re taking?
Rahier:
Yes. So the way I think about the industry, if you think of talent acquisition, it really breaks down into four stages. You have kind of the source, the select, the engage, and the hire stages. And within those four stages is a myriad of service providers that have cluttered the industry for the last 20, 30 years. You have thousands of providers there. And what every platform tends to do is come in and rebuild their stack, using companies in any of those four areas. And when we looked at that, we looked at that as a very, partially an antiquated model that was expensive and was time consuming and slower in terms of results. So what we wanted to do when we approached the problem is we wanted to actually verticalize the solution. So we wanted to be able to say, in order to move faster and be more cost efficient, we needed a solution that owned all of those areas ourselves and built technology from the ground up without a reliance on vendor patchwork.
Rahier:
And so, the mission behind Turn and the journey of Turn was really to do that and create that autonomy. And so we did that and so advise is a standalone platform that helps us understand the nature of hiring and it tracks over 500,000 companies and over millions of jobs, openings, I think 13 million job openings in real time daily. The ready platform, the uniqueness of the ready platform is instead of the traditional model of I have to fill a job. So I go out and I post jobs on Indeed and Glassdoor and wherever else, which is a push strategy where you’re pushing out the thing and hoping people come back. We spent time developing our own proprietary candidate database, which is about 147 million people. And we utilize the advise technology and AI to help us inform, understand behavioral patterns, who would be ideal, where people live, et cetera.
Rahier:
And so our strategy, when we look to fill opportunities is a pull strategy. We go into our database, find the talented people, pull them out, communicate with them and get them onboarded. So that model is different from the push strategy that everyone else does, because we own all of the proprietary database information. So and then that’s probably more akin to say the way like ZoomInfo has a database that they rely on as well. So we built a database, which is a key component of our proprietary approach. We also built all of the components necessary in the hiring stack ourselves. We won’t rely on third party background check. We have that built component as well. So, in essence, nobody can be as fast as we can be and as cheap as we can be, because we own all of it. And I think that is a massive benefit to employers when they work with us.
Mark:
What you’re describing is in a space that’s pretty busy right now, talent acquisition, onboarding, background checks, all of that. You’ve got a unique way of approaching those challenges, but from a marketing standpoint,
Rahier:
Yeah.
Mark:
How do you separate yourselves? How do you get above the buzz?
Rahier:
Excellent question. I think how you market and position yourself is an ever evolving strategy that as we have recently rolled out some of our products, those things, the marketing message will evolve and change over time as we figure out what resonates and what doesn’t. What I would say today is the age old theory that show beats tell. So, in our approach, what we like to do is get people to try the technology and see it for themselves for free. And most of the time when you are able to get people to see the technology that it wows them instantly. The fact that the level of capability and data is available, the ability to inform how they hire is there, the way they can adjust pricing to understand demand and supply of labor is very powerful. So I think, when people try, they buy and I think that’s probably the most effective answer at this stage.
Mark:
Yeah. One of the things that strike me is there’s a lot of folks out there who refer to the company as turn.ai.
Rahier:
Yeah.
Mark:
And tell me about the AI. Where’s the AI built in and what are using?
Rahier:
Yeah, the AI is built in, in the entire, I would say all three components of our business. The advise component obviously is constantly analyzing the job market in real time. So it’s able to make predictive insights. So we do a monthly output called the job economy report, which is an output that we put now as a result of a lot of the machine learning and predictive analytics that we’re looking at. So the AI on the advise side is definitely inherently there. It’s also in the entire candidate resume database that we manage ourselves. So we are able to understand and predict who might be good as a worker down to the street level and block level. So if you were looking for workers, if you’re looking for nurses in Brickle in Miami, I could tell you on a block by block level where the talent would be and how that talent is changing and evolving and who might be, what are the right tendencies that would inform one person working for the company versus another.
Rahier:
And the AI helps with that a lot by analyzing patterns, movements, et cetera. And on the screening side, one of the important components where AI is very helpful is in helping us determine the fidelity of a lot of the data. So some things that people may not discuss openly in this industry is our public record databases are not very good compared to other countries. And part of that is because we don’t have unique identifiers that are necessarily linked to a person over time. Social security number is one, but that doesn’t come with certain elements, phone number, driver’s license, et cetera, are better, but there isn’t one number that anything ever happens to you, you have to provide. If you get pulled over for a speeding ticket, that could be a driver’s license. If you get arrested somewhere, there could be nothing associated with you accept a name. So what ends up happening is a database that we all rely on as CRAs tends to have a lot of noise. And our AI helps us filter through that noise, triangulate on people better. So that’s where every component of our business benefits from the AI.
Mark:
Now that must be coming in kind of handy right now with the great resignation still going on. It’s just a lot of unsettledness out in the talent market.
Rahier:
See that everywhere. For sure.
Mark:
So what are the effects that you’re seeing?
Rahier:
We see a lot of that we call the great reshuffle as we’re seeing kind of people moving around. I think you’re seeing jobs that had a momentary lift due to the pandemic, things like logistics and last mile delivery, healthcare in areas like nursing, hospital, pharmaceutical delivery, all of that we saw as a pretty big rise during the pandemic. And we see some of that coming back to more stabilized levels and we see other industries returning, hospitality, travel, manufacturing, et cetera, coming back. So we’re seeing those shifts and those recalibrations happening.
Mark:
And given the state of the world right now where nothing seems settled,
Rahier:
Yeah.
Mark:
How are you thinking of proceeding over the next, say three to five years? How do you plan to run and grow the business?
Rahier:
Yeah. I think what’s always helpful is being at the right place at the right time. Right. I think that is probably the most important thing for startup success and having, probably I’d say before that is probably having the right team. I think that’s probably… Most investors would always say, I’ll take a great team with a B idea than an A idea with a B team. So I think having the right team is one key thing, but as we look at the business over the next three to five years, we believe we’re in the right place at the right time. Right. I think if you look at the unemployment rate, if you look at our workforce capacity, hourly labor is the fastest growing sector. It’s growing three times the rate of full time growth.
Rahier:
So this will remain a massive area of importance for the country as a whole as well, over the next decade as we deal with low immigration rates, early retirement rates of people. You’re seeing structural problem in our workforce labor, you’re seeing, even if every unemployed person got a job today, you’d still have like 5.4 million open jobs. So that creates a fundamental problem. Where we believe the solution lies is productivity of people who want to work. And in the hourly labor space, making workers more productive by giving them the ability to discover opportunities that are well suited for them is a key thing. Being able to price them. So they have the right wages, depending on market changes will be valuable for employers so they can retain talent better. And eventually, being able to provide benefits to them in support of engagement and retention metrics will be very powerful for both employers and workers. So I see those major tailwinds as being things that drive our growth over the next three to five years.
Mark:
It was great to meet you. And I really appreciate your taking the time to talk today.
Rahier:
No, thank you. My pleasure.
Mark:
My guest today has been Rahier Rahman, the founder and CEO of Turn Technologies. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of Recruiting Daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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