Hey Omowale, how are you doing?
Doing well Wise Man Say, thanks for having me on.
Let’s dive in: mySenSay, in a nutshell
mySenSay is a social recruiting community for the entry level. What we’re designed to do is help employers of entry level candidates, and top tier college students interact, discover and connect with each other.
OK. I’m an employer. What are you going to do for me?
We’re going to have you come on to our site and fill out your ‘employer showcase’, where you tell us about your company and type of candidates you look for. You put all kinds of content on there – blogs, video, twitter feed and so on. Those are the things we are going to share with the student community. Once the students get on there, we do a sales and marketing plan to go after the students you have targeted on the showcase. We have predictive matching technology, which can track employer behaviour, and so if you spend more time looking at a certain type of student profile, we can bubble up similar profiles as soon as they come onto the site
…so you do the leg work of finding these candidates for us….then reach out to the candidates as well?
No. We’re not going to replace the employer. We think it’s important that employers engage – in fact, that underpins everything we are trying to do. We see mySenSay as a way to expand their employment brand, and facilitate interaction with the student community. I wouldn’t say we’re trying to do an RPO. We’re trying to figure out the best way for employers to connect with top tier college students.
Our goal is to basically …..look, we still think that employers should be going to campus. They should be meeting students in real life. But we think that before they even get to the campus, if they’ve already identified a pool of candidates that they really want to talk to, then we can enable them to attempt a much more targeted interaction once they get onsite.
It sounds that this may be based on personal experience?
Yes, I think so. After I graduated, I did some college recruiting for a very large Fortune 500 company and we found it a real challenge to get candidates who were the right fit. I mean we were a very well known brand, everywhere in terms of advertising, and yet when we were on the campus, it was difficult to get engagement with interested candidates, that interested us. Being on campus just two times a year, it was really hard to find those special students who were going to stick around for more than a few years and have an outsized impact on our business results. If you step back and look at the amount of time a company spends on campus in front of candidates, it’s actually very short. And structured so that it’s also very concentrated, which makes it very difficult for both employers and students to differentiate……..
……everyone wants to work for Accenture…..
(laughs)
Right.
Everyone wants to go the big brands. And they get inundated with candidates, and those companies actually don’t want that either. For the student going up to one of these companies at a Careers Fair, they only have 1-2 minutes to make the case. It’s not a ‘discovery process’, it’s a basically a sales process. What we are saying is that time should be spent up front, prior to that condensed, time-bound, structured, face to face interaction, where discovery on both sides can take place through an ongoing relationship. And you can do that through the mySenSay platform.
Employer engagement is obviously key. How do you drive that?
That’s our goal and our challenge. We want recruiters on there, we want hiring managers, early career prof……
(Phone rings. It’s Paul Miles, my old boss. Have to take the call, haven’t heard from him in ages. Unprecedented interruption to a Wise Man Say interview. Omowale, ominous, looks on. Interlude 5 minutes)
…..where were we? Oh yes, engagement.
So that’s where the shift is going to be. On careers sites, the content is static. On mySenSay, we initially envision that the employer will get a their existing employees on there and either through blogs, chat and video, create the sort of interactive content that will attract, educate and engage the students. And the other side, we also have the students who can come on and initiate interaction through messaging or email. Employers are already doing this in a limited way. People are already out there, expanding that employer brand, being active on social media, on social networks. What we are trying to do is bring it all together it in a particular place.
Driving client engagement is definitely the challenge. But if you look at the impact that talent has on an organisation, then those are the things that companies are going to have to do to get that type of talent into their business.
Tell me about the tech.
Basically what we are doing is looking at candidate and employer behaviour and predicting what type of profiles or showcases you are interested in. How long are you spending on a particular profile? What kind of content are you looking at? This is the data where we are trying capture, so that we can then bubble up increasingly relevant profiles & showcases, the more you use the site. One of the long standing problems with many directory type sites, is filtering through volume. There are sites with hundreds of thousands of profiles. What we are trying to do is make the matching more efficient
OK. Let’s look at it from the candidates point of view. I go on the site, then what?
We tried to think very carefully about the user adoption and what were trying to do is lower the barriers as much as possible. So you can use Facebook connect, Google, LinkedIn, even Twitter to connect. However, the challenge is that social networking profiles don’t have the complete data, so, we need you to fill out additional information so that we can help point you to the right types of employer.
And do I get selection of companies presented to me, once I complete my profile?
We don’t make it at the company level. We try to get students to give us there industry preferences. Not a lot of people can even name 10% of the Fortune 500. If you were to select a company it would go back to the careers fair dynamic of choosing only the companies that you already know, and we didn’t want that.
There is also a search function. You can look for companies or sectors, see people associated with that company, what the content they are producing. And if you then do a search, then we can start tracking your behaviour on the site and begin to serve employers to you. Once you have a history, our search algorithymn will learn what employers you are interested in and start bubbling that information to you.
What type of students are you targeting to get on the site?
We want to make sure that we can present an audience that our employer customers want to hire from. At the moment, we are concentrating on students who are Mathematics, Science, Engineering & Technology Majors. At this stage, we are actually being led by what our clients are telling us that they are interested in. It’s one of the benefits we are giving to the early adopters of the platform, that we will reach out to the colleges and student communities you are interested in and populate the system with that type of candidate profile
Hang on Omowale. Sounds like you go a pro active sourcing exercise, on potential candidates, on client request. Is that true?
Yes.
Right.
It’s not going to be an ongoing exercise, but at the moment, where we are just starting out and have a small sample size of employers, we are going to optimize the candidate base for those early adopters.
Problem for you OC (we’re friends now) People gets jobs. They leave. Doesn’t that mean you have to re- resource?
That’s already what’s occurring right now, in any case. If you are an entry level employer then each year you have people coming on and going off campus, on and off market. So we are simply making this general industry process as simple as possible, whilst increasing the calibre of hire by moving the employer/employee first contact point forward, and securing engagement and mutual discovery through engagement.
You’ve gone through a massive re-brand. Basically, you were green before. Why the change?
Well our initial mySenSay site was an outreach platform, to share our position on social recruiting, talent community, you know, how we see the recruiting market. The design you see now is what we’ve been cooking up for the past several months. Our goal was to bold, a bit edgy and place where students want to go, and basically manage their professional career. The colour change was….scientific. There is a whole science behind colour, and ‘green’ is actually one of the worse for converting colours for a website. So we tried to think a lot about that and our tech guys brought this to us, and we decided to go with it.
How do you make your money?
Our pricing model is an annual subscription fee. We have a promotion in the first year, to recognise the risk early adopters are taking by going with new technology. Overall our pricing model is going to be tiered. but it won’t be based on moving you at the top of the stack if you pay more. It’s not pay for page rank – we don’t view that as a good signal and it destroys the value proposition from the candidate side. Then it just becomes a matter of who’s got the biggest budget. So our pricing is based on volume, how many people you are going to hire, how many bandwidth you’re using and so forth. It’s about platform technology use, not about paying to bump you up.
Give me some numbers Omowale
Well, we need to understand the client’s hiring needs before we give a quote, so we will meet with the customer to understand exactly what they want to achieve. Of course, we have a range, at the lower end we would be $10000 up to $75000 per year.
How long til world conquest?
I don’t think we are looking at world conquest. Our goal is to get 100 companies on in the first year. Our development is an iterative approach, so it will be a step by step process. Our goals are not based so much on metrics, but more on whether our customers are getting value. Are employers make better hires? Is our platform helping with that? That is our bar for success.
Omowale, thank you for the information.
No problem, great speaking with you.
Thanks to Omowale Casselle, CEO of mySenSay. Find out more on www.mySenSay.com and follow Omowale on Twitter @mySenSay
Wise Man Say helps agency & in-house recruiters understand how to use social media to find candidates & acquire clients. Strategy, Implementation, Support & Training. Call on 020 7 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk
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