Gogohire is a hiring marketplace for sales talent. In this episode of The Crowd, we sit down with Pete Ryan, CEO & Co-founder of Gogohire.

For more information on Gogohire: https://gogohire.com/

 

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Transcript: 

Kevin:            Are you an aspiring entrepreneur looking to jump into the sharing economy? If so, you need to check out Near Me. Why? Well, you could go out and develop your own technology stack which will cost you 500,000 or more or you could use Near Me’s platform. Anyway, check out Near Me. They’re the sponsor of this podcast.

 

Hi. Welcome to The Crowd, a podcast by Near Me. We’re talking about peer-to-peer marketplaces. We’re talking collaborative economy and we’re talking about thought leadership. We’re talking about all these things, any and all of them with some of the best minds in the field. And of course, I’m your host, Kevin Cohen.

 

Today, we’re going to connect with Pete Ryan, co-founder of Gogohire. What is Gogohire? Gogohire is a marketplace that connects sales executives with technology companies in San Francisco and in other markets throughout the US. Let’s jump in to the interview.

 

Hello. I’m your host, Kevin Cohen. I’m super excited about today’s interview. Today, I’m going to be joined by Pete Ryan. Pete is the co-founder and CEO of Gogohire. Pete, welcome to the show.

 

Pete:               Thanks.

 

Kevin:            Pete, why don’t you tell everybody here what is Gogohire?

 

Pete:               So Gogohire is a hiring marketplace for sales talent. We only focus on sales talent. And basically how it works is we attract the best sales people in tech sales in San Francisco and New York and they apply to join our site. Once they apply, we basically schedule a phonecall with the candidate to learn more about them and then we put them on a one-week match which is basically a period of time when their profile is visible to over 200 of our partner companies which include Ooyala, Hackerinc, TalkDesk, Zendesk and many others. So it’s pretty typical for our sales candidates that are on our site to receive like between two and six interview requests from various companies during that one-week match. So really, we’re providing sales talent with multiple opportunities in a really quick way. And it’s pretty painless to set up a profile which is also a benefit for our sales candidates that are on our site.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. So before we jump in to Gogohire and how you came up with the idea and how it all works, give us your back story. What did you do before you started this company?

 

Pete:               So, I’ve always been a sales guy. I graduated from the University of Dayton in 2008 where I studied Entrepreneurship. And then I joined Oracle where I sold database fusion middleware which doesn’t sound very interesting but it was. It was a great place to kind of cut my teeth. Yeah, it’s the first company in my career that I worked at. So, I was there for about a year and then a boss of mine, James moved over to LinkedIn at that time. They were roughly 200 employees and I reached out to him and I was really interested with what LinkedIn was doing. So I joined their sales team. I was there for about three and a half years. We’re out selling their recruiting solutions as well as their sales solutions. And then after LinkedIn, it became – it grew from a few hundred employees to 5000. I kind of knew it was time to go to something smaller so I joined DoubleDutch which – they’re in the mobile app for event space and that was really like an awesome startup for me to join. There were around 15 employees. So, I kind of learned a lot of inner workings around the startups.

 

Kevin:            So, how did you come up with the idea for Gogohire?

 

Pete:               When I was at DoubleDutch, I was really itching to start a company. So, I really looked back in my career and I thought about just kind of some of the challenges that I’ve faced in kind of my like career transition and from every place from Oracle to LinkedIn to DoubleDutch. And I was thinking about when I was leaving LinkedIn. I knew that I wanted to join a startup and that was like really fast pace and growth mode, doing some really cool things but I didn’t know where to look, right? So I think the alternatives to what Gogohire offers, they’re pretty sucky. When you think about job boards, you put your resume up on a job board and you hope for a company to reach out to you which is rarely the case. And then when it comes to like LinkedIn, you’re kind of having to network your way in the companies. But if you’re currently employed, you’re going to be a little worried about your employer finding out about you wanting to make a career change.

 

So, we provide that alternative which is you create a profile on our site and your current employer or past employers will never find out about it. And we’re presenting your profile for a one-week period and that’s where you can get a ton of interview requests and then pick and choose the company you want to work at. So I think the idea for Gogohire didn’t just like come about. We were working on a different idea which is Work Voice which is like an employee feedback platform where employees could come up with cool ideas and share ideas on like how they can improve the company, culture process, product and all those things. But that was a tough run for us. So we knew that if we just enhance an existing process that will be really valuable for sales candidates and companies. So essentially, we’re bringing the third party recruiting model online. And the response has been great so far.

 

Kevin:            Nice. What were some of your early wins?

 

Pete:               So I would say, I think we’re really excited to bring on Dropbox and ClearSlide as clients, extra members like us being in the office. And we really had like 10 clients at that time. And these are sales organizations that are doubling, tripling in size every year. So, we’re just really excited to have them as partner companies on our site. That kind of sticks in my mind as like a big win and then also the first interview request that was ever made. It was made by this guy, Bryan, who at that time was over at Hackerinc and he requested a candidate. It was just really cool to see the interview request made and then the candidate accepting that and then going off to interview. It was just a really streamlined, easy process. And I think the last thing is us getting in the 500 Startups. We wanted to get in there because the program is amazing when it comes to popping us with marketing distribution and fund raising. It’s been a huge benefit to us.

 

Kevin:            So, what was that like? Give us some details of what the program is like for a marketplace Startup at 500.

 

Pete:               Sure. So, aside from kind of getting picked out of crowd like during out meet-ups by Dave McClure and just on the spot and telling you to like pitch your company and tell us why you’re special. I think that like gives you some thick skin but I also think like the mentor is here. A lot of them like Tristan, for instance, he started Storefront which is a really well-known marketplace and just getting advice from him right around how we should be growing our business with like the number of candidates and the number of companies and then also increasing engagement with our existing candidates and companies. So we have these weekly meetings and really the topic today has been around marketing and distribution which for us is extremely important.

 

Kevin:            Nice. So, what are some of the early challenges that you guys have faced?

 

Pete:               Yes. So for us, it’s all about getting solid candidates in the door and so acquiring them, converting them and retaining them. And the thing about the value that we’re providing our partner companies is that we’re surfacing candidates that are actively looking but also very high quality. So, when you think about the life cycle of a sales candidate, in some ways, they’re kind of perishable, right? Like, there’s only a window of time where they’re actively looking versus currently employed and just focused on hitting their number and killing in sales. So, we have to constantly be filling the top line of our funnel with high quality candidates that we can then vet out and surface the candidates that are really truly looking to make a career move today.

 

So I think again going back to the marketing and distribution, that’s a key piece for us. And to be honest, when we first started 500, we weren’t good at it at all. I can’t say we’re experts at it now. We’re still very much so in beta and learning as much as we can. But that’s our product, really strong candidates. So making sure that every week we have great talent and for companies to reach to us is our number one priority.

 

Kevin:            Very nice, very nice. So, as part of going into the 500 Startups, you get to raise a little bit of money. Do you have plans to raise additional funds in the near future?

 

Pete:               So right now, we’re really focused on getting our metrics up, number of hires, number of interview offers up and the number of interview offers accepted. But we’re going to start that in about two weeks. We’re just in the process of prepping for that. But yes, we’re planning on raising.

 

Kevin:            Nice. So for our listeners out there who are thinking of starting a marketplace or already have a marketplace going and they’re struggling, what advice can you share with them?

 

Pete:               I would say – I think like Paul Graham always says this. It’s like focus on a pain point that’s a true pain. I think there are different types of companies. There are companies that are providing a pain pill or a vitamin. I would say for us we’re very much so a pain pill. I think where we misstepped with the first startup that my co-founder and I tried to create before Gogohire which is Work Voice that was very much of a vitamin. So that’s the first piece.

 

                        The second piece is really be like strappy with getting users to start. I think that helps you really understand like the difficulty in getting users right. I mean if you were just kind of pouring some money into marketing, you’re going to get users no matter what. But if you’re kind of taking the strappy approach, it helps you actually really understand like your users and what matter most to them. And then also, it just like helps you think outside the box because as a startup you have the ability to actually take this kind of unconventional approaches to marketing that like a larger company just doesn’t have the liberty to take.

 

So for us, like I think what was really cool is during Dreamforce last year, we built a website and it was kind of a side door in for us to acquire candidates as well as companies. And it’s called DFparties.com. It stands for Dreamforce parties. It is basically a full listing of all the after parties and basically like we had people hand out flyers. We were handing out flyers at Dreamforce. We probably handed out like 20,000 flyers to people that were walking through the door. And we just said go to DFparties.com and then they would see it was sponsored by Gogohire. So from that, we had like roughly 3000 signups and we collected 5000 email addresses. So that’s just an example of like us thinking outside the box and doing something a little more unconventional with regards to our marketing than a larger company would do

 

Kevin:            What other types of marketing are you doing to acquire supply in terms of candidates?

 

Pete:               For us, it’s pretty easy to identify like the top sales people. We basically just go to like the largest sales organizations that have the most well trained sales people and create a list of them. I have a team in the Philippines that will create, build a list of email addresses and all that stuff. So it’s a tool called Toofr and Kickbox.

 

Kevin:            What was that first tool again that you use to build the list with?

 

Pete:               So, it was called Toofr and that’s more for building lists with the email addresses. And then we use Kickbox.io to then clean the list.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. Do you have your KPIs down so that you know what your candidate acquisition cost is for a raw candidate pre-vetting?

 

Pete:               We do. Yes. So for us, it’s roughly – our cost of acquisition for candidates is around $200. Companies, to be honest, it’s been a little bit harder for us to track. It’s been like pure sales but yeah we’re working on collecting those numbers.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. I like it. So where can our Crowd learn more about Gogohire?

 

Pete:               Really just by going to our site. So gogohire.com if you’re a candidate and if you go to gogohire.com/companies – it’s free for candidates and companies to sign up which is the coolest part. So if you’re a company looking for sales people and you want a constant flow of sales candidates to build your pipeline, we’re the perfect marketplace for that. So you can go on as a company, create a profile, a company profile. And then within a day or so, we’ll fill up your dashboard, your Gogohire dashboard with high quality vetted sales candidates.

 

Kevin:            And would you say for someone who’s looking to get a sales job in the tech space that there’s an insatiable demand, good demand or is it fairly weak? What’s the marketplace like right now for candidates?

 

Pete:               I think it’s the best it’s been in probably like the last 15 years. Especially in markets like San Francisco and New York, it’s very much so kind of candidates market, I’d say even especially in San Francisco. You have more tech sales jobs than tech sales people. So again, it’s very common for candidates within a given match which is just one week to receive between two and six interviewer requests from our partner tech companies. And these are really cool companies. They’re doing interesting things from like 20-500 employers.

 

Kevin:            Are you looking primarily for people that have sales experience? Or are you looking for people who come out of school looking to get a sales job?

 

Pete:               Just to tell you the back story on where we’ve come and what like our direction is. When we first started, we kind of catered to every single sales position. We had like VPs of Sales signing up on our site. We still have VPs of Sales signing up on our site. I would say as a candidate, you’re going to find kind of the most benefit from our site and receive the most modern request. Our folks that are right out of school, they either graduated or went through a sales program while they were in college which is actually a common thing now with colleges or they worked for like college works painting and they were selling door to door, these types of candidates are really in high demand by our partner companies.

 

And then I would say like in that same kind of bucket we have candidates that have like one to six or seven years of experience that also receive a ton of interview requests. I’m not saying that the candidates that are sales managers or Director of Sales or VP of Sales, you won’t receive interview requests obviously because kind of your position is more specialized. You may not get six interview requests in under five days. So just an FYI on that.

 

Kevin:            Yup. I’m just kind of curious about your sweet spot.

 

Pete:               Yeah. Totally.

 

Kevin:            So again if people want to find out about you, they can go to gogohire.com and click there. And also if they want to find out more about you like if we have any marketplace entrepreneurs out there who want to bounce some stuff off of you, is LinkedIn the best way to get a hold of you?

 

Pete:               I’m happy to speak with anyone at anytime. On email, it’s pete@gogohire.com. And then also, you can look me up in LinkedIn. I’m on that site all the time. It’s just Pete Ryan. And Pete Ryan and Gogohire, I’ll come up.

 

Kevin:            Perfect. Well, for all of our listeners, to get more information on Gogohire, check out the show notes. And there will be all the links and information that we discussed here. Thank you so much, Pete, for your time today. And I look forward to seeing you guys blast off like a rocket ship.

 

Pete:               Awesome. Thanks so much, Kevin. Appreciate your time.

 

Kevin:            All right. Take care.

 

Pete:               You too.

 

Kevin:            So that’s it for today’ show everybody. I’d like to thank Pete Ryan from Gogohire for joining us here today. They’re doing great stuff. If you’re a sales exec looking for a new gig, check them out. Also if you like to learn more about Gogohire, we got all their information in the show notes. Go to www.near-me.com. Click on the blog and then go to the podcast listing. If you like today’s show, we’d really appreciate it if you could go to iTunes and leave us a five-star review. It really helps us out. Also, subscribe to the podcast while you’re there. Make it a great day and thanks.