Alex Epure (Qureos) - Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] There hasn't been an easier time to hire than today. You have more tools than ever. You have more platforms than ever. Everyone is still complaining about hiring. How much of your time was taken up with hiring? 90% of my days. In the first four or five months, that's all I did. We were in Sheraton lobby at like 1:00 AM after a dinner with the team.

Said, look, I don't know how this is gonna go. I dunno where this is gonna go. The world changed like three times over. You go from grow, grow, grow, money was cheap, to nobody can raise anymore. Thrive in chaos. I didn't know if I would. Are you a job displacement vehicle? From a recruitment perspective, the actual displacement is that somebody else that is able to do your job and his job and three other jobs at the same time.

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Alex, welcome to the podcast, my friend. Appreciate having me. Thank you. And congratulations on the round, $5 million seed led by Prosus, which is unusual. Generally they're Series A and beyond, I think. Yeah, [00:02:00] or B. I think they did their seed back in September, October, I wanna say regionally, but, uh, maybe tell me a small bit about how that round came together.

Uh, you hadn't raised since, was it '21, '22? '22, different world back in '22 into what the world is now. Different company as well in many respects in terms of the mission. Similar, but yeah. Company itself, business model maybe has pivoted. Uh, tell me about the round. So it was a little bit unexpected. First of all, we were not planning to raise that much initially.

So we started first thinking that, um, 'cause the first round was a pre-seed for us. Yes. And we could have gone directly to Series A now. But we just wanted to follow sort of the well-trodden paths that's there. Yes. Um, so initially we went with the strategy of doing an internal round with internal investors.

This is why a few current investors followed on into the round. [00:03:00] And Oryx invested two times even. In this round, they led essentially the starting point of this round. Nice. And then when Prosus came in as well, they followed on. Shout out Ivo. Good friends. It's the first time I see a DD where if it doesn't pass a pilot with an operating company.

On a tech side, it doesn't go to the DD at all. I've heard from Naaman at Oryx. That's intense. Yeah, so we did that with Prosus and different teams in different operating companies, outside of this region as well, which was a little bit scary because you never know if you haven't been trying your tech in countries where.

Even the laws could be different, especially from a labour and HR perspective. You never know how that is gonna be perceived, but that went really, really well. They tested it against a couple of other solutions. And then from a relevancy perspective, it came out to be the highest. And that's what built conviction essentially.

And then it was more about how do we meet the right amount, not from a ticket perspective, but the right amount of share from Prosus's perspective. And it's why we needed to be creative in terms of how we structure things. And [00:04:00] then obviously Prosus came in with a much larger ticket than we initially talked about.

Yes. And that's how it turned out. But we're super, super happy to have them on board. I think they're a technology-first investor where they are very clear with the thesis. At least for us, we knew that they are AI in workforce and then AI in commerce. And we were a perfect fit for AI workforce for them.

Obviously very large portfolio, both of operating companies, very well known companies as well, as well as portfolio companies in this region and outside of the region. I think we are probably one of the last investments for now in this region that they're doing. And you're absolutely right, they typically do much larger ticket sizes, so I think it was just the right time, the right people, and then having the right technology as well, and it just worked.

Okay, we've skipped ahead. Would you mind describing or giving me the elevator pitch for Qureos? Am I pronouncing that correctly? Perfectly, yes. I unfortunately have to admit that I struggled with the pronunciation until I realised it was probably like a week. [00:05:00] It took me a week of looking at it before it clicked.

Oh, that's very clever. Qureos. Okay, I get it. Anyway, I digress. When we wanted to decide about the name, we wanted to really butcher the spelling of it. So firstly we went with "curious" as properly spelled. It was obviously taken and all permutations of that were also taken. So then we said, you know, if we're gonna do a little bit of misspelling, then let's do it properly.

Go for it. Yeah. All in. And that's why we, so, a lot of people think it comes from Spanish. Yeah, I see the vision. It's so many things, but it breaks the ice and once you get it, then it clicks essentially. So it has a good purpose. In layman's terms, what Qureos does is essentially to help reduce the time to hire.

And we've taken a slightly different approach than being a point solution. We've taken an infrastructure or an operating layer approach that allows us to really focus on the top of the funnel first. Okay. Meaning candidates. So if you think about from a sales perspective, you have a funnel or pipeline.

Yeah. We have the same in [00:06:00] talent acquisition. So focusing on the top of the funnel, making sure that we can get deep into the market in terms of access of talent in many different job boards or talent sources. That unlocks a lot. Once you have a huge top of the funnel, it's gonna be much easier to find what you're looking for.

Even a needle in the haystack. Yeah, even in the early days, you start manual and then you start automating and then you figure things out. And once you get really automated, then you can find a needle in a haystack very, very quickly. Think of it from a sales perspective, if you have a CRM, a HubSpot, whatever you might have, if your sales rep has a huge pipeline.

You can make target, it's an input-output game. And that's the thought process here. So that's from one side. And then the other is, yes, we started on SMB being an immature platform. But then as we matured, we obviously are mid-market sweet spot right now and then going towards enterprise.

As we went into mid-market and up, it's gonna be very evident that there will be another system in place. An SAP or Oracle of the world and so on. So we are not [00:07:00] gonna be forklifting or exchanging those. I mean, we can, if the customer wants, but that's another integrating and operating layer that we've also established to make sure that we integrate seamlessly with anything.

And if you think about it from a process perspective, recruitment or hiring is one of the most repeated processes in any economy. Every company does it every single time and at scale. I would probably, I don't have numbers on this, so don't quote me. That's okay. But I would love to get some numbers.

I would probably believe that financial transactions are the most. And then hiring is somewhere out there. And we essentially sit in the middle of that workflow, and that's the purpose. We are not competing with job boards. We are partnering with them.

We integrate with all of them. So that's essentially what we focus on. Okay. Amazing. I wanna dig into the product, but we'll leave that maybe for a small bit later. And let's maybe rewind the clock because what you're describing there is not maybe what Qureos was three years ago. It's changed quite a bit.

So I'd love to unpack that, but maybe first a small bit on your background as well. You were a [00:08:00] Cisco alumnus. You were there for quite some time, I believe. What leads you to make the jump to Swvl? Can you talk to me about that time? So, yeah, I spent nine years, I think, with Cisco.

I joined in a graduate program in Amsterdam for about a year and moved back to Sweden. That's when I, through some of my mentors that I had from the graduate program, got the opportunity to move from Sweden to Dubai. And I was part of what was then called Global Enterprise. So managing the global large enterprise accounts from a sales perspective. So although I came here to Cisco where there's an office in every country and large offices, I was still alone because I was reporting globally. So imagine coming in and you're the person that leads now, or takes the global account from the local team.

You're not gonna be perceived in a good way. But anyways, I had an amazing time at Cisco. It was what shaped me in many ways and amazing mentors around me. One of the reasons why I moved to the region was because of mentors. And Cisco's office is on a campus [00:09:00] in Dubai. It's in Knowledge Village.

Yeah. So every time we went to Starbucks or downstairs, there were students all around us. And because I'm a product of mentorship, I wanted to give back. So I had a few mentees myself. All of them were sick and tired of education or learning more. They wanted to get a job. How do you get a job when you don't have a CV or anything to show for yourself?

And that's, I was trying to be the middleman essentially. And it was very tough, was successful with a few of them. And then back then there was a program that Future Foundation released, an accelerator. Like an incubator. Yeah. And in partnership with different government bodies, KHDA being one of them.

They put together a challenge each. So the challenge then was how do we help the people transitioning from education into the workforce? That was exactly what was my sort of side passion at that [00:10:00] point.

Long story short, applied to that and it was on the side of Cisco, as a passion. If I can interject, Alex, why was mentorship so important to you in the first place? I don't know. For me it's always, first of all, I would not be where I am without specifically three people. By far.

And you get a, for me, I get a different gratification from helping someone. But not helping anyone in that sense, it's someone that actually wants it and has that intention from their side. They want, I usually say the people that want to take the bull by the horns. Just show them a couple of doors and then they really go in.

I like that. And I was given those opportunities and that's what led me to take those actions at that point. And I guess that's why I never thought Qureos would be anything at that point. There was no Qureos whatsoever. And so long story short, got into the program and it was more about how do we solve that challenge?

That was essentially the V [00:11:00] one or V 0.5 of Qureos. How do we help people that just graduated to first demonstrate skills and get into jobs. Nobody wanted to learn anything new. And then at that point there was no AI, none of that. So we grew up to about a hundred students or graduates, had a partnership with 14 universities at one point.

But nobody wanted to hire them. That was the problem. Makes things difficult. And in this part of the world, graduate programs are not that common. No, they're not. That's something I've definitely noticed. When I joined Cisco in the Netherlands, they were taking a new cohort every single year.

It was a natural ingestion. Same in Ireland. I mean, it's an expectation nearly that you just go into a graduate program for two to three years. And then you kind of enter the workforce. Exactly. You make a decision whether you stay on or you're going somewhere else. It's not the same here.

It's much harder. So that's when we sort of tried to first attack the problem from, okay, let's help them to, not upskill, but to demonstrate their skills. So this is where the first version of Qureos was: let them [00:12:00] solve certain workplace problems. Micro projects. Where they can solve them and prove that they actually can do some of these things.

What did that look like? So think about a random example. Think about, for example, a micro project being, let's say if you want to become a product manager. So let's redesign and prove the conversion of Amazon's first page or product page. That could be a micro project. And the result is not what matters.

The approach is what matters, how you're thinking about it. And then the mentor's role in this is to give some guidance. There would've been certain online sessions for the group. You can also book one-to-one sessions for free. And we had over a hundred mentors at one point.

That were giving, you know, pay-it-forward type of their time to support these people. So we got to a certain level where we got jobs and we matched people. You could only be matched to a job if you completed certain projects and you get verified skills in that sense.

And that worked to a certain level, but then we had customers that said, hey, I'm only hiring two [00:13:00] or three of these per year. But I need to hire a hundred of these. Essentially, can you help me with this? So it's further up the food chain and broader as well. And this is where we knew that we are leaving money on the table, essentially.

So the pivot itself, the mission is still the same, but it's more how do we fulfil a certain demand and how do we solve this? But then I moved into Swvl. How was that transition? 'Cause Swvl was hypergrowth, wasn't it, at that point?

Yeah, hypergrowth. And for me, going from super structured organisation in enterprise, very large ticket sizes and average deals, to now trying to even launch Saudi in transportation during COVID. Very difficult. But I think I found a different side of myself: that I thrive in chaos. I didn't know if I would, and it was an exploration for myself.

And I really liked that. I love the team. The people that I met there got me to learn the zero to one. I mean, Cisco is probably not one to ten, it's probably a hundred to a thousand. So it was [00:14:00] the other side of the spectrum and that was invaluable for me. Priceless. So for me.

When I joined Swvl, I knew that it is time for me to explore the other side of the spectrum other than corporate. And I could have either jumped ship to do something or take a stepping stone to see if it's even for me, essentially. So came out of that really with amazing network and friendships and experience.

Loved it. But the hardest thing for me when I built a team on the B2B side in Swvl was hiring. We were contracted with almost every recruitment agency, we had subscriptions everywhere. And still the only thing I was doing was screening candidates, manually interviewing candidates. 90% of them, more than that, was a no.

In the first three minutes. How much of your time was taken up with hiring? 90% of my days in the first four or five months. That's all I did. And it was, I mean, if I would've had something like Qureos then, 90% of the interviews I took would not have [00:15:00] even happened. This could have been filtered out long before. So this is when I noticed that it's not the tools.

And this is also, what, 2022, '23? Yeah, '22, '23, somewhere there. And it's not even a long time ago, but if you look today, there hasn't been an easier time to hire than today. Hiring is the easiest today. You have more tools than ever. You have more platforms than ever. And the candidate can create their CV to be stellar in less than a minute.

So that means you should be in a good spot. Everyone is still complaining about hiring. So it's very evident that it's not because there is a shortage of talent. Effort, everybody puts effort. Everybody has good intention.

It's really that it's so fragmented, essentially. So that was kind of, if you combine how hard it was for us with hiring, finding the right people in Swvl, versus how Qureos started, combining these two, this is what [00:16:00] led us to essentially double down. And when we had enough candidates on Qureos, when we reached about 500,000.

Then we knew. Okay. Now is the time when we sort of flip the page and we start with V1 of the B2B product. You met your co-founder at Swvl as well? Yes. Is that correct? Yes. How did that relationship come about? Very organic. So when we joined the B2B side of Swvl, Osama was then a market launcher.

So think of a market launcher, the first man, Columbus style, going in, figuring out is this a market that we want to go into? Yes? No? Why, why not? And so on. And if yes, then he would essentially help to set the foundation.

The problem we had is COVID hit, so he got stuck in Saudi for the longest time. You're kidding. Yeah. So I met Osama in person after, I dunno how many months? Like seven months, although we worked together every day. Wow. [00:17:00] Funny dynamics, essentially. And so we worked really well together.

We launched Saudi, obviously UAE, and then a couple of other GCC countries. And one day, this was after the lockdowns, I went to Saudi to meet the team and meet customers there as well. In the summer, I still remember we were in, I think it was Sheraton lobby. At like 1:00 AM after a dinner with the team.

And he was like, man, I'm thinking about leaving. So I was asking him, what do you wanna do? I have no idea. Let's chat, let's chat. And then I said, I have an idea. We spent the next three hours until 3, 4 AM in the morning in that lobby explaining to him this, and this was.

Still in that V1 of Qureos. And I said, look, I don't know how this is gonna go. I dunno where this is gonna go. We haven't even raised money at all. And it's been on a slow burner on the side. So what do you think? And he's like, gimme 48 hours to think about it.

And that's it. What's the biggest takeaway or lesson that you learned from [00:18:00] that time at Swvl?

Good one. There's many, but I think what I saw in Swvl was, I'm gonna tell you something that was an epiphany for me. How well you can execute even if you have ambiguity and not enough data points. That you can really go at speed as long as it's reversible.

Go for it. That is something that doesn't happen in corporate. I remember I'm coming from a type of culture where it is, oh, let's talk about it next week. Right. And yeah, but I'm off next week. Okay. Let's schedule it for three weeks. Loop back on that one. And then I go to Swvl, where we do things today.

And there's no next week. Unless it's Friday at 7:00 PM then it's next week, but it's the next day. And I love that. Is there any example in particular of something that you worked [00:19:00] on that sticks out to you to that end? Everything was like that. Literally just speed. Speed, and because you were in that high, high growth.

But the thing that I've probably learned the most, what to make sure of is to have the right foundation. When you scale, like really scale, make sure that the ground you're standing on is really solid. So that things that work at X scale, when you go to the next phase, also hold up. Because growing from 1 million to 3 million is a certain structure and process, but growing from three to 10 million requires a different structure and different foundation.

Not saying that things didn't work out in Swvl, but it was evident that what we thought would work later, suddenly didn't work. Essentially. Look, it was a combination of many different things. Market timing obviously wasn't ideal as well. Were you responsible on the sales side of things?

Or partnerships? I mean, from a title perspective, in startups it's always like that. From title, yes, it looks very nebulous. Even incorporation of a company in Saudi came under me, and even legal. [00:20:00] And then the HR governance side in that country came under me, of course, with help from other team members.

But it was really how to structure the B2B side. The task and whatever was the obstacle ahead of us, let's deal with it. I didn't care about title. No, that's understandable. What was the sales cycle like at Swvl? Like what was the sales motion in terms of when you're in that hypergrowth phase?

And the KPIs are just ridiculous. Like, you know, do you have to strive for realism? Oh, I think in any startup you have to do that. It's the sales process, I would say, and even the persona was one that I was never used to. Me going from speaking to IT where everything is very documented, to now speaking with customers that need to move 2,000 people at 8:00 AM and they can't be late by a minute.

And then you have to make sure that operations aligns to that. And then making sure that suppliers that own the fleet essentially have the right incentives to make sure that [00:21:00] they don't drop the ball. It's not really just sales. No. It's a lot of operational alignment. And I realised that success in sales in Swvl and such businesses is backwards from the supplier side.

Not the customer. If you can control the supplier and the operations from pricing, but also operations perspective, you'll win deals much faster. Okay. That's my Swvl digression. I'm just always curious. So in terms of speaking to people about it, okay, you're gone full time now. I'm curious, what are the first steps?

What does this look like? You said you hadn't raised funding, you've got Osama on board now. Where do you go from here? Well, the world changed I think in that year. This was second half, more or less, second half of '22. The world changed like three times over. You go from grow, grow, grow, money was cheap, to nobody can raise anymore.

And you have to think about bottom line and then wait. But you cannot only think about bottom line [00:22:00] because then you won't grow. Was that a crazy environment to start up in? For me, I couldn't even navigate it. I didn't know. And as a first-time founder, didn't understand. I mean, I just raised, how do I even manage investors' expectations?

And everyone thinks differently. That year was really for me to navigate, to understand. And that's a mistake we made. Do we care so much about all the inputs we get from all angles? We should definitely go backwards from a plan that we have and don't let that influence us too much.

All the external opinions. And we got very good investors that told us the truth and the ugly behind the market and what we should and should not do. So it was really a year for us to really first of all, learn a lot. 'Cause we were very early, so our first mission was let's fail and let's fail fast.

It's much easier to know what not to do than to know what to do. And that's what we did a lot. But our main focus was really to grow the talent side first. The candidate pool? [00:23:00] Yes. And because we know that whenever we're gonna get more jobs in and demand, if we don't have enough talent, then we need to be able to find talent.

And we were not integrated at all yet at that point. So that was the main focus. How do we get them? And that's the mentors. The better pedigree we got on the mentors, the more talent we could attract. We got projects from different businesses, Amazon and the likes. And that was great.

And we're pulling people. We didn't have money to spend on performance marketing. We never did. So it was just focused on navigating this whirlwind of macroeconomics that was happening worldwide at that point, and then growing the supply side. How did you grow the supply side? A lot of growth hacking.

Is this just rolling up the sleeves and trying every which way that you can? I mean, we knew a few things for sure. Depends on what type of talent. But if you look at people that are in the last year of university and then up, 'cause we were focusing on early-in-career.

From that point until two, three [00:24:00] years of experience. There's a phrase that kept cropping up: learn to earn. So we had that model where, when you did activities on the platform, you would get these credits.

And you could cash them out essentially. But we knew that all of these people eventually want to get a job. And to get a job, you need to potentially prove yourself in one way or another. This is what the recruitment process is about today, even. So we played on that and we tried to get different apprenticeships.

We partnered with DP World very early, was one of the first COVID partnerships. And they have a program for early career called Mohi. Through that we were able to get placement spots at about 30 different companies that they work with, like Maersk, Siemens and so on and so forth.

So that had a lot of pull and that was one. And then with that one we were able to snowball more of that sort. But it was always backwards from demand in terms of jobs, trying to see what is needed to get this job. And then we pull in the talent, so to speak. There could be a mentorship, it could be [00:25:00] different micro projects they can work on on the platform.

And then we pull them in. How does Qureos then evolve over time? The market is essentially saying I wanna hire other people, simple as that. And also, we also realised that when we start monetising, and we did monetise even on the B2C side as well, it's gonna be a lot more sustainable to monetise on the B2B side.

From a margin perspective. From building a sustainable business. Stickier as well. Of course. But also if you think about it, if you're gonna have candidates pay for X, Y, Z, there is a paradox essentially here. The better we are at placing people.

The faster they're gonna churn. This is true. So that's not good for us. It's the problem with edtech, isn't it, in many respects, in that eventually you graduate. So once we saw this in numbers, we were like, okay, [00:26:00] let's remove the gateway. Because once we remove the gateway, we're gonna get even more candidates.

And we saw that. We removed the gate and then obviously it's much better to focus on the B2B side. But then we needed to also be ready for the B2B side, not just from a tech perspective, but also from candidates and data. 'Cause we are big on data and the type of insights that we have is thankfully from that first phase of Qureos that we were able to achieve.

Do you think you should have made that pivot more into the B2B side quicker in retrospect? I mean, of course hindsight is 20/20. I think obviously pivots should always be, look, when I look at pivots, I'm not ashamed of a pivot, but I always look at them in a slightly different way.

If you can reuse the majority of what you're pivoting from into the new direction. For me, that's just a natural evolution. So that was the case for us. Essentially we just monetise differently. [00:27:00] Of course, there's a lot of go-to-market changes.

But we could use everything that we had before. We scrapped some B2C code, of course. You're not ripping up the entire thing and starting from scratch. Exactly. We just had to comment out a few modules and the same B2C platform or candidate platform is still live today.

From that first version. So for us it was a good pivot. It was needed. Could have done it earlier. Yes, of course. But then, would 200,000 candidates be okay? Versus 500,000? That's a good point. I dunno. Today I'd imagine AI changes everything. Tell me about.

Maybe your first experimentations with, whether it be OpenAI or Anthropic, et cetera, what that looked like when you first realised, hmm, okay, we need to rethink things here and how we can best incorporate this. So the first absolute first time when we saw a huge optimisation, I would say was, so these projects that I was talking about, the way we [00:28:00] were creating them was literally working with someone from a big company, let's say someone from Cisco. That is in that role already. And we would create these projects backwards from a problem statement that they might have in their daily work. That means we have a program manager on our side that is dealing with a mentor, meeting week in, week out for a few weeks, and creating a series of these projects takes a ton of time.

Inefficient. Imagine when AI came in, and you could do this in a couple of minutes. That was, wow. Now we can really scale this up. So that was the first time. But remember, the purpose of us doing these projects and mentorship was really guidance and demonstration of skills.

We can do that with AI. This is true. So this means we don't need the mentor. And also another data point we got, if we looked at all the mentorship sessions that were conducted, 80-plus percent were questions that a mentor could have answered in writing. Hey, how should I think about this role? It was guidance.

It wasn't really in-depth mentorship [00:29:00] essentially. So even in the early days of AI, AI would've done that much, much better. And it was perfect. I think I'm gonna take back what I answered earlier. Go for it. I did the pivot at the right time. I agree. But from the outside, at least it seems really well timed, unintentionally.

It was at the time when AI came and then perfectly aligned for us to be able to do still the stuff we were doing on the B2C side. But now fully with tech. Essentially. So now when you got me to think about it. So yeah, this is the starting point of things and now we do so much with it, but we've enabled the platforms.

It was always AI-native because AI came at the point when we pivoted and we were starting to build out the B2B. So we built it from a blank page with the view that, okay, it's not just about taking a segment of the process and making it faster. It's not about driving faster. I usually use analogies of cars.

That's okay. But it's more about how do we make sure that it has a time to [00:30:00] value that is short and it needs to be so simple. Simple, simple, simple. Because the persona that we are dealing with in HR are usually not tech savvy. They've done the same thing for the last 15, 20 years. So there's an unlearning and relearning.

So simplicity was the key here. And we needed to make sure that AI is just naturally part of that. Not just a completely new way of doing things. And so we did a lot of experimentation. We thought a chatbot, like ChatGPT, is gonna change the game. No, it didn't at all.

Really? No. Because in the end there's a matching that needs to happen in the backend. Now, if you ask someone to put in their criteria, and if you tell them, can you put in industry, you're gonna see skills in the industry input. So of course you can improve that with product.

But it needed to be even simpler than that. You can't just rely on people saying what they want and then suddenly the platform is gonna know what you meant. And what we say and what we mean is usually not the same. So that's why chatbot alone, standalone, didn't [00:31:00] work fully and we had to evolve. And now it's just.

Embedded into the platform in a way that feels natural. And the platform is very modular. Like Lego. So if my process looks a certain way, then I can configure the platform in that way as well. So it's recognisable to what the stakeholder would've been used to in recruitment internally, but you're kind of supercharging it. Yes. Supercharging with AI, but also solving a gap that came as a problem for us. So this region, for example, is quite unique. I'm from Sweden, so this is even illegal to do. But hiring based on nationality, based on gender.

Forget about it in Europe. Oh yeah. You'd best believe it. But here you have to, to even make quota to not get a penalty, whether it's Emiratisation, Saudisation and so on. And if you're now a company and you're looking to source candidates, where are you most likely gonna source from? A global job board.

Some of the global ones don't even allow these data points. Some CVs that come don't even have those data points. So we faced [00:32:00] this problem, so how do we solve it using AI? We built a prediction engine that can now predict, for example, the nationality of a person, although they didn't mention it, the gender, which is important because.

If I'm hiring a female Saudi, I get two expat slots. As a quota trade-off. So there are, this is the reason why we had to sort of think about how do we use AI to be compliant, but at the same time solve the actual localised problem statements that companies are facing, which job boards don't solve.

This is true. I hadn't really considered how important localisation would be from that perspective and how different it is here. Yeah. The UAE has or will increase the Emiratisation target. Saudi has already. There are some departments, functions in an organisation in Saudi that are a hundred percent Saudised.

HR, a hundred percent. Can't even have expats. Wow. I did not know that. Yeah. It's one of the things that struck me here initially, when [00:33:00] putting together a CV a couple of years ago, was this sort of insistence on having a picture of yourself as well, which I found so incredibly strange, coming from an Irish context at least.

Okay. Can we talk about, on the B2B side of things, you have a really diverse array of clients and companies that you work with. Do you work with any and all companies? Is there a particular industry that you work more so with than others? I can probably tell you what we don't do.

It's probably easier. That's helpful and faster. We don't focus on roles where the talent is not typically online or applying through an online channel. That typically tends to be blue-collar type of roles. We also don't do C-level type of roles.

Why? I don't think I've ever met a CEO that ever applied to a role. You're unlikely to apply via Indeed or something like that. It's always a network play and very high touch. So those two are the ends of the spectrum. We don't do those. Everything else in between, we can do.

[00:34:00] And then from a customer perspective or type of industries we focus on, it's kind of evolved as the product matured. In the early days of the B2B product on the platform, because of lack of certain features that needed time, we were more towards the SMB side. Once we got integrations with systems such as SAP, Oracle and others in place, that's when we knew we could push the boundary a bit higher up into the market and go towards mid-market and enterprise.

So it was an evolution. But now what we are focusing on is essentially companies that are probably mid-market and up. But the more important aspect is the volume of hires that you do per year. You could be, for example, a startup or an SMB that are growing like crazy, which is fine. Then I think it would be a fit to use Qureos.

And the threshold that we set is at least 15 open roles per year. 'Cause that's where you are really gonna see a bang for the buck. And true ROI from this, whether that comes from time compression of hiring or whether [00:35:00] that's coming from recruitment costs, you're gonna start to see the ROI from investing in a platform like this.

Otherwise you can do a lot of it with one person. What are the USPs when you're pitching to prospective clients? Is it, obviously first of all, that you'll hire a great person who's fit for the role, but is it like that compression in terms of timelines, or all of these things?

It depends who you speak to. But if you speak with the head of hiring or talent acquisition in HR, who are you going after actually, out of curiosity? It's always HR. Always HR. Some industries or some type of companies, it could be the head of the business, it could be engineering.

Or if it's a construction type of industry, then there is a project side. 'Cause they win projects and they need to staff them up. But usually it's HR. So if you speak with the head of HR, then recruitment costs is obviously a big thing in addition to time to hire.

But if you speak with the recruiters and the acquisition teams, it's always the time and the burden on workload that is on their side. And confidence. How do I know that [00:36:00] I'm able to shortlist the 2, 3, 4, 5 people to the hiring manager so that I don't have to go back and forth? And the biggest killer of time in hiring is actually not the process, it's the reset. Because.

The hiring manager tells the recruiter, this is what I'm looking for. Spends very little time explaining. Imagine if that might be a head of engineering that is looking for a Ruby on Rails engineer. I don't even know what that is. Imagine a recruiter knowing what that is. So that recruiter having to source candidates, screen them, initially shortlist, that's a big knowledge gap there in the first place.

Yeah, exactly. And then the hiring manager gets the pipeline, no, this is not what I asked for. That's not what I meant. And now you have to reset the whole thing. And the reset kills momentum a lot. And so how does Qureos address that specific pain point? Yeah. I mean, that's one of them.

So how is this addressed in the market today without technology? Having specialised recruiters. They know their game. And now think of Iris, our AI, now having that specialisation [00:37:00] across all domains. So, for example, we had, I'll give you an example. We had a customer, forgot the role right now, but there was a title.

That they were looking for a particular job. And it turned out that within that, they were saying there are three types of specialisation. Iris said, no, there's actually 11. They didn't even know that themselves. So when we mapped it out, ah, okay, we are actually looking for this. So we changed the title and we saw a completely different type of people applying.

So we had to reset once because we listened to the customer, but then when they wanted to listen to our recommendations and they were like, okay, let's change. Then just changing the title was a game changer for that particular job. And that's because Iris knows and AI is way more specialised in many of these domains.

What does the business model actually look like then? How do you get paid? So we essentially have two types of offerings. We have the platform offering. Think of this as subscription, usage-based. And this is for companies that have an internal team that they want to enable and let them use the [00:38:00] platform.

This can integrate with any system. But also integrate with all the sourcing channels globally. We integrate with over 2,400 sourcing channels globally. And then on the other side you have what we call managed services, essentially for the type of companies or employers that are looking for an outcome.

With or without a guarantee. So there's two options here. If you wanna hire for a particular role, but you don't want to put in the effort. Think of this as: you're driving the car. We are the passenger next to you. So you pay for one job and you want to get as an outcome pre-interviewed candidates. We won't guarantee that you will hire from this, you could hire one, multiple, or none. We don't give you the guarantee. But we do that work as a service. The other aspect is where you actually want to get an outcome and a guarantee. Now we are the driver and you're the passenger in the car. And that means we will charge you per placed candidate.

This is the traditional recruitment agency style. [00:39:00] Both of these are for different types of customers. So if you are, let's say, a customer service manager, you need 20 customer service agents per month. Random example, that's one job. Then it's perfect to take the first option. I just want pre-interviewed candidates, gimme a free-flowing pipeline.

That's a perfect solution for that. You might not need a whole subscription for that. The other one could be tricky roles, could be confidential roles, or could be companies that don't have a team at all and it's a founder or absent team structure essentially. Then it makes sense to do that as a service.

Where is the margin better, on the platform or the managed service? Margin-wise is better on the platform. Ticket-size-wise is better on the managed service. What's the revenue mix at the moment? It's about 65/35, leaning towards 60/40, on the platform side. Thank you for answering that. Most people don't.

That's great. Do you have any interesting insights? Obviously, considering you're sitting on a lot of data as far as [00:40:00] hiring trends, particular roles, we've seen a massive uptick in AI-oriented roles over the course of the last 12 to 18 months, although there's a lot of talk about AI in this market.

Market being the whole region here. The adoption of AI, the intention of adopting AI is very high. The actuality of it is very low. I'm talking on the HR side of things a lot more. And the readiness to adopt it is extremely low. Really? Very low. In this part of the world. And we have customers in the US.

So I have the benchmark of US versus here. And the language of just speaking about AI with HR, there is a completely different level. They understand. You can say "inference" to a person from HR in the US. HR here wouldn't even understand what the word means. It's a huge difference and I think there's a lag in the market.

From an HR [00:41:00] department perspective actually, or the companies themselves making sure that their team, one, understands, and I'm speaking from a talent acquisition perspective, they are not at risk, but they need to change. And so that's one. The second is talent acquisition will change whether we want it or not, it's gonna change.

How that change is gonna look is that talent acquisition, recruiters and so on, are essentially transitioning from being task-oriented and activity-based, making sure that they do this huge list of things on a daily basis per job, to becoming relationship builders, very much like sales.

What's the difference between a sales rep and talent acquisition moving forward? In sales, you sell the product, a solution, a service. In talent acquisition, you sell the company. But you're selling to a candidate to join, or you're selling to a client to pay you. But it's the same job.

Everyone's an SDR really. I think investors are to a certain extent as well. There's an element of it. But talent acquisition had very little time for doing this before. [00:42:00] By virtue of them being burdened so much. And I don't see many companies actually helping their team members in that transition, to first give them the confidence.

That they're not at risk. And we see that in the sales cycle as well. If we go bottoms up, there's a much higher risk of being blocked. Of course, if we go top down, then we need to make sure that we get the sponsorship from the team. So this is quite evident. It's also one of the reasons why, for example.

We have a customer success team that actually acts as, not only a consultant, but as a pal to the recruiters that need to learn. And we see that it takes approximately, on average, an engaged customer that onboards, it takes them about two to three months and then we can let go afterwards.

Of course, the CS team is still there, but there is that market transition that needs to happen at scale. I mean, I would love to be able to do it single-handedly, but this is a responsibility of many other companies. And there is a huge gap that I can see in the market. I'd love to talk about job displacement then, maybe [00:43:00] from a couple of different angles.

First of all, are you a job displacement vehicle from a recruitment perspective? Like ultimately, will there need to be fewer recruiters? Are you phasing out a layer that currently exists in order for Qureos to be successful? Does that necessitate the partial erasure of a particular layer?

No, and we never have that intention. The simple answer is no. However, and this goes beyond Qureos, beyond talent acquisition or HR, a lot of people are going to be displaced if you are a laggard. If you don't power yourself with the knowledge on how to be able to do what you did at scale without scaling with a team, but doing it with tech, with AI, and different tools.

You're gonna, somebody else is going to get ahead of you. And so the actual displacement is that somebody else that is able to do your job and his job and three other jobs [00:44:00] at the same time. So I'm a firm believer of that. But if you become very enabled in what you do with the help of tools as well, obviously there's gonna be a need for you in any type of role, be it in HR or talent acquisition.

Because in the end, I still see talent acquisition, if we double down on that, and sales is quite similar. It's very relationship-based. And we see that with AI interviews. We have about 9% or so of all AI interviews that happen on the platform where the candidates still want to speak with a human.

So as a talent acquisition professional, become really good at that. Good at the things that AI is at least not accepted within yet. So displacement can be reduced. But for those that are not taking that leap, unfortunately, that is inevitable. If hiring slows down globally, which the suggestion is that this is going to happen in certain roles.

Not in everything. Is that a good thing for you? Does that have an adverse effect? Do you become [00:45:00] more important in that reality? Like if hiring slows down, does greater competition for roles mean Qureos plays a more important, outsized role in that reality? Or if there's fewer people being hired, is that.

A danger? I mean, depends on how big of a downturn that is. It's true. Look, this is all speculation in many respects. But I'm trying to project. So I think we have a little bit of a wedge here because one, we are not geo-specific. This is something I wanted to ask about as well actually.

So was the ambition always, we can build a global company from here, we don't have to be constrained? No. Even today, we focus on this region. But technology-wise, we are not restricted. It works globally because we always had to have a deep reach into the market from a talent perspective.

So that's why it's been global from that side. It's one of the unique things about the market here as well, isn't it, the extent to which you're always bringing in talent from abroad. It's always an [00:46:00] import. And the domestic versus import distribution is quite similar. Depends on the industry.

But then when you look at a downturn from a hiring perspective, I don't believe that there will be a time when there's not gonna be hiring for anyone. And because we are so broad in terms of industry, if some goes down, others go up. So we can be flexible in that sense. So now we need to take geo as a flexibility and industry as a flexibility.

I'm not that concerned about this. We just have to make sure that we see the patterns and we can forecast it. And being nimble, learn fast enough. What jobs go first? I don't wanna say creativity per se, but things that are very input-oriented. And just, you know, you just have to press buttons.

Done. Content, you can create near 90%-ready content in no time with AI. And it's getting ridiculously good now. Ridiculously good. And if you're really good at prompting as well, you get very, very close to amazing. [00:47:00] Those are essentially all the heavy administrative, task-oriented type of jobs that are just gonna be much, much better.

With AI, much, much faster. Creativity, this is where, and relationship, this is where you really need a human. How important is AI literacy as it pertains to the job market at the moment? Is that something that talent acquisition specialists are screening for? If you have the intent and the willingness, where do you start?

And if you don't come from a tech background, and I've seen people, I don't wanna mention specifics here, that have a difficult time to know how to share a screen on Google Meet. I've made a couple of those mistakes myself. So if we talk about that level, how would you, if you're that person now, know where to start to become AI literate?

So I think they, I don't even think they understand what AI can do in the first place. [00:48:00] So it's first a realisation for them to understand what it really is. My mom is one of them. She knows ChatGPT as, in terms of, a Google search.

Easier. That's it. And she can speak any language much easier. And that's where it stops. Google search with no ads. Well, it had no ads. So I think the first step that needs to be done is not just, do they need to become literate, it's do they even understand what they need to be literate in?

First, then comes the step, how do I get that? And that was back to what I meant earlier, which is that knowledge gap. The adoption, the intention to adopt is there, but it's not happening at the pace of how fast the market is and the technology is moving. Now, ultimately the best talent will find a way to adapt.

It's kind of the long and the short of it. Absolutely. If you have the intent. You'll figure it out one way or another. Those are gonna be the ones that are not gonna be displaced. They'll probably move from one role to another, but they're not gonna be displaced. And the others are gonna be displaced and try to figure out another type of job that they [00:49:00] can do.

$5 million seed round. What are you gonna do with all that money? Sales, GTM pretty much, most of it, and product essentially. So we are at the point right now where we definitely have, I would say, early product-market fit. And I usually look at it as you first need to have founder-market fit.

And then product-market fit. And then you need to find channel-market fit, essentially, to one or multiple channels to really double down on. And that's essentially the next phase of the company. Find the channel-market fit. Make sure that the fundamental metrics are in place. And once you have that component ready?

Then it's just about putting more fuel into the fire. What's your most successful channel at the moment, actually, out of interest, from an acquisition standpoint? Inbound. Really? Yeah. SEO isn't dead. No. I mean, and I don't think it will be, you just have to adapt it. SEO and content has been the predominant channel that leads to inbound for us.

Have you done much on the GEO side of things, optimising intentionally? [00:50:00] Really, so, I don't have a, it's so hard to track. Of course. But a lot of leads when I'm on customer calls, and a lot of leads are like, yeah, how did you find out about us? I asked ChatGPT and you were in the top three.

I didn't even know that, but okay, great. So unintentionally, and I think this is because of all of the programmatic SEO that we built, that AI learned through that. And we do a lot of content, but in an automated way. And we've done it over the past few years. So that has been the predominant channel.

But obviously you won't be able to scale a business only on that channel. So we need to mature and figure out, do we do a complementary channel or can we actually just double down on this? The last channel that I'll probably go to is performance marketing. Fair. Founder-led sales, so very much you're still on sales calls?

Yeah, I enjoy it as well. I like it. Founder-led sales, but of course now it's scaling up the team. We've been a one or two-man band from a sales perspective up to date. This is the first time where we are really scaling up the sales team, [00:51:00] from single digit to double digit.

Team size. And it's a transition. I've done it before, but it takes a little bit of time to get stability and get everybody comfortable and then making sure that everything else in the engine works as well. We need to have 10x more inbound leads now, and then 10x more MQLs and SQLs. So it's a lot of components that need to come into the right alignment for this to work.

But it's an exciting phase for us. Right. Okay. Amazing. Well look, Alex, that's all the questions that I have for you, and I think we're perfectly on time, so we'll leave it there. Thank you very much my friend. Thank you for coming on. Really enjoyed this conversation. Cheers. Awesome. That was good. Awesome.