Recently FloCareer CEO and Co-Founder Mehul Bhatt was interviewed by Julian Torres on the award-winning Behind Company Lines podcast. Very inspiring and insightful show on what it's like to manage and grow a start-up as well as how we structure interviews for success. We encourage you to watch, but if you prefer, you can read the transcript below.
Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining The Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Mehul Bhatt, co-founder and CEO of FloCareer. FloCareer is an initiative, or excuse me, an innovative interview as a service HR tech platform that helps companies across the globe, higher talent, faster and easier to scale while reducing interviewing over.
Mehul, I'm so excited to chat with you, not only to dive into your career and, and your background and your experiences, but also FloCareer and this interesting kind of ecosystem around interviewing and, and this whole kind of, uh, actually the, probably one of the biggest headaches for a lot of founders is building teams, and a lot of that goes into evaluating the type of individual and making that process efficient.
When you have all these other priorities at hand. And before we get into Flow Korea and how you've kind of created a more, you know, faster and scalable process, what were you doing before you started the company?
Mehul: Sure. Julian, thanks a lot for having me here. You know, really glad to be part of, uh, you know, your show, uh, before, you know, starting FloCareer.
I have always been a techie, you know? Yeah. I have always, you know, be a hardcore developer and, uh, interesting. In my previous work experiences, I had almost, you know, 16 years of experience before I jumped into FloCareer. Yeah. I never become even a manager. During my entire career, I had always been an individual contributor, a tech lead, you know, architect, but never a people manager.
Yeah. So that's, uh, that's has been my history. I have, I have been a developer essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,
Julian: and you've looked at some pretty substantial companies. I'm curious in terms of like, you know, one thing as founders scale and build out their teams, whether it's the engineering team or not, I think the engineering team probably is, is a lifeblood of a lot of companies because of obviously, especially companies like SaaS companies who have a service or product.
How.
Mehul: How do big companies
Julian: structure the team Well to create a really cohesive, um, kind of unit and organism to be able to, you know, not only take objectives and build features and complete milestones, but also to keep people kind of integrated within that team and inundated on, on the culture and everything like that.
Because it's hard once you have a few different personalities and, and things kind of become dispersed. Teams get larger. But what do large companies do well structurally that you've. In your experience and that you've taken maybe even to a FloCareer, that that helps teams run efficiently and effectively?
Mehul: Sure, yeah. I think people are the most important assets of any organization, right? I mean, it's ultimately all about people, you know? Uh, so finding the right set of people, making sure that they are all aligned and they are all motivated, you know, to do, you know, a work that is, you know, Common goal of the company, right?
That's, that's essentially critical. Uh, I was fortunate enough to work with, you know, two startups, which really grew quite big. One got acquired by Cisco, uh, another, you know, grew really big, uh, became public company. And I've seen that journey personally, you know, where a small team comes together, becomes either part of a much larger ecosystem or, you know, they grow organically to become big and, you know, kind of.
Much bigger purpose and much bigger audience. Yeah. Uh, what really helps is from starting, you know, people are really clear on the purpose of the, and the mission, you know, of, of the organization. Right. Why are we here? What motivates them to come on Monday morning and come to the work and, you know, you know, continue applying through, you know, the, the, the hurdles of the week and the days and the months.
Right? Yeah. That's, that's very, very important. Right? Yeah. So, so have that clarity of, of of, of the purpose you. What, why exactly we are here and, and then giving them autonomy to do. Yeah. What they are doing, you know? Yeah. Most combination really helps a lot.
Julian: Yeah. And thinking about, you know, the whole interview process and, and, and, you know, getting talent and, and vetting talent and making sure that you, you have the right people.
In your experience on other teams before even FloCareer, where did you see the interview process? I don't wanna say broken, but maybe not necessarily hitting the objectives or hitting the goals that they're looking for. And, and this is not May and I think a lot of people. We should take a step back.
And it's not about the skillset somebody has, because that's different than somebody fitting within a certain team or organization. Um, when at least you're building an initial core team. And as you build, um, core teams of different organizations on, what did you see in the process that wasn't necessarily accurate or inefficient or, or just, you know, not, not achieving the outcomes that you want in the interview process, in your experience before flow.
Mehul: Yeah, so I was always on the other side of the table before floor career in terms of, you know, the hiring team side. Right? Yeah. And some of the observations that we always had was, uh, Number one, you know, lot of resumes that comes to the table of the hiring manager, you know, they are not relevant, you know?
Yeah. And we come to know, not while looking at the resume, because that's what the HR time team has already done that. And you know, they find the resumes to be quite great. Yeah. But when you talk to the candidates, you know, you come to know that, okay, that's not really a right fit. Right. Uh, people claim all sort of things on the resumes, but when you talk to them, you come to know that whether they're really a fit, fit for the, for your team or not.
Right. That wastes a lot of time of hiring teams. Right? Yeah. The second thing we were always, you know, uh, facing was that, you know, people waving, literally waving the resume and say, saying, Hey, who can take this person's interview? The guy is already in the room and you know, I don't have time. So you know who can do that?
You know, that results into a lot of, you know, uh, uh, unstructured approach towards interviewing. Right? Yeah. So that's another opportunity that, that we saw that, okay, this is something that we can add value, right? And last but not least, you know, after going through so many interviews, you know, and, and still sometimes, you know, you know, people, companies have mis-hires, right?
Yeah. So all of those, you know, uh, clutter and all of those chaos around interviewing while recognizing that the people are most important asset of any company, right? Yeah. And pretty much all companies understand that, acknowledge that, uh, uh, but there are very few tech giants. Interviewing really seriously and structured the interview, right?
Yeah. So we saw that gap and you know, we thought that there is something that we can add value here.
Julian: Yeah. And just to give the audience a little bit more context, describe FloCareer and how you've been able to create a really kind of interview as a service product that allows teams to do a lot of things.
That are say, um, pretty standardized across the interview process. Um, do it efficiently and effectively so they can get to the core value of that interviewing, which is seeing if the, that there's a, that there's a fit within the team, um, their skillset and their experience and, and what their motivations and their goals are.
Describe FloCareer a little bit more and how you've been able to kind of standardize and give companies kind of a, a hack to doing it efficiently and, and sometimes asynchronous and not having to have so much, um, manual labor on that and, and what that really means to companies.
Mehul: True, true. You can, you, you can think of us as, as Uber of interviewing literally.
So we have gig workers, you know, we have freelancers across the globe, in fact. So that's another beauty that, that we have, that we can. Into the resources across the globe. Right. Uh, so, uh, you know, these gig workers are the one who would take the interviews on behalf of the hiring team, right? Yeah. And as soon as you have that element that, you know, a, a third party, a freelancer is taking the interview, uh, yeah.
Immediately the concerns from the hiring team is that, well, will those people be able to take the interviews? In the same fashion that we are taking these interviews. Right? Yeah. That led us to an essential element of our, uh, journey, which was structuring these interviews. Right? Yeah. So we, we, we developed, you know, uh, uh, a very specific structure around interviewing.
Which when we present it to the hiring team, they realize that they themselves don't have such structure in place for their own interviewers. So, so, uh, uh, many times they take the same structure and apply to their own internal interviewing also, because, uh, we are not the final, you know, uh, uh, interviewers for, for any candidate.
We take first couple of round of interviews, and then final call is always with the hiring team. Right? Right. So you think of us as an Uber, you know, You know, instead of hiring team, taking the, you know, first few round of interviews, the freelancers across the globe, you know, take these interviews. Yeah. Uh, interviews are structured.
That also helps the companies from de and I perspective, because now it's not that, okay, I'm favoring some kind of people because I have certain affinity with that group, or not sure. Right now everybody goes through some standardized process and you know, Companies get a much consistent output because of that.
Yeah. So that helps them a lot, right? Yeah. So that in a nutshell is what we do. You know, we kind of uberize it, standardize it, and you know, uh, that helps companies conduct interviews faster because now you are tapping into a much bigger resource pool across the globe, right? Yeah. Uh, we conduct at times almost 2000 interviews.
Right. Uh, so, so if, if there is a, you know, let's, let's assume a team of 10 people who want to hire three more people, right? That would result roughly 45 to 16 through, you know, yeah. We can do that in a day, right? Which, which a team of 10 within the organization, it would be a big challenge for them to kind of take the time away from their, you know, primary job and just conduct interviews.
They're not gonna do that ever. Right? Yeah. So, so that's how we bring the velocity to the
Julian: companies. Yeah, it's so fascinating thinking about, you know, companies like yourself who take, say a core job function, I don't wanna say away, but they, they essentially create a system or product or service around, you know, that job function, particular, this is interviewing.
Um, but adopt having a company adopted or having a team adopted that is that core responsibility. Obviously it's met with a lot of friction sometimes as people think that, you know, they have that ownership and it's hard to relinquish it. How have you been able to communicate the value that it does add to teams that have that core responsibility and the, the fact that it'll give them back that time?
To say do other more important or high level tasks, strategic tasks, or even more detail-oriented tasks, um, back to their schedule. How do you communicate the value and, and kind of, um, ease into those teams to who are, are seeing it as, as friction in relinquishing some of that ownership. How, what, what is the challenge there and how have you been able to
Mehul: overcome it?
That's a great question, Julian, because, uh, you know, when we started, I have always worked in startups in the product companies, so to speak, right. In the, in the, in the high tech, uh, domain. Uh, so, uh, I was, when I started FloCareer, you know, I was always under impression that okay, it would be the, uh, product companies who would value the time of their engineers the most at.
You know, to this, this process. Yeah. Uh, but surprisingly, you know, lot of services, industries, companies were the first to jump on, you know, you know, using our services, uh, and our platform. Yeah. Because, For services companies or the contract companies who, who, who build their customers on an hourly basis for their leaderships.
Uh, you know, they had this Excel spreadsheet in front of them that how many hours of my engineers are billable? Yeah. We are charging our customers for, for, you know, our own engineers. Right. And and they saw that interviewing is a big overhead. Yeah. And we did not hire these, our, our own engineers to interview other engineers, but we hired them to.
Delivered the products to our end customers, right? Mm-hmm. So they were the first one to jump, uh, you know, to use our, our, our, our platform and our services. Uh, uh, but later, you know, uh, we were able to convince lot of product companies also after, after seeing the success with this, with the services industry, that, hey, you know, you also value your engineer's type, but their apprehension usually.
Will you guys be able to do the interviews the same way we are doing the interviews? Because, you know, most product companies, you know, uh, you know, think that Okay, our style is very unique, right? Sure. And when we show them our processes, when we show them the entire structuring of the interviews and, and so on and so forth, right?
They really get, you know, uh, really impressed and, you know, You know, they're willing to try it out. Once they try it and then they realize that, okay, this helps me a lot. Now instead of conducting 15 interviews to close one position, I just have to do three or four interviews, and the hiring team can engage with those people in a deeper way because now they have more time to work with them so they can engage with good leads in a better way, which yields them better results.
You know? Yeah. So, yes, you are right. It is definitely a journey we need. With their confidence to help them realize that yes, we can do as good of a job as, as their team for better. Right. Uh, and, and then they are still, you know, in control to make the final decision. Right. Right. So yes, that has been a journey.
Uh, uh, and, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's a matter of working with the engineering leadership, explaining them our processes. And making sure that, you know, uh, uh, they're on the
Julian: same page. Yeah. You know, one thing that you just mentioned that I think is particularly, you know, really interesting is, you know, product teams or, or product companies who have say a unique, you know, I use air quotes there because a lot of times the uniqueness of the interview process is, you know, the test that they, you know, give developers for instance, and have them go through, right.
That are related to their product in some way that they, some way or degree, but, It's not only, it's not always successful, right? Like we've seen testing kind of come in, there's, there's two camps on that, whether you should say, give a test to a developer or not. Um, or if you do a code pairing session, how much time to allocate to it?
There's all these variables that companies kind of think about when hiring talent, but in my experience, they don't always do it. Right. And I guess I'm curious, if you were to just generalize it, Like, what recommended interview structure would you recommend to other founders who may not need the volume that FloCareer comes with, but are looking to kind of set some kind of standard so that they can start bringing in talent and evaluating at a really, um, you know, at a really kind of successful level where they, they find the right talent for their teams?
What generalized structure would. Recommend to other founders out there.
Mehul: Sure. So, so you know, again, you know, if you think about, you know, what are the best practices in terms of, you know, asking the right set of questions to the. Interviewers by the interviewers to the candidate. Right? Uh, uh, especially if you are hiring senior folks or, you know, uh, uh, mid-level folks, not like fresh out of the college.
Yeah. You need to have your interviews much more interactive in terms of, you know, real hands-on experiences and whatnot. Right. Uh, and that's where many times we see the gap in, in companies interview processes where you. Techies. Usually they have their own favorite interview questions and they keep asking the same questions again, right, because.
Again, you know, they were not hired to structure the interview or coming up with more content or good interview questions and whatnot. Right. Uh, so they keep asking the same question that, that which are their favorite questions, which eventually gets leaked on the glass door and any of the platforms online.
Right? Uh, so what we do is we ask our interviewers to come up with a good scenario based interview questions, right. Just to give a very. Simple example, right? Uh, non-technical example is if you ask anybody, you know how to make, uh, pasta, you know, they, they can recite a recipe, right? Right, right. Get the pasta, boil it, add the sauce, and you are done.
Right? Uh, anybody can tell them. But what we encourage our interviewers is, you know, looking their at their own work and see what kind of problems they faced in last few months, right? Mm-hmm. And from that, Coming up with a good set of interview questions. So we have, uh, in the same pasta example, let's say somebody's making pesa pasta.
Sure. They, they had so much of a sauce, you know, so much of a pasta sauce and not enough pasta, and they're at home is no chance of buying more pasta immediately. How would you fix that? You know, a good chef would be able to fix that. They will say, okay, you know, in that case, you know, I will probably, you know, boil some broccolis and, you know, edit to the Sure Mix so that you know it.
You know, neutralize the strong, you know, uh, uh, uh, pester sauce, right? If I don't have enough pasta. So these are the real life problems. Only if you have worked on it, you will, you will know that, okay, I face this problem, and this is how I usually have solved in my past life, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so similarly, you know, we, we have now almost close to 50,000 questions across like 300 plus skills.
Wow. Where these people have. Going back to their own problems that. Come up with a good interview questions, and we keep refreshing these questions, right? Because sooner or later this will get leaked, you know, out there on the internet, you know, so we have certain meta, you know, we use those, okay? The same question has been asked more than end number of times.
Then retire those questions, right? So, so that's what I advise, you know, uh, people who wants to structure the interview that, you know, look at, you know, uh, the skills that you want to evaluate, the can. And look at the real life, you know, like, uh, examples, how would you test their abilities by writing some code snippets and, and not like quite testing them, but as you mentioned, the pair programming, right?
You, you kind of, the way you work in a daily environment mm-hmm. Work, but you are not constantly testing the other person. You are just challenge challenging them with some problems. Let them go out, do their research. They can, they can refer to things. We don't want them to remember things, right? We don't.
We want them to solve a problem. So real practical, scenario based questions. Using them, can they solve a real life problem? Right? If yes. Then yeah. That those, those are the people who, who can be your great asset,
Julian: you know? Yeah. It's so interesting thinking about, you know, not only just past example, but also the, the, the, you know, utilizing real life scenarios that you've, you know, had within your company to really get to someone's thought process.
And there's, you know, it's a lot of times that's what people really care to understand in how you solve a problem, what your process is behind that, in terms of the information you're grabbing. Where do you go, how resourceful are you? They are within those scenarios. You know, questions that elicit some, some sort of response.
Always kind of give you a template of how to respond versus offering some level of creativity that, that doesn't have that structure. But how do you collect that information and then communicate whether you know, uh uh, you know, if you do it in your interview process. How do you score answers like that in a way that you're really, you know, accurately, you know, uh, um, recording their level of, whether it's aptitude or critical thinking or whatever, uh, attributes, how do you record those out of those kind of more open-ended answers?
Mehul: Yeah, that, that's again, a great question because interviews are mostly subjective, right? Yeah. How do you bring more objectivity out of it, right? Yeah, that's, that's the question, right? So, uh, what we do is we kind of, uh, you know, have a, a community program for all of our freelancers, you know, where we engage with them, we explain this perspective to them, we help them come up with good interview.
And not just the questions, but the grading guidelines, you know, how would you evaluate the Kennedy. What kind of answers will, will, will deserve, you know, you know, full marks. Right? And, and when would you give, you know, the next level of, you know, categories, right? When we do you four, five star, for example.
Right? Yeah. So, so, so bringing that structure into the place, not just the questions, but what is the grading guidelines, you know, that's, that's an essential part of that interview. Structuring. Yeah.
Julian: Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about FloCareer and what, what's been exciting about the traction you have so far, and what you, what are you particularly excited about in terms of the next, um, next chapter of the journey of FloCareer?
Mehul: Sure, sure. So, so yeah. Uh, despite, you know, a lot of news, uh, nowadays about, you know, the fan companies laying off people and whatnot, right? Uh, there are always this conflict. Uh, you know, information out there in, in, in the market, right? That okay. Despite, you know, people laying off, you know, large number like Facebook laying off people, Google laying off Microsoft, laying off people.
Yeah. And at the same time you get the job market report, which says job market is still strong. Right. What we have seen in, in, uh, this quarter is just ending today. Right. And, and we just had a quarter over quarter quick review. The final numbers will be compiled next week of course, but quarter over quarter here in US, we have seen strong growth for, for this quarter.
Yeah. So we were just talking today that we can become that, you know, we kind of hope, uh, for a lot of people, right. Uh, we. A lot of touring of our customers, you know, in January, uh, uh, also, right? Yeah. And, uh, we have seen, interestingly, if I, if I can quantify right, uh, in bay we saw a lot of pessimism because of, a lot of, you know, fang companies were laying off over there and you always hear, oh, my friend got laid off and this.
But outside of the Bay Area, you know, we saw a lot of, uh, optimism on, on, on, on the, on the, the job market, right? Yeah. Uh, uh, we have seen the growth. We continue to see the growth in the next quarter. That's our expectation. Yeah. And what we are excited about the future is that, you know, when we talk to our freelancers, right?
We have the two arms on the freelancer side. They come to us and, and let us know that I'm not worried even if I get laid off tomorrow, because I. Great secondary source of income now, you know, uh, which I can depend on, right? And, and that. A really good sense of satisfaction. Yeah. Because, you know, uh, when you are able to build that ecosystem for people, uh, which helps companies as well as individuals, right.
Uh, you know, that gives you that sense of purpose, right? Yeah. Uh, so in terms of our journey, yeah. We are looking for strong growth, uh, uh, you know, in us, uh, uh, this year. And, uh, uh, you know, expanding, you know, into multiple d. Segments, you know, beyond technology two is what we are looking at. Yeah.
Julian: You know, I know there's a lot of external factors and, and you know, feel free to, you know, you um, um, uh, comment on those.
But also internally, if you were to think about external and internal, what are some of the biggest risks that, uh, FloCareer faces today?
Mehul: That's a great question. You know, in terms of the risks, you know, I would say that, you know, you know, whenever anybody, or especially. Investors look at the companies, you know, they, they, they, they look at three things, right?
Is, is the problem that you're trying to solve is real? Is it a real problem that you face, right? Yeah. Uh, number two, is there a big enough market? Are, are are large number of people facing that problem or not, right? Right. And number three, the solution that you are providing is capable to kind of meet, you know, uh, the requirement, right?
And if we, if you look at all these three things, right? Is hiring an issue. Is, is hiring a real issue? Of course it is. Everybody knows that, right? Uh, ask anybody, they say, yeah, we have a problem finding the right people. Uh, and, and, and it's a large enough problem. And, and our, our solution does scale. So my concern always has been that, you know, the people who solve the problem for us, our, our freelancers, right, their engagement.
With the process. Yeah. Their engagement and their bandwidth and their motivation to work with us. Right. Uh, that has to be there at all the time and be, that's, that I see as a risk because if, if, if they get disengaged for some reason, uh, then we would've trouble, right. We wouldn't be able to satisfy the needs of our customers because demand is huge.
We need to make sure that. People who are working for us are, are, are engaged and motivated, right? Yeah. That's where we spend a lot of energy internally to make sure that they're engaged. We keep giving them programs, uh, uh, not only just the monetary benefits, but beyond that, what all we can do for them so that they They're motivated.
Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And if you, everything goes well. What's the long term?
Mehul: The long-term vision for us is, you know, uh, you know, making, you know, if, if interview as a service becomes a norm across, you know, anybody's hiring plan, right? Like today, the applicant tracking system in an HR tech is a norm, right? You cannot imagine any HR.
Functioning without an ats. Right. Uh, uh, like interview service is still a greenfield, you know, lot of companies are adapting to that, but, but it is not completely widespread. So we would like to make sure that that becomes, you know, household, you know, like not a household, but you know, every company, you know, we would think about it that, okay, who is gonna be my interview as.
Partner, you know? Yeah. In, in hiding, uh, uh,
Julian: strategy. Yeah. I was like, this next question I'm gonna call, I call my founder faq. So I'm gonna hit you with some rapid fire questions and we'll see where we get. So, um, always like to open up. First question. Um, what's particularly hard about your job?
Mehul: What's hard about my job?
Yeah. I would say, you know, uh, it is, you know, time management, right. Amount of time is restricted and that there's so much things that you want to do. So you need to stay focused and, you know, make sure that you know, you bucketize things correctly and do it, you know, on time. You know? Yeah,
Julian: yeah. And I always like to thinking more, more about FloCareer.
You know, it's almost like you, you've created like a capture network for interviews for, for, uh, for, um, for candidates, right? It's a caption network in the sense that you have a lot of different interviewers validating this person's experience skills, and. Overall maybe impression and, and ability to, you know, do the, the work or responsibility at the company that you're servicing.
How many interviews do you, does a candidate go through per, uh, per job? And then also, um, how do you keep those interviewers kind of up to date and trained? Um, being that, that's such a high value add to, you know, the, the overall system and it kind of is dependent on the quality of the interview. Um, being able to vet the right skills and, and things outta talent.
So, two questions there is how many interviews per, you know, candidate? And, and secondly is how do you keep, you know, the quality of the interviewer high.
Mehul: Sure. And I'll give you a third one also, uh, very interesting statistics. So how many interview rounds per job? You know, it varies from companies to companies a lot.
Minimum three I have seen. Mm-hmm. And maximum goes up to H also. Yeah. We only take care of the first two or three rounds on our platform, you know? Uh, fastest turnaround I have seen. Uh, two round on our side and one manager round, and that's it. Yeah, that's, that's the fastest, right? Yeah. Uh, uh, quality, you know, quality depends on two aspects.
Do we have a good interviewers and do we have a good interview structure and questions? Right? So these are the two critical parts of our solution, and, and we. We have evolved with a lot of processes and, and, and, and technology to ensure that, you know, both are good. But a very interesting observation on our platform is that, you know, uh, these, these candidates, we don't source the candidate, the candidates are provided by the hiring team.
Right. Uh, so the same candidate might have interviewed for two different hiring companies. Yeah. We cannot share the data across them because, you know, like it's, it's completely owned by, You know, companies and the candidates right now. So we just want to make sure that the same candidate are not asked the same questions no matter where they are being interviewed.
Right. So that's what we ensure on our platform. Uh, and, and when we look at the same candidate will be interviewed by how many companies, and I thought maybe two or three or four when they're hunting for the job. Yeah. To our surprise, we. Many people who interviewed on our platforms 17 times. Wow. Maximum 17 was the maximum number.
Yeah. Same candidate gave interview on our platforms 17 times, you know, in, in, in, within, within around five to six months timeframe. Right. Wow. Yeah, so, so that's, when you ask me that question, how many round of interviews for a given. But the same candidate where, where they're hurting for the job is the maximum number that I saw, which was really
Julian: interesting.
Yeah. Yeah. It's so fascinating thinking about, you know, the overall kind of transition or change into, you know, a lot of companies are looking at service-based, um, organizations to help, you know, offload. Processes that are, I think, I think a little bit more, um, uh, dependent on the actual, when they need them.
You know, when you need interview services, when you're hiring, you need, say, development services, say for like an agency perspective, if you're building out a certain feature that's away from your core function, but you feel a lot of companies being very. Thoughtful or intentional about, you know, adding or, or, uh, purchasing services that they need in a certain point of time, but then offloading them when they're not needed.
Have you seen that common trend with a lot of companies that you've been working with, seeing that they're offloading, you know, a big portion of that responsibility onto you, especially with the interview process, but do you kind of con, do you see this, um, continue to be more and more popular? As companies find efficient ways to scale and grow their business, uh, without say hiring somebody internally as an HR person, um, doing all these interviews and then trying to figure out what job function they should have after this big hiring push, what kind of trend are you seeing with companies and do you, do you think it's gonna catch on, um, you know, in the future?
Mehul: Sure. So what we have seen is, you know, uh, the churn on our platform is very, very minimal. Yeah. Uh, having said. Depending on the size of the company, the startups who work with us, right? They usually get funded. They do a lot of hiring in the quarter or the next quarter, and then they kind of slow down a bit, right?
Uh, not a bit, but significantly I would say, right? Yeah. They will hire a lot of people in one Quran and then they will go quiet for a couple of quarters, then they go for the next round and, and then they hire a lot of problem, right? So, so that kind of, you know, uh, uh, ups and downs we see with, uh, smaller companies and startups for large, you know, services, industry giants that we serve, uh, are pretty consistent in terms of.
They are so diversified. They have so many different customers. They, they have, you know, they, you know, so they, we do see, you know, a lot of, uh, uh, requirement, month over month, repeat for them. Right. Uh, another trend that we have seen recently is, you know, the companies like, uh, you know, who do the nearshoring or offshoring, right.
When they present their interviewers, sorry, they're candidates to the hiring companies in. Uh, they wanna make sure that they just don't give just a resume. Mm-hmm. But a detailed and thorough interview report. So, so, so those, we have seen a lot. We just had a, uh, you know, in January we've started working with Deal, uh, which is a payment company for, you know, across, you know, like 150 plus, uh, countries.
Right? So, so we are working with them now when, when, when somebody is hiring, let's say some, a person in Bolivia or, or Ukraine, you know? Yeah. Uh, they wanna make sure that, okay, I'm hiring somebody. Are they, you know, capable enough to do the job that I'm supposed to be, you know, uh, giving it to them. Right.
So, yeah. So we saw that, you know, so a lot of interesting dynamics here. Yeah,
Julian: yeah. Yeah. Can, uh, can an interview process ever be fully automated?
Mehul: Um, I don't think so. There is a, in my opinion, right? Yeah. Or,
Julian: I guess how much of it can, I'm a futurist.
Mehul: Yeah. How, how much? I'm a futurist, so I, I like to see, you know, like, uh, all sort of things coming up, but there is, there is a human part, you know, which is essential, you know, in, in, in interviewing for probably semi-skilled jobs or part-time jobs, if you want somebody to just, you know, stack your Christmas trees, just.
November and December, maybe you told me that part. But you know, if you are looking for, for knowledge workers, right, who can contribute, who can be creative, they're, you know, uh, human interaction is very, very important, you know? Yeah. Uh, so I believe that, you know, uh, I don't think that would be fully automated.
At least not in near
Julian: future. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I always like to ask this question because I love how founders extract any, you know, knowledge out of anything that they ingest. Uh, whether it was early in your career or now, what books or people have influenced you the most?
Mehul: Great question. Yeah. So, you know, uh, in terms of books, you know, probably a book that, that would've influenced me the most is the Seven Habits, you know?
Yeah. Of highly effective people, right? Yeah. Uh, and, and it has a lot of, you know, a lot of tho you know, the talks over there is, is is not just transactional solutions, but, uh, you know, uh, value-based, you know, To the level of, you know, spirituality? I would say so. So, uh, I, I, that book has definitely impacted me a lot, you know.
Uh, uh, there is, there is a book about, uh, you know, interview with Del Lama about, you know, happiness. Right? That has also a, a profound impact. Uh, and in terms of people I was so fortunate to work with, you know, uh, uh, uh, early on in my career, uh, you know, Frederick, you know, who, uh, I worked with at the first job out of the college.
You know, he, he, he's the author of the first, you know, Uh, uh, realtime protocols, so streaming based protocols in, in early nineties, you know, uh, uh, influenced a lot on my work style and, and coding style and whatnot, right? And, and, and then later on in my second startup where I was working, you know, uh, my hiring manager was, uh, ed Bun on the founder of VMware, right?
Uh, work with great people like JR Rivers, and, you know, and so on and so forth. Lot of great people. You know, Carlos, Alonzo, another, another great mentor that I, I I came across in my early days, uh, really shaped my thoughts Yeah. My, my, my, my leadership style, uh, and, and so
Julian: on and so forth. Yeah. What's, uh, what's something that you are, you are good at now but you wish you were better at early on as a.
Mehul: Oh, it has been a long, uh, you know, learning journey. Yeah, yeah. You know, there are, there are certain idealized versions that you have at the beginning, right? Uh, and, and, and one of those that I always had was, you know, that any person, uh, can learn anything and, and be productive, uh, if there is a wish, right?
Yeah. But for a fast-paced startups, that's not the case. You know, you, you, you have to make sure that, you know, uh, people are also having the right, you know, aptitude mm-hmm. For the kind of, you know, skills that, that job demands. I'm not talking about the tools, but I'm talking about, you know, a specific, you know, aptitude towards, you know, certain skills, you know?
Yeah. Like, for example, customer facing skills. Mm-hmm. That's. You know, not anybody can learn that, you know, it, it, it requires, you know, your own inherent, you know, uh, implicit, uh, motivation
Julian: for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like matching not only the, the skills you have, but the interest in curiosity you have in a specific domain that actually kind of creates that right.
Yeah.
Mehul: Yeah. The presets that you are born with in some cases. Yeah. Yeah. Some people, some people have a great, you know, uh, sense of humor and others don't, doesn't mean that, you know, anybody can become a standup comedian. Right? Yeah, yeah,
Julian: yeah. Definitely not me. But, uh, I, I, I, I, I, um, I, Mara is one around the, around the apartment.
Um, no. Uh, um, last little bit is I always like to ask before we ask for your plugs and your websites and your linked. I always like to make sure that we didn't leave anything on the table. So is there any question that I didn't ask you that I should have or that you would have liked to answer? Anything that we left on the table here?
Mehul: No, I think we have pretty much covered, you know, uh uh. Everything that we wanted to cover, I suppose, you know, uh, and, uh, yeah, I, I think, yeah. Yeah.
Julian: Good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Mahu last little bit is, um, where can we support you? Where can we support FloCareer? Give us not only your LinkedIns, but your websites, your Twitters, wherever we can be a fan of, of, of you as a founder, but also your company and what you're building.
Mehul: Sure, sure. Yeah. You can find all of those links on our website. It's uh, www dot uh, FloCareer.com. It is f o career no w there, ffl career.com.
Julian: Amazing. Maho, it's been such a pleasure. Not only learn about your experience in terms of the engineering team that you've been a part of what's worked, but as and worked, but you've, you've gathered from big companies, but also how you've created such an ecosystem for companies to really offload a lot of the processes that you know are not necessarily.
You know, needing to have their ownership but can be kind of automated, quote unquote to a certain degree, to help them run efficiently, run effectively, um, and hire people that are not only, you know, at a high velocity, but also match well with their organization and their objectives as teams. It's been such a pleasure learning about FloCareer.
Um, I hope you enjoyed yourself on this show, and thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
Mehul: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me here. Of course.
