‍Hello and welcome to the HR Minute podcast by All Voices. I am Jeffrey Fermin, and today we'll be talking with Nevena Sofranic, the founder of Recrooit. She's our first international guest, so I'm really excited to have her on here. That said, Nevena, tell us a little bit more about yourself.

‍All right. Thank you for having me. I'm Nev. I'm the founder of Recrooit. As you said previously, I also founded the tech recruitment agency, and I've been working in tech recruitment for 10 years now. It sounds awful when you say it like that. I'm based in Belgrade at the moment. So yeah, that's pretty much it. Nice. And I want to talk to you about something that you're probably familiar with.

Challenges in the Recruitment Process

‍We hear a lot of job candidates saying it's very stressful out there for them. There's a lot of time being spent looking for jobs. All these processes and all these technologies that have been put in place, they've been kind of sold as this thing to be more efficient with recruitment and applications. What do you have to say about that? Like, do you think some things can be improved in the recruitment process?

Recruitment Issues

‍Well, I would say I agree with you. I'm not sure if it's broken or it just needs a little fix up, you know, but I would say that two issues stand out mostly. The first is the gap between candidate skills and job requirements, and the 2nd issue would be that recruitment processes are just time-consuming and very costly for both employers and candidates. And so we lack an efficient screening process. I believe. So, the third issue that we're mostly hearing from candidates is that the recruitment process usually misses that personalized touch that will help candidates also grow within together with the process they're in. So I would say those are the issues we're hearing the most about.

‍In what ways do you think Recrooit helps remedy these broken aspects of recruitment? And what unique solutions are you offering? Yeah, well, as I said, I've been in this space for 10 years now. I've been working on both continents and recruitment. And what I've seen is that exactly what we're talking about, like both candidates and companies are frustrated with the recruitment process and how it works. It's either expensive, it's too long, you know, like everyone's wasting time. So what I'm looking at, I came about building Recrooit with the idea that recruitment should be community-driven, you know, like, and especially when it comes to startups, which have been working with most, most of the time it takes a village to build a product. We talked about this before, and I believe that a lot of, we've seen different sources of hire throughout the recruitment processes, you know, and some sources work well for certain niches or industries and then others. Work better for other industries and so on.

Personalization and AI in Recruitment

‍So I guess there is some point of personalization within the recruitment space as well, but at the top of it all, what's the most common source of hire throughout any industry are actually referrals. So I was thinking about like, how do we help companies? Once they tap out internal referrals and they can't hire any more talent through internal referrals, how do we help them get external referrals and get the community engaged in companies that they believe in? Right. So that's how Recrooit came about that personalized touch. I've been talking about some, so we tap into pre-vetted talent, and we ensure a better match between candidates and job requirements. And so additionally, into what we're building at the moment, we do use some AI-driven tools to assist in streamlining the process while at the same time, keeping that human touch. So that's the balance we're looking to achieve with Recrooit.

The Role of Human Judgment in Recruitment

‍You touched on it a lot, like human judgment, the human component to recruitment and hiring. So what role do you believe human judgment should play in recruitment? And how can technology complement it rather than replace it?

The Importance of AI Education for HR

‍Yeah, well, my point of view here is that AI and machine learning have been tremendous help through for just working through a lot of data. So if you're a company that gets a lot of applicants, this is where I can be useful, right? But I don't think at any point of, and this is why this is why I have the approach to building Recrooit that I have. And that's the balancing between the human touch and AI. Right? I don't believe that humans can ever be replaced. And such a, you know. Crucial point of recruitment as a selection is, you know, like, can AI understand personality, potential cultural, like, what are the data points that we should provide to AI so they can do this, you know, like, I don't think humans are replaceable at this point. So human judgment and also we've seen a lot of, I know this is controversial, but we've seen a lot of bias in AI, you know, and it's not something you want to play around with. So I do believe humans still have a big role in recruitment. So I don't think we're going to be replaced that soon.

Embracing AI and Technology in HR

‍I think that when these HR technologies started picking up things like artificial intelligence, a lot of HR managers were getting a little scared, like, Hey, is my job replaceable? And that's just across the board, right? Like whether you're a content creator, a blogger, like you start seeing all these systems come out in the past year, two years. And you're like, Hey, can my job be replaced? What would you have to say to HR managers that are still kind of a little scared or they're kind of on the fringe about AI and like about incorporating AI. I'm actually hosting our first meetup recruits meetup in Belgrade this January. And this is exactly the topic we're going to be covering.

The Importance of Education in Embracing AI

I'm bringing in a data scientist that's going to talk about like how you should incorporate AI into HR processes and what's snake oil, what's not how to make a difference, you know, like so I believe the first point to how HR should approach this is educating themselves, you know, like learning about the biggest LLMs are there, what are like large language models, you know, like, how can I turn this technology into my advancement, right? Because I do believe, like, anything else humans have built so far, this will help us and with those that are, I mean, intelligence at the basic line, you know, like intelligence is the ability to adapt, you know, like, and we should be thinking about how we can adapt to how technology is growing, you know, so I do believe AI should be incorporated into, you know to HR processes at the same time, I think HR is need to step up and learn about like, what are the real tech, not water, the technology that they should adopt into their processes. And I think that's the best starting point here.

Embracing Referrals in Recruitment

‍I love how you're bringing the social component to recruitment. If you have any advice for HR departments embracing, you know, the referrals a little bit more. Yeah, I would love to hear your two cents on it. Okay. So we've, we've seen like 30 percent of the best hires across companies came through referrals and. What we're seeing and like, you're gonna, let's talk about sources of hire, right? So you have job boards, you got LinkedIn, you got cold outreach, you got recruitment agencies.

There are different sources of hire and then the Recrooit is bringing in a new source of hire, which are external referrals. And this is where I'm hoping to see everyone come together, both candidates and HR professionals and recruitment professionals, you know, like you as well, you know helping each other find their match with the touch here and there of AI, right? So that's why we're looking at building recruit. And what I believe in as our mission and our vision and Recrooit is that long term recruiting should be community-driven, and we've seen it in the most successful companies, for example, just talking about OpenAI, Sam Altman wrote a blog post about his co-founder, Greg.

So we spoke a little bit about it before, we started recording web three. That is a whole new atmosphere. I feel like over here in the States, we're not really embracing it as much. I want to know your thoughts about that and. Your thoughts on Web3, Web3 in HR and where you're planning to take Recrooit.

‍The Future of Web3 and HR

‍I would say that, I mean, after last night and that thing with Bitcoin, it's too funny talking about Web3, Web3 is a very, a very young industry, you know, so I believe that it, it will take time for people to understand what they're building and I don't, when I say web three, a lot of people are thinking about crypto, but it's not, it's not just crypto. It's more of, building a more secure, decentralized space for, for people, right? I would say to build Web3 products. And I'm going to talk about Web3 in terms of recruitment here.

Challenges in Hiring for Web3

‍It's not a tech stack that has been used traditionally. Web3 industry is also very young since Web3 industry itself is young, right? And so there is not a lot of talent that is experienced with this technology. And obviously, they're lacking experienced talent. So they're often turning to a more traditional tech stacks and engineers that have a background in traditional technologies, right? And they would source them and help them acquire and adapt to these new stuff they're working on. But at the same time. It takes a certain personality and a certain, you know, like mindset to be able to grasp and to believe in the industry itself. It is quite controversial, right? So not a lot of traditional engineers are going to jump into Web3 and be like, Oh, yeah. So, you know, like, I'm going to invest my time and my next couple of years into building a product that I don't even know if it's gonna be worth it You know like in the end, so it takes a bit of I would say I would say some engineers that are super curious about solving really big Technical issues, you know, like just making stuff up, solving problems that most of the people don't even know they exist, you know, so a lot of curious people are coming into the industry. And I believe Recrooit helps. Companies that are hiring in the Web3 space, because a lot of folks in Web3 are also they're not actively looking for jobs, right? They're, most of them are already employed, so it's really hard to reach them, and they're not active on social media, except on Twitter, and on Twitter, most of them are anonymous, you know, like, so you can't really reach them, and it's really hard to source them, so Recrooit jumps in by, Bringing this community together and helping, helping companies actually reach them through referrals. So referrals have been traditionally very successful for both web three and cybersecurity niche. Because both these candidate personas are not active on, on social media and are hard to source. So I would say this is why Recrooit is like. Helping a lot of web three companies at the moment, which reach candidates.

Nev, really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. Um, hope our audience enjoyed this and yeah, thank you so much. You do. Thank you, Jeffrey.