Mark Chaffey is the Co-Founder and CEO of hackajob, a tech careers marketplace that puts the ability back within the hands of those working in tech. It really works as a reverse marketplace, meaning developers can select to just accept or decline requests from employers and discover roles of interest which can be tailored to them.
Could you share the genesis story behind hackajob?
In 2014, I co-founded hackajob with Razvan Creanga who got here up with the thought for hackajob after working on other startups and seeing hiring at other organizations. He saw a possibility to take a more meritocratic approach to the tech recruitment process—a philosophy that has guided our growth at hackajob since day one. Razvan and I were each studying at King’s College London, and he approached me with this great idea for a business and asked if I desired to go on this journey with him. We raised a small angel round in 2014 from an investor that had backed one in all Razvan’s previous startups that kickstarted our growth and all of it happened quickly after that. Ultimately our success thus far has culminated in our latest milestone—a $25 million Series B raise led by Volition Capital.
What are a few of the current challenges for corporations to source tech staff?
Historically, recruiting on traditional digital platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed results in little or no engagement. Candidates get spammed so often that they’ve generally limited the visibility of their profiles or don’t reply to messages in any respect. When candidates do apply directly, they get frustrated because they often get ghosted. However, recruiters are also frustrated because they must sift through plenty of noise to seek out quality leads—especially in tech roles with specific required skill sets. At hackajob, we’ve turned the model on its head. Using our platform, candidates have the ability to just accept or decline requests from employers who reach out after vetting potential candidate matches. 85% of the time, quality candidates reply to those requests moving quality talent into the pipeline.
hackajob is targeted not only on talent recruiting assessment but additionally employer branding. Why is that this essential?
Employer branding is vital for any company, but it surely is especially useful for giant, non-tech corporations. Think, for instance, of a few of the biggest big box retailers or hospitality conglomerates. They employ tens of 1000’s of individuals, but only a few of them, proportionally, are tech employees. An employer that uses hackajob can tailor their page to talk on to developers. It would only grow to be more critical for non-tech corporations to bring on technical talent as they move into the following phase of their digital transformation. It’s a little bit of an overused sentiment, but we’ve come to a spot where every company is a tech company in some capability. Targeting the correct talent with a robust employer brand is crucial for corporations that wish to compete and scale.
How does the hackajob platform work by way of corporations sourcing developers and tech talent?
I discussed it briefly before, but hackajob’s platform is a reverse marketplace, which puts the ability into the candidates’ hands. Candidates create a free profile and we match them to relevant job opportunities based on personal preferences, including skills, salary expectations and site. Candidates can share their expertise by uploading their projects from Github or participating in coding challenges inside the hackajob platform. On the back end, our platform matches quality candidates with top tech corporations and people corporations are answerable for proactively reaching out to candidates to start the interview process. Within the last yr, hackajob grew its talent pool by 6x, so we’re consistently matching highly engaged talent with candidates able to make a task change. It’s a win-win for employers and candidates.
Low-Code and No-Code tools are sometimes seen as an existential threat to developers, what are your views on these kind of tools?
My fundamental belief about any kind of automation is that it enables humans to maneuver more quickly through mundane, repetitive tasks and get back to doing what they do best. Individuals are best at the abilities that require critical pondering, empathy and creativity—the things that encourage connection each internally and externally with customers and clients. Low-Code and No-Code are enabling teams to do more with less, meaning that the main target will be on specialization and innovation.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is ready to write down reasonably accurate code, how will this impact developers?
The exciting potential of ChatGPT, or GitHub’s co-pilot, which can also be powered by OpenAI, is the potential to make developers 10x simpler. While I don’t consider these products will fundamentally replace developers, I do consider that each engineer ought to be embracing the potential that these products provide. There are still plenty of gray areas to iron out (for instance, should content libraries which can be used to coach the information be compensated or who really owns the IP of a GenAI output), but there isn’t a doubt in my mind that the one way a developer will grow to be obsolete is by not embracing these tools in any respect.
How will GAI be utilized in talent recruiting, especially for DE&I?
We consider that, while technology is an awesome tool that can assist address a scarcity of worker diversity within the workplace, it’s fundamentally a people problem. Meaning, that we should always use technology to discover breakdowns within the recruitment process that result in a scarcity of diversity somewhat than using it to filter candidates based on non-skill-based criteria like age, race or gender. For example, if an organization analyzes its hiring pipeline and identifies they’ve a top-of-funnel or talent attraction problem, one thing it will want to analyze is its profession page content, job descriptions and outreach messages. It is a really powerful use case for GAI to create more unbiased content for candidate attraction, resulting in more diverse prospects entering the highest of the funnel of your hiring process.
What can corporations do to make sure ethical and accurate use of AI for talent recruiting to avoid missteps like we saw with Amazon previously?
It’s essential corporations understand what training data their AI tools have been built on. Should you’re using an AI tool that has been trained on an inherently biased data set, it’ll produce biased outcomes. I’d have plenty of caution about using any AI products to make final decisions in your hiring process at once. As a substitute, AI ought to be used to assist guide your internal recruiters and hiring managers on potential things they could miss (e.g. complementary skills, biased language, etc) after which empower these people to make the ultimate decision.
What’s your vision for the long run of hackajob?
Ultimately, every company on the planet needs the flexibility to draw, hire and retain exceptional technical talent to be able to achieve success over the following decade. Nonetheless, most corporations aren’t digitally native and don’t know the best way to do that effectively. That’s where we are available—our full-stack talent platform enables corporations to adapt every a part of their hiring process, from employer brand to sourcing and assessments, to raised hire technical individuals. Ultimately, our technology suite becomes the strategic partner organizations need to be able to attract the talent today that may help them construct the long run tomorrow.