Entrepreneurship: Going From Zero to One with Adam Couch of Oleeo and Tawfiq Abu-Khajil of Eqo

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur?  Being the founder of a startup can be a daunting task, and to break down these challenges we have Adam Couch, Vice President of Global Sales at Oleeo and Tawfiq Abu-Khajil, Co-Founder of Eqo. The discussion draws attention to the trends at HR Tech, focusing on AI and people analytics. Oleeo's contribution to high volume recruitment and financial services is highlighted, along with Eqo's effort to transform the frontline workforce into a potent hiring unit.

The conversation gets heated by digging into challenges faced by startups and the essence of maintaining a positive and resilient attitude.  We also discuss the value and impact of employee referrals, the importance of having an easy referral experience, and the crucial nature of persistence for any startup entrepreneur.

This is a special mini series recorded with Oleeo at HR Tech 2023 with hosts Ryan Leary, Brian Fink, and Shally Steckerl.

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Transcript

Brian Fink: 0:07

Hey everybody, welcome back to RecruitingDaily Sourcing School. We are live and in charge of HR Tech here in Las Vegas. We are in the Talent Acquisition Content Lounge. We are powered by Oleeo, Data Driven Automation Recruitment, and I am joined by my esteemed colleague, the godfather of sourcing, Shally Steckerl. Yeah, he's over there. That applause is for me. You hear the applause? People are excited about that. Uh, we've got two guests on the mic that are rocking the microphone with us. We've got Adam from the team at Oleeo. Adam, say hello to the good people. Hey, hey, hey. All right, that's a hey, hey, hey to the good people. And we are joined by Tafik, who I met about a year ago at another event at Talent Acquisition Week. He is here with his new startup, which is aiming to solve a critical problem in the talent acquisition and retention marketplace with Echo. Tafik, what's going on? What's up, what's up? All right, all right. Let's do it. To get this party started, uh, quickly, right, um, I want to know, what are you guys seeing on the floor? What's the vibe today?

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 1:14

Yeah, I think biggest vibe today is a lot more folks on the floor, both from an employer standpoint and then from a buyer standpoint, practitioners. So really that's giving, uh, you know we chatted about this a second ago, giving a really good indication of hopefully where the market's going, uh, upwards, more folks, more interest in technology and solutions. The big word, AI, all around, um, but yeah, a lot of folks compared to last year for sure. Activity, buzz.

Adam Couch: 1:45

Yeah, I'm like you, I always call this the biggest recruiting event for the, for the vendors, right? You come here and you change jerseys and you show up the next year with a different team logo on. Yeah. But this year there's actually folks that are looking to buy, um, more practitioners as you said, that I've seen. Um, and then I think last year was all about, it's AI again this year, AI was big last year, but you go around, it's a lot of people analytics now. Look at the booth that Vizier has right when you walk in, right? It's probably the biggest booth here. And so I see people analytics as a kind of one of the hot topics this year.

Brian Fink: 2:15

Alright, so as we're talking about analytics and we're talking about data, that kind of gives a good segue for both of you to kind of tell, to give like a 15 second snapshot of who you are and what you guys do. Who wants to go first and tell us a little bit about what their use case is?

Adam Couch: 2:28

Yeah, so at Oleeo, we help organizations source, recruit, and hire, applicant tracking, CRM, and events management solution, and really our focus is on high volume recruitment and then financial services industry. So organizations like Amazon use us globally for their physical stores or somebody like Bank of America for their early careers. So if you have a problem with volume, call Oleeo. Awesome.

Brian Fink: 2:51

Alright, now, this is the startup pitch. This is the man, the myth, the legend coming at it. He is challenging over here, Adam, who has, they have 30 years in the space. Tawfiq, what do you got?

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 3:02

Yeah, Adam's absolutely awesome, learning from him every day. Um, so I'm Tawfiq, and co founder of Echo. And what we do is we help organizations with a frontline workforce transform word of mouth into their biggest hiring superpower. Right, typically organizations struggle with two things when it comes to referrals on the frontline. One is employee adoption and engagement. A very, very small percentage of the workforce even knows about the referral program. And that's usually the biggest workforce with challenges and struggle to hire for. Nurses, warehouse associates, truck drivers. And the second thing we're solving is, you'll be surprised, a lot of large organizations, 30 people organizations, still track referrals on a spreadsheet, taking a lot of hours and admin time wasted, and double payments and missed payments for these types of employees. So we're saying, we're coming out with a solution. That makes it very simple for the frontline employee to refer someone, hence increasing adoption and engagement, and at the same time, eliminating any manual referral tracking for the admin side. Alright, so... So you're deputizing your frontline workers to being like many recruiters. Absolutely. And they are. They're really awesome. They know a lot of folks around them that can work the same job they can. But they don't know a referral program exists at their company, and this is where we step in.

Brian Fink: 4:19

Alright, so when I hear frontline workers, I immediately go to COVID, and I immediately think of people who were essential workers, like nurses. Use case? Not a use case? Am I completely off base? What's going on?

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 4:30

That is the biggest use case. Frontline includes nurses, anyone in healthcare that's not sitting behind a desk, allied health, technologists, etc. Delivery. Delivery. Uh, retail is a big one. Hospitality is a huge one. So it's really within the area that Oleeo as well operates in.

Brian Fink: 4:47

Alright, so you talk about hospitality. I know that there was a jobs report that came out last week on the, on October the 6th. In that report, they cited that there were 335, 000 jobs that were created. Of those 335, 000 jobs, most of them were in frontline work. How many of those people do you think should have been referrals as opposed to a cold source hire?

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 5:10

Yeah, absolutely. I think a healthy recruiting organization on the frontline should be doing at least 40 to 45 percent of their hires coming through referrals. The problem is today when we speak to these organizations, most of them are doing referrals around the 8 to 15 percent mark. You're like, why? It's because our employees don't know about it, or they can't get in, they can't log in, they don't want to do it, and then you'll be surprised. So to answer your question, it's 45 percent at least should come through referrals.

Adam Couch: 5:40

And hey, Tafik, are you guys relating this back to retention and quality of hire as well? Because as we all know, referrals are the best source.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 5:47

Yeah. Absolutely, that's where we lead with, we say, hey look, your goal as director or VP of TA is to attract talent efficiently, reduce turnover, and reduce your time to hire. If you, if you just look at your data alone, right, referrals give you those three. So only if an organization looks at their own data, they say, oh referrals actually stay longer, they are faster to hire, and they're just awesome hires. Okay, why don't you double down on those, and that's what we're leading with for sure, Adam.

Adam Couch: 6:16

Cool, man, I think it's awesome. I met you two years ago. You were at the startup booth somewhere else. Yeah. And now you've learned a lot, and you've come full circle now doing it yourself, man. Keep rocking, brother.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 6:26

Yeah, I appreciate it.

Brian Fink: 6:29

Hold on. Am I there? I'm live. Okay. All right. I'm still talking to a little music. I know. I was like, I was like, yeah, I know. I'm like, don't stop believing. All right. So, so we've got, we've got that use case, uh, particularly for frontline workers, but you mentioned the retention or Adam, you mentioned the retention variable and the goodness and the. Quality of hire. How are we measuring quality of hire so that we can say a referral is more, is a better quality hire than a cold sourced or a regular, or a cold sourced applicant?

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 6:58

Yeah, great question. I think the biggest number that companies are measuring this with today is, uh, retention. So, for them, again, it could be causation or correlation, so we still don't know, but for them is if an employer, if an employee stays longer, they're a better quality of hire. You do have more sophisticated organizations who actually look at performance reviews. And they have a rating for every employee and say, okay, let's see our referrals. Are they actually performing better compared to non referrals? And they're also reading that too.

Shally Steckerl: 7:27

Yeah, I mean, cause just longevity alone is not really... Yep. You could be hiding.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 7:31

Yeah, absolutely. And that never happens in organizations.

Shally Steckerl: 7:34

No, no, nobody ever hides in, yeah, large organizations.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 7:37

Yeah. Ever. Yeah, they're downstairs and they want to know where their stapler is,

Shally Steckerl: 7:40

right? But, but, but, but, somebody move my stapler.

Brian Fink: 7:43

Somebody move, yeah, yeah, mhm. Alright, so, uh... The other thing is, I know that there are a lot of people who are going to listen to this podcast that are recruiters who are thinking that they have that entrepreneurial spark to go forth and to start their own company, whether it's their own agency or it's HR tech. As an entrepreneur, how do you stay motivated every day? Because you hear the word know a lot, just like recruiters hear the word know a lot.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 8:11

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, going from zero to one, and I'm sure Adam knows this being at different startups as well, going from zero to one is one of the biggest and hardest challenge time of a startup. You're really looking for your first five to ten customers that are going to believe in you as an individual and as a team and say, okay, I'm going to trust this person to work with him and give them a shot. Um, motivation's good, but I don't think it gets you to where you want to go. I really think it's just being disciplined and controlling what you could control. And really trying to not think of things that you can't control. So actually, my co founders and I did this list. I said, hey, here's what we can control during the week. We can control how many emails we send. We can control how many cold calls we make. We can control what energy we bring to the demos. We can control qualified, disqualifying folks. We can control building a great product, doing great customer service. Here's what we can't control. We can't control people ignoring us. We can't control budget cuts. We can't control people being rude on the call. And every time we have a situation where something happens, I look at this list and say, is this something I can control? I can't control. If I can't, I just leave it. Okay, on to the next one. Uh, but it's really hard and I always say just one domino at a time is what we're focusing on. One domino at a time.

Brian Fink: 9:21

Is that the same advice that you would give to recruiters who are... You know, cold calling can, or, okay, cold calling, I actually mean picking up the phone and getting on the phone. Is that the same type of advice that you'd give them?

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 9:31

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, if I cold call Adam today and Adam gives me like, no, you know, stop calling me, closes the phone in my face, I call you next, right? If I bring that energy from Adam's call to yours, and I have this like, you know, down energy, like, hey, Brian, how's it going? You're not going to feel it, but you're not going to know that I had a bad conversation with Adam, so why miss the opportunity with you? Just because I had a bad call previously, so, that's the biggest advice I give to recruiters. Or really anyone, just, you know, keep going, play the long term game. And you know, Brian, you're best at this, building your brand in this space.

Brian Fink: 10:02

Well, I was going to say, I'm sitting across the table from somebody who inspired me to kind of take the brand to the next level. So, uh, Shally, you got any thoughts on that?

Shally Steckerl: 10:11

Well, my secret to that has always been that when you run into something like that, when you run into a negative call, is um, Make another call, but not a call that has any expectations. So, I usually refer to my, you know, the easiest way to do it is refer to your LinkedIn inbox, and find somebody that's sent you a connection request, and just reach out to that person and be like, Hey, I got your connection request, you know, let's, let's chat. What do you do? Here's what I do. There's no, there's no negative outcome from that, right? So at least it gets you back on the, you know, And if you're, if you're ending on a positive note, because you don't have any expectation that you're gonna close the deal, and there's no possibility that they're gonna reject you, so at least you can kinda, you know, get back up on the bike. Yeah, I wanna say just sort of erase the negativity, take a step back from the keyboard, take a break, and come back, but yeah, definitely don't pick up the phone and. Make that next call with that negative attitude, that just, that's not gonna work. You gotta reset somehow, but that's my secret weapon, is just call someone with no expectation.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 11:19

Yeah, I agree. I heard this the other day, is like, when you call someone, call to disqualify them, not to qualify them. And ever since I heard that, it just stuck in my head. So if you're calling someone, you want to disqualify them, like, Hey, how's it going? You have 20 seconds in my eye, call. Nope, cool, disqualify. Or yes, awesome, you know. Just quick question, do you have an employee referral program today? Um, no, they're disqualified. Awesome, have a great day. And like, you want to just disqualify them and get to the qualified one.

Adam Couch: 11:46

My wife tried to disqualify me 25 years ago. She called, but it didn't work. How many times? Yeah,

Brian Fink: 11:53

not

Adam Couch: 11:53

enough, not enough. She's still trying. Yeah, yeah. So, Tafiq, hey, tell us where you are in the life cycle of the business. Kind of where, are you in version 1, are you in beta? Kind of where are you guys at?

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 12:02

Yeah, absolutely. So, we've been, you know, working on this for about 10 months now, we've been full time for about 7 months today. Um, over the past 7 months, we've chosen 6 to 7 enterprises that they helped us build and shape the product. So even from like literally prototypes to sketches to just going up and beyond. And very soon here, we've just recently launched our V1. Uh, we are fully enterprise, so security, SOC 2, all that, getting it out of the way, of course. But we're launching with these 6 7 enterprise customers and helping them really transform their employee referral program. That's awesome. Yep.

Brian Fink: 12:39

About transforming the employee referral program, I want to go back to something you said at the very beginning about spreadsheets, right? Yeah. Why are, why are enterprise companies so archaic when it comes to adopting technology that is compliant? I mean, like... What's going on there? I don't know.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 13:00

I don't know. I mean, I just got surprised. Like, when we came out and said, look, we want to help you transform your employee referrals including employee adoption. We didn't know there was this other problem as well that we're solving. It's like, oh, you're also helping the admins track it and automate it. How do you do it today on spreadsheets? What? Your 40, 000 person organizations that you have. And they share their screen. They show me that spreadsheet. And I look at the spreadsheet and I'm like,

Shally Steckerl: 13:25

what? Like, Brian, there's still companies that don't have ATSs.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 13:29

Yeah,

Brian Fink: 13:29

right. Ladies and gentlemen, the word ATS, if that was on your bingo card and you were listening... Three dollars? Three dollars, you can scratch off ATS. That's spelled

Shally Steckerl: 13:39

A T

Brian Fink: 13:41

S. You can bet your ATS on it. That's right.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 13:45

Right, uh, but, you know, to answer your question, I think it's just... Everyone, like... Everyone's now focusing on the next big thing. Like, three years ago, it was blockchain. So why are they not solving the current problem that's in front of them? Exactly. And like, they're just forgetting the basic stuff. Like, get a great ATS, like Oleeo. Get a great employee referral solution, shameless plug in, like Echo. Get the basics out of the way, and then think AI and all that stuff. You still have to cover the basics first.

Shally Steckerl: 14:09

Sure. Bright, shiny object syndrome. I got a question for you, though. Um, Is there any magic number to what an employee referral

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 14:17

should be worth? You mean there's like a bonus amount to be paid? Yeah, that's what I mean. Uh, there's

Shally Steckerl: 14:24

no... Is it 500 bucks? Is it 727 bucks? Is it... You'll

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 14:27

be surprised, there's hospitals paying up to 5, does it

Shally Steckerl: 14:31

matter? What I'm asking is, if the hospital pays 5, 000 or 5, 500 or 500, does it really

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 14:38

impact? So I say it's a balance between two. Uh, if you want the amount to be low, you need the experience to be easy. Okay. If you want, if the experience is not easy, you want the amount to be high. Okay. If I'm gonna spend five to ten minutes referring someone, that may, that better be worth it. It better be like, you know, 750 bucks or a thousand bucks I'm getting. Okay. I'm not gonna spend 20 minutes for 50 bucks. So what's low then? I'd say that, you know, in the hourly...

Shally Steckerl: 15:04

What's okay low? Like what's low that's still okay?

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 15:06

250, 250 to 300 is a...

Shally Steckerl: 15:10

So if you're gonna do it, you gotta put 250 bucks on the table.

Brian Fink: 15:12

Now wait a minute, wait a minute. Plaza Bach in Work Rules says that they did studies at Google Uhhuh that the amount doesn't matter.

Shally Steckerl: 15:20

That's where I'm going with this, but that was a while back. That's why I'm asking somebody that knows now. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah, because that was some time ago. Yeah. And yeah. And that was Google. It was Google. And when I was at Cisco and other companies like that, I was at Google myself. Yeah. Um, I've noticed that there's very little impact in the amount. Yeah. In fact, what I did notice is that when the amount gets really high, you end up getting people. Who stopped doing their job.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 15:45

And they turn into full time sourcers. And turn into recruiters.

Shally Steckerl: 15:49

But, so you know, you know now what's going on. So, put 150, 250 on the table, minimum. And then what's high, what's high that's like, the number where you really, if you get any higher than that, it's not going to impact.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 16:00

I'd say 5, 000. 5, 000 is surely the number.

Shally Steckerl: 16:03

So if you offer 10, 000, it's not going

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 16:05

to get you any... Yeah, it's probably not gonna give you that huge of an impact. Um, and that's also some of the data that we're excited to dig into with our, for those six, seven beta early clients that we're working with is having them test that out. Hey, do this amount versus this amount. Are you getting difference? And just, right, showing them that on their dashboard as an admin for sure.

Shally Steckerl: 16:24

And what about the, um, tax implication with employees that are not full time?

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 16:29

Yeah, good question. So, sometimes it gets tricky there, but typically bonuses. are paid as wages. They're just added to the paycheck and they're taxed accordingly.

Adam Couch: 16:40

So over the last, I don't know, half a day today, we heard a lot about the candidate experience. And you just touched on the referral experience. It's got to be easy. So what, how are you guys looking at the referral

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 16:50

experience itself? Yeah, absolutely. So today, uh, with ECHO, 6730. And be able to refer someone in 15 seconds from there. Our tech technology recognizes who they are from their phone number as an employee, knows who they are, thanks them for engaging, asks them just a few questions, gives them a unique referral link that they can share with anyone who they want to refer. Huh. Right.

Shally Steckerl: 17:15

That's easy. Yep. 15 seconds. Why don't we have

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 17:18

that for recruiting?

Brian Fink: 17:20

Uh, because we over engineer a lot of things and put them on spreadsheets. Yeah.

Shally Steckerl: 17:26

Right. Spreadsheets. Yeah, Google Docs. Yeah. All right.

Brian Fink: 17:33

That are not shared. That are not shared. Not shareable Google Docs. Yeah, so, um, to kind of wrap this up and to bring this home, we've talked a lot about candidate experience, referral driven experience, we've even talked about the entrepreneurial experience and the journey that you've gone through. Is there anything, I mean, now that we've got a lot of things on the table, is there anything that you wish that we had asked you about? That we didn't ask you about, whether it's about the product or about your personal journey. What is it?

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 18:00

well, good question. I'd say, you know, I'd say like, what are the, you know, today you have all these founders and entrepreneurs. It's a shiny word on LinkedIn, only sharing the good stuff. You rarely find someone sharing like the hard stuff.

Brian Fink: 18:13

Yeah, but you guys build in public. Like, your co founder was on LinkedIn showing how she was making these shirts that you guys are wearing. Yeah. Okay, sorry, I interrupted your answer. Go for it.

Tawfiq Abu-Khajil: 18:21

Yeah, so I would say to your question is like, what are the things that suck as a founder or early stage employee at a startup? Right, no one ever asks that question. People generally just go, share their, oh, we've raised 30 million, we've raised 20 million, oh, you know, we've partnered with X, we've partnered with Y. Here are all the good stuff, which I think is good. But then you give this false image to a lot of folks, and it's hard. Like, it's really hard, and you just gotta keep going. And the harder it gets, that means you're doing some right stuff, you're doing the correct stuff.

Brian Fink: 18:49

Alright, and I think that you've delved into it a little bit, like, what the journey is, what the struggle is to build in public, to go from zero to one. I'm Brian Fink, he's Shally Stackwell, we are powered by Oleeo today on the floor at out, this is great. hR Tech. HR Tech, we are the Content Lounge, we are sponsored by Oleeo. Good luck, brother. Adam, appreciate it. Y'all have a great day