SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Welcome to Retained Search, the podcast, where we lift the lid on what it's really like to work retained, discuss the stories we've gathered along the way, and give you all a peek behind the scenes of our amazing community and how they're getting ahead.

SPEAKER_00: 0:28

Which is great. I'm obviously not uh I'm obviously saying reasonably okay stuff.

SPEAKER_02: 0:40

Well, I don't know whether it's what you're saying, I think it's more about what you're doing. Um I I have heard more about what you're doing than you, actually. I didn't know it was you behind it until about 24 hours ago. So um, yeah, I'm very, very much looking forward to uh diving into what you've been doing for the benefit of me and our listeners. Um, would you mind telling us a little bit about your journey and how you've come to be doing what you're doing? I'm gonna leave the audience in mystery and it will evolve itself and they'll find out why we're talking today over the course of our conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24

Yeah, um, and a solid place to start. Yeah, it's Atlas is my second baby, my second business. Um, I'm not a recruiter, although my first company um was in an industry that was very recruiting, but no one kind of knows about it, which is called the exper network industry. And essentially, uh recruiters will place a candidate at a company for a long or short period of time. An expert network will usually work with investors or consultants, and they will say, I'd like to learn about this company. Can you connect me with the former management team? So you go and source them and clarify their knowledge in a similar-ish way to what a recruiter might do at the beginning of a process. But then the outcome is a one-hour phone conversation. And so we built that business pro SAP in in 2017. We got it, at least when I was there, to about 40 mil USD revenues. And the business began to mature um, professional management, etc. And AI was coming at that point. So we had seen GPT 2, and I got very, very excited about this technology. Um and so so much so that I actually ripped the entire search engine of our platform out to replace it with one of the models that were equivalent to GPT-2. It was actually one of Gemini's very, very old versions. Um and then I just thought this is the next dot com era, and I'd like to have the freedom to build something. And when it comes to the what, I think it was all about the unfair advantages that you gain from your experience. So what was the most similar industry to what I had already done? And recruitment exec search is the most similar to the process of Expo Networks, and I'd already built this product. So you get a head start essentially.

SPEAKER_02: 3:49

Tell people if you will. Um I think I have experienced, or the reason we're having this conversation today, I should say, is that the people that I work with, particularly in my mastery group, that are at the front of uh technology and um and obviously AI is a huge part of that now, and even just tactics and their game in general. And your name, or rather, Atlas, uh, your software's name has been cropping up um more and more frequently, and I've therefore got a feel for why. Um, but there are people listening to this that probably don't know why people like that are talking about what you're doing and are using your software. What is it that it does that most other traditional and other CRMs don't?

SPEAKER_00: 4:55

So let's take exec search as an industry, and when you're presenting yourself as a service provider, you usually talk about the depth of your knowledge in that industry. And we've been doing this for 20 years, and we know everyone in the sector, and so we really have the inside scoop of the people you might want to hire. And that's uh partially true. You have had those conversations if you are a great professional, but uh our brains aren't very good and they get worse as you get older. So the percent of all this amazing stuff that you learn through your intelligent questioning and forward-thinking calls disappears, dis disappears. And so you're presenting a value that's partially true. We want to build the part around memory. Everything that everyone at your company says, hears, reads, and writes, we are ingesting always. And that means that every interesting tidbit is stored, ready to be brought back to you whenever it is needed. So when you're next pitching uh on a beauty parade for a CEO search, let's say, and you've got to make that slide where here are four people that we think could be quite good, just as the pitch deck, while all of your competitors are just putting generic uh bullet points, they worked in the tech industry too. Thanks for that. You can actually, without any effort, just say this is specifically why this person would specifically be great for your business, and you can do that without any thought. And so having this memory uh stored, it just makes you much more than just the recruitment part of your business. You become a data store in your sector and a much deeper data store than even a LinkedIn would hope to be, because you have all these conversations that you've done over these years. So that is where we are trying to get to from the core, and with that memory, it's then how much of that boring admin work can we get rid of?

SPEAKER_02: 7:11

Yeah. When some of the people that are using your software were telling me about the things that it can do and how helpful it is, I immediately wanted to find out more and um have even without meeting you have suggested that several people look at at the software knowing that um nothing's perfect, and especially in evolve where a world where everything evolves so quickly, um we're all building the airplane while it's in the air, right? Um, but the the the the way that you're doing that is responsive and with feedback and intuitive and um and that it's evolving really nicely. Um the peak that piece that that that that that's your answer as well, um it's just music to my ears. I absolutely love it. Like there are lots of pieces of software that do the process piece really nicely, or you know, from a business development perspective, like your sales forces, and there's a there's some really nice software like clockworks and stuff that do the the execution process beautifully. But the the biggest loss in both of those processes is is knowledge. Um how on earth can you remember it all as an individual? I used to say, I used to keep write everything down, every single thing my memory is crap, um, and I have them all uh all my notes written in um little uh soft black moleskin notebooks. I've got maybe 40 of them from um you know the last 10 years of my work, and I can't find anything. Like I used to say, I wish I could control F it. Um, but even if I could do that, I wouldn't necessarily know what I was looking for. You know, the fact that you know what what Rome, one of the my guys, said to me was, um, I can say I've had a conversation with a guy last week, and it was something about investment that was going into a company somewhere in the East Coast, and it will help you find that conversation from and link things up and say, Well, you had this conversation, but this is also relevant. You might remember having this conversation, this conversation, this might also be interesting for you. It's absolutely phenomenal from a business development, from uh knowledge and management of your candidates, you know, remembering who they're married to and how many children they've got and what sports they support. It isn't just about you know being able to present to your clients the the knowledge and the um the fit that you can make, it's all the other stuff that you can do with it as well. I think it's amazing, and I'm very much looking forward to the growth. Um did you come from a tech background, Jordan? How have you come to no?

SPEAKER_00: 10:14

I was I was I was in hedge funds for a decade. I was in banking and hedge funds, but the so I'm autistic, so I'm I have uh I'm naturally inclined to numbers and I think very weirdly in structures that when I explain to people how my brain works in conversations, they just walk away thinking, it sounds like a flipping lunatic, this guy. Um, but it's you know, it's how my particular brain works. And I started coding while I was uh uh you know in my last hedge fund, and and it was all about I want to invest in a business or sell a business based on the data that I can scrape and analyze at scale from the internet, and so I got into it there, but then to be honest, it was just I learned it by building my first business. There was uh now I look back at some of the decisions that I made technically in the first year or two were absolute howlers, you know, the decisions that really caused a lot of pain and time to you know remove. But after doing it for five years, I'm fortunate to have learned how to build this stuff, and it's a very learned by doing thingy. Fortunate to know now a number of people who I know are tremendously good engineers, and yeah, you just you learn it, you learn it over time. So that's yeah, so that is the advantage. Have you built it once before? Yes, so you know what not to do. There'll always be new mistakes that will come, but you know, it gives an advantage, certainly.

SPEAKER_02: 11:51

And what does your team look like?

SPEAKER_00: 11:54

Um we have like 26 people, I think. And over half of them are engineers. Yeah. We actually only have three people in sales, and one of them is my co-founder. So we are very much an inbound engine business um where your marketing team is bigger than sales, but to be honest, customer support is bigger than both marketing and sales put together, and then the engineering team is twice the size of that. Um we are, you know, for our size, we probably have a comparable, if not larger, engineering team than quite a few of our competitors. But I think we're getting to the point where I'm probably peeking at how many engineers we actually want because there is this law that people think, oh, you just have twice as many engineers, you build twice as much stuff, which is not true. So we'll probably end up with 15 or 16 engineers, and I think at that point, that's the sweet spot to build a really good product.

SPEAKER_02: 12:48

And what are you guys focusing on at the moment?

SPEAKER_00: 12:52

So we finished our memory engine, and then we're now using that memory engine. So the big items currently are opportunities which will be out by the time this gets to publication. The idea is there's a load of uh BD or uh uh admin in BD, why can't we just get rid of all that admin as well? So, for example, I can you know launch a campaign or whatever to somebody, and every outbound and inbound communication is up tracked, updated, and the next steps are just told to me. And there's also a little heat rating. So every little action that's happened, if someone clicks or opens, a system will adjust itself. So that means if I'm sending, you know, if I'm active with a hundred prospects and I'm pitching a candidate to those 20 people, I'm trying to do some, you've just raised uh outreach to these 20 people, and I've got a hundred people I'm trying to actively do BD with. This system is every day gonna say, I'm gonna tell you what you should focus on today based on everything that you know and everything that's going inside and outside of your system. So it's that kind of stuff. Um, but the big one is magic search, which will be the first of its kind product. Um, because it's the first time when you can do a full search on all of the data. Find me a CEO who absolutely loves Pearl Jam, the band, for those who are probably not my age. It's my era, I know Pearl Jam. There you go. So if you've had a WhatsApp conversation about buying Pearl Jam tickets, that will come up in the search. Right. And so this was the the, you know, we spent really two years building our entire architecture to solve to make this one feature, which is you know very different from the pins or or juice boxes that are doing some really great work with the data outside your database. For us, it was why do people even go outside their database? Usually because the database is just no data is there and it's just badly organized. We wanted to say, can we be the first product where people truly say, I go to my database first, and then I go to LinkedIn or PIN or Juice Box?

SPEAKER_02: 15:20

Very cool. And how do you see it evolving over the next few years? What big changes or incremental changes do you see coming?

SPEAKER_00: 15:36

So we uh we are very, very um cognizant that most recruiters have had the same. So let me phrase this properly. Every software that every recruiter uses will always usually have one big problem that everyone has, which is there's basic problems that have been stuck there for years, and we keep flagging it, and they keep building new stuff, and they never get to the basic stuff, which a little thing could make my life 20x better. So we don't want to be though those type of people. We obviously had to build the whole product, and that was a big piece of work, and we'll probably get to the end of what I would consider the complete platform by probably latest January. Um, and what we try and do is we we always go to our clients and we're constantly saying, What do you guys want to see? What doesn't work? We do this thing where, and we're gonna do it again next month, where we say, What do you hate about Atlas? So I kind of say, Look, I'm giving you total um freedom to you know slate the hell out of the platform because I want to know what annoys you about it, and then I want to understand how many people it also viscerally annoys. And then I'm gonna fix those items first. And a lot of people don't do that because they say, Well, well, if I show that there's some weaknesses around the platform, then they might think it's really bad and they won't buy from us. But I just think that people are smarter than that, and actually, everyone knows that no software is ever truly done, and particularly one that's only been sold for 13 months, right? We compared to a Vincieri, which is gosh, 13 years old, something like that.

SPEAKER_01: 17:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 17:25

So to get to where we are in a in just over a year is is pretty cool. But we also, yeah, we we want to make sure we're doubling down on the things that people use the most. Um, as a case in point, the big I we did a little survey last week, and we have like we know there's 30 features that are really nice basics. And though the classic, I want to add an automation. So when someone goes to a particular status or stage, it sends an automated email. Oh, well, let's have an interview. So we've started building that, it will take three or four days, and that'll be out again, probably by the time this this video comes out. But it's just making sure that we we we do the the basics, and then when it comes to the big bets, um, we we are trying to be cagey about where we want to go the next 12 months, purely because we've now realized that people are watching what we're doing, and like everyone's it's like our website has been replicated by three or four. No, our general form of flattery, though.

SPEAKER_02: 18:24

I get it, I get it.

SPEAKER_00: 18:25

I'm cool. We get it as well. If someone wanted to copy us, I'd be very disappointed. You know, our concept of getting rid of admin has been replicated, and some of our features have been seen as the this is what a futuristic uh CRM looks like. So we we know what we're trying to achieve, and it's very simple. I want your you know, your listeners, our clients, to bill more. At the end of the day, I can tell you a beautiful story about memory. It's a memory engine, and oh, it's got all the things, and admins not gonna be there and everything. But the only thing that really matters is how much are you billing per head at the end of the year?

SPEAKER_02: 19:07

Are you enjoying this so far? Don't miss a single episode. Hit the subscribe button right now so you can be part of the conversation that's shaping the future of recruitment. So we dive really deep into the strategies, the stories, and the truth about retained search. So if you want to hear more about it or you know someone else that needs to hear this, then share it with them. Right, let's get back to the good stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 19:37

Can you go to Icos with your family for two weeks, or do you have to go to a four-star or something like that, right? It's I want to build a business that's going to make you as financially successful as possible so you can do all the cool things that you like to do with your family, etc. And so at the end of the day, every filter, filter, uh every feature is framed through that lens. How is it going to increase revenue per head?

SPEAKER_02: 20:02

Nice. I like that. There are um people listening to this that will be at various different stages of uh adoption of AI and everything that comes with that in um this context. What advice would you give them, these founders and business owners that are navigating this change?

SPEAKER_00: 20:29

Yeah, so a general advice about navigating. So the first thing is that everyone should be using ChatGPT or Claude natively as a total minimum. It's equivalent to you should give your recruiter a phone. I would say it's probably as important as a phone now. Um and that's the basics. Um, I would also do incentivization if you're struggling to get adoption, make a little incentivization. So, for example, when we wanted to get our engineers to use agentic coding, I literally made a bonus. I looked at how much everyone was spending, and I said, everyone who spends all an X will get a bonus at the end of the month. You know, just try it out. When it comes to your softwares, and you must remember, dear listener, that I am biased towards Atlas. So everything I say, you must say, well, he would say that because he's he's and he's he's an Atlas guy. Yeah. We are three years past GPT four. If your vendor is still saying, it's coming, the AI is coming, the roadmap's great, but today you cannot see anything that's really fantastic, it ain't ever going to come.

SPEAKER_01: 21:50

That's such a good answer.

SPEAKER_00: 21:53

And and it's funny because you when you when you're a technical person, you you you you you are in code all the time, you understand very deeply. We didn't like the first version of our BD system. It's the first system we built, said it's not good enough, and then rebuilt. And that small part to rip it out and replace it has been a hellish month or so. It's been a quite a complex thing to do, and that's just that's a post-AI product with everything correct apart from one feature they don't like so much. For the pre-AI people, it's the whole platform that has to go. They've built these beer moth products that were built to be the best thing they could be in a world where the technology we have now did not exist. And you cannot rebuild that. You just can't. And you can pretend, you can rebrand your website, put a dot AI at the end if you like, but you ain't ever gonna build the stuff that a post-AI business will build. And then when it comes to CRMs, of course, it's do I want to move CRM? Jesus Christ, this sounds like an absolute waste of time. And you know, we're doing okay, we're making you know, reasonable money. So, what's the point in rocking the boat? The problem is that when you go to pitch in three months' time for a juicy CEO position, and an Atlas-powered uh exec search consultant has essentially put four candidates which are perfect matches based on 20 years of knowledge, your deck is gonna look ludicrous. It won't, it just won't compete. And then you're gonna be on the back foot saying, I wish we did it back in the day when it was great. And it's much, much harder to change your CRM when you are under pressure from those who are using the technology that you decided because it was comfortable not to do. So take the plunge. While migration is a pain, and I'm not gonna say it's beautifully easy, it's not as painful as people think it is. It is a bit of a pain, but it's not as painful, but it's much less painful than losing all your business to someone who did take that.

SPEAKER_02: 24:08

Too right, yeah, too right. That was very, very good advice, very good advice. Um tell me, if you will, a little bit about pivotal moments on your journey, because you've learned a whole new industry, um, as well as the uh technology around it. What tell us about moments along the way that have changed the course for you or have been moments of learning and realization that have influenced the directions in which you've gone?

SPEAKER_00: 24:52

So when we when we started, our first bet was we want to go specifically after Exec Search because we thought the people that have the most valuable conversations are exec search, and therefore they would see the most value out of the product. I still think that's the the right thing. Then it turned out that the the white collar, the the tier below, was actually the first adopter and remains today the main driver. So a lot of features like building the contractor module, I had no intention of building actually at the beginning. A lot of features that I thought I'll build to a certain quality, but I didn't think you know, an exec slash person would want it that much. So I just didn't think about it. But as you build, you've got to, you know, like water floating down a mountain, you have to kind of go where it goes to an extent. You have to be flexible. And you also have to challenge your, you have to challenge always say, is what I've made good enough? Doesn't matter how people say, oh, it's really great. Is what people say good enough? So, example, what is the BD product? We made a good attempt at it. I thought it was great when I when I launched it. But people said, Well, you know, it's okay, it doesn't quite do everything. And then I said, guys, can you just be honest and just slate it? If you if you if it's not working, tell me why. And you know, these kind of things where we've empowered our community just to kind of give us honest feedback, and we don't we don't make them feel bad that they're telling me that something's crap, and and and and we build things that people generally want. That that's that's the pivotal moments we've had. That was one of them. Is there another one? I mean, there's plenty of little ones. Um I guess uh, you know, the the how the migration, the that how much you effort it was was probably an unexpected. And it's migrations from our side rather than the customer side. Like all of the work, you know, the the engine that we use to migrate is a platform that's almost as big as Atlas is. So we built a second business in the background that no one ever really interacts with apart from the first month there with Atlas. And that was uh, you know, you're thinking you're building this really big product, and then you've actually got to build another product to get big people into that big product. That was an interesting learning. So we've been, you know, we've been really, it's been a very hard year of work, I would say.

SPEAKER_02: 27:28

And obviously, you won't tell me anything that's sensitive, and that's fine. Um, do you have the big uh executive search firms interested in or approaching you about the software? The Shrek firms, for example.

SPEAKER_00: 27:44

We do. We have our largest customer, um, uh, which I don't know if I can name it yet, so I won't hear. Um well-known exec search firm who are one of our first customers and a design partner. Um, and some of the partners even invested in one of the earlier rounds we did. Um, a lot of people know in the market, know that company, it seems, and they're asking, how's it going? Is it, you know, is it ready yet? And we're now getting to that final point where we've onboarded, they're picking up these little nuances that exec search happens to have. And we're just fixing them as they go because they've kind of said, you know, we want you to be a essentially a bit uh a CRM that can support an 100 seater plus A exec search firm now, um, which has been again a high pressure thing, but we we've known about this. We we signed this contract a year ago, in fact, and so we've been moving in that direction. So you know we a lot of people are waiting for the the uh this now works for 100 seater perfectly to probably open the gates, and we are so close to that now, which is exciting, because I think a lot of people they they do ask what CRM you're using, and before AI, it was a much of a muchness, you know. In in exec search, you've got Ezekiel, Clockwork, Kluen. Invenius, as I understand, was good a while ago, but post-born acquisition hasn't really been got the the TLC um that it should have got. But all of those, while they've got a little feature here, a little feature there that might be a bit different, there's not really any main difference. See there's no reason for you to take any pain because it's not a okay, there's one feature we'd really love to use, but do we want to migrate for that feature? No. Whereas now what we're seeing is that what we've brought is is just a fundamentally different approach, which which will supercharge Exper networks, you know, to a sorry an expo executive search to a huge degree. So this one I reckon is going to happen um probably January, February, you're gonna see this really take flight.

SPEAKER_02: 30:00

One of the reasons that I ask is I've had a couple of conversations recently with those in the kind of true um executive search space that are, you know, the big five, the the Shrek firms specifically, which obviously aren't 100 C to their thousands, thousands. Um and there are concerns around GDPR and recording calls and using data from transcripts and permissions, and therefore there's barriers for them in adoption of a lot of the tools and techniques that a lot of my clients and our members are and have been enjoying the benefits of for quite some time now. Do you see that as well?

SPEAKER_00: 30:59

So we don't speak to the Shrek firms as much because, as I understand, they all have their own systems.

SPEAKER_02: 31:08

Yeah, they have. I think there's one on Cluen, and then as far as I know, the others have got bespoke software that's been built for them, but very much pre-AI.

SPEAKER_00: 31:21

And I know that they're probably looking at it because it's becoming a disadvantage because none of them have managed to really make a dent there. And so I would expect as we it's probably a 2026 thing for us, we'll probably get inbounds. And we, you know, we do have a couple of those partners that peek around and have quick calls with us. It's a tough one, isn't it? Now I have views based on very expensive lawyers that we used at my first company because it was the same concept. These are my views from my advice I've got, and this is not legal advice.

SPEAKER_02: 31:57

I always say that.

SPEAKER_00: 31:59

Um but at the end of the day, there is this permitted use of, you know, when you're recording someone, a legitimate business interest, it is called. And if you're a candidate, there's a clear legitimate business interest to say, I want you to get a job because, well, you've applied to the job, I want you to get the job, and it's in your interest because you're going to get a promotion and more money and everything, but I'm not a Superman and I can't remember everything you say. So it's it's a legitimate business interest for me to record everything because I can then present you and give you the best chance to get that role you've always dreamed of getting. Now, if that person says, that's very nice, but delete my data, please, then you know, Atlas has a one-click delete button. Pop. And even and it can even manage that deletion across LinkedIn as well. So we just make it open for how everyone wants to interpret it or you know, in terms of how they believe GDPR should be read and the posture to take. But this is a particularly at the higher end, it's a very people-driven business with a lot of knowledge and it were just at a material disadvantage. And while if you're a big five a Shrek firm or Shrek, if you want to put true in there, um you you live off you live off your brand to a great degree. This would degrade over time. I mean, let's look at a similar industry, management consulting, which is a similar concept of big three, and you come to Bain or Boston or McKinsey for, you know, you get you pay twice the price because you've got that comfort of of going with the big people. So, you know, but I guess the same way as if you hire a CEO who sucks, you can say, Well, I did go to Spencer Stewart or whatever. So, you know, that wasn't my fault, really. Um, those guys are plowing ahead with generative AI all over their business because they understand, and it's the same professional services concept. So I generally think that people are getting used to being recorded. Now, as long as you've got that that flexibility in the system to disable, enable, and delete, that's what you need. So I think they will eventually adopt it. My bet.

SPEAKER_02: 34:23

Yeah, yeah. I think it's going to be difficult not to, but everything I've heard recently is that the barrier there around uh core recording and GDPR is slowing, is slowing it down significantly. Like, how can it not?

SPEAKER_00: 34:39

Yeah, and it's I remember we had we had a really interesting um uh conversation with my first business at the time when it was coming out, and as an expert network, I want to reach out to to people, so I need their email addresses, and we would subscribe to all the usual uh people that you buy emails from, right? Every one of them, because that was the business. Hello there, uh Jordan. Uh, we've got a person who wants to talk about the expert network industry, and we noticed you're in it. Can you chat for a bit? Or pay you$500 or whatever it is. And we had our compliance team said, Oh, this is a clear breach of GDPR, uh, or that was their opinion. And my my point there was, well, we're an expert network, we need to actually connect to these people, but um, you know, and we need these email addresses, um and they are sold en masse by 20 different companies, and everyone uses it. And so we got a lot of work done um at the time, and the opinion was is that the the it the risk, it was like theoretically it might be, but the risk is extremely low because as long as you are deleting data when people ask you to delete it quickly and efficiently, um, and in this particular case, you're actually coming and you're not using their email and then trying to sell them something, you're trying to actually give them money, which is the same in recruitment. I think it's a fundamentally different thing. Again, this is you know, everyone should take their own legal opinions and advice and take you know the things they feel comfortable doing. But I think that it's so well known that people are using all these providers to buy email addresses. And if you do that, therefore you've probably already created a tacit opinion on GDPR.

SPEAKER_02: 36:27

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm uh we've been I've I've us and our clients have been using note takers for years now, you know, and not and not but you very rarely experience an issue, and and actually it's improves the service that you, like you say, you you can provide to them as candidates and clients. So um I'm in, and I was just curious to see what you know what you see. And it's interesting that one other thing I wanted to ask was the way in which, as you've probably started to realise, the way in which a contingent recruitment process operates is quite different from the way in which an executive search and retained search process is run, uh, both from a sales perspective and uh an execution perspective. Um, I can share uh examples, of course, but not least that if you're executing a contingent project, you need speed, you need to be presenting top three CVs within a matter of hours, really, days, because that's what it's about fastest finger first. When you're executing a retain process, you need to be thoroughly mapping all of the candidates and taking them through an assessment process. How are you planning to manage the differences in the two different types of processes that you're looking to support?

SPEAKER_00: 38:07

So that's an interesting interesting observation, and it's totally true. And you'll know better than me because I've only been doing this for now two years. So um at its core, they're not dissimilar from a framework. I take a person and they pass through a set of gates until they get to a presentation present it, and then there's a process part of that. So the concept from winning project or mandate to presenting candidates, that's the same. What you do in each stage probably differs, but most of it's always around the same concept. We have to speak to them. For contingent, it might say, Well, I don't need to speak to them because I'm flying over them, so I know they're gonna be good. So actually, I'm not gonna bother interviewing, or I might do a quick five-minute call. Um when you present it again, there's not there's nothing to be said to say that a contingent recruiter wouldn't like to present their candidates in the form of an executive search. They'll just say, I have a maximum number of this many minutes to present. Whereas exec search have got teams carefully doing all these things. So it's just about making a system that, you know, so for the client review, right? We've kind of automated the majority of that process for exec search. Now that means a contingent person can say, well, I can now present a candidate with an amazing exec search style in the same amount of time it took me to do it normally. I'll probably do that one because then my work looks like it's of high quality. It probably is. So then it's just having the flexible modules. The one important thing which I think everyone has got wrong in the industry is that uh you don't want a customer to see buttons they don't need. And so what we've tried to do with our system is if you're a contract recruiter, you flick on the contractor thing, and then all the contractor features will be visible. But if you flick it off, they all disappear. So the idea is that you only should only see the things you need, but the system again is is built to be flexible enough to not worry.

SPEAKER_02: 40:33

Cool. Um I've got more questions on that, but I I guess it probably gets quite technical and quite boring for our listeners, so I won't go into it all now.

SPEAKER_00: 40:48

And how do the pipelines function there?

SPEAKER_02: 40:51

Yeah, I'm I'm really interested to uh find out more. And I think with the kind of input that you're getting, um, I'd just like to see the capability continue to develop for executive and retained search, um, you know, as well as servicing the contingent uh clients because but it sounds like you're listening to that.

SPEAKER_00: 41:20

Oh, yeah, but the audience too. Yeah, they're that. So we've got they've they've given us really great granular feedback on the scheduling system.

SPEAKER_01: 41:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 41:31

Like we'd like you to separate the invites between candidate and contact, or we'd actually like you to put the optional button there, or can you make it private or public? Generally, more custom things. What we've noticed is exec search like depth of features and contingent like speed of features, right? So, because obviously contingent doesn't have the same amount of time than exec has, and exec, I suppose if I'm selling a service that's 50,000 pounds plus, like it has to feel like a 50,000 pound server, it has to look like one. Even though you could do the same work and not like that, is I think where the difference is is that they need to have that granularity because it is a white glove service. So we're learning like about that, where some features people will just you know say it's really priority 50 for me, but with exec search, they say, no, this is vital.

SPEAKER_02: 42:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good.

SPEAKER_00: 42:35

We built um one which is the scheduling feature. So you can actually have an EA and say, right, instead of me just creating the meeting, I can just start, right, start scheduling, write a note, and it goes off to my EA, and then the EA can write it or can schedule it, and I'm cool, don't have to do anything more. So that was a feature that came in a few days ago based on that feedback.

SPEAKER_02: 42:54

Yeah, and that's that's a great example because you're dealing with people who won't necessarily click a calendarly link because they're at the C-suite and expect to be handheld through that scheduling process by someone saying, and what time works for you, sir? Wow, busy next week. Okay, great. So will the week after work for you? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's good, that's really good. Um, I'm I'd love to carry on talking to you, and I'm hoping that we will offline. And I'd like to um, you know, keep up to date with your journey and how things are going. In the meantime, I want to say thank you for being on the show and for sharing your journey and all the little um bits and pieces of insight that we've had into what you guys are doing and how you're doing it. And to those of you listening that are starting to realise that your um your CRM isn't perhaps in the age that we are now, um, have a look at Atlas. We've had great feedback, so I'd like you to have a look at it.

SPEAKER_00: 44:04

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_02: 44:07

My pleasure. Well, that's another episode of Retrain Search, the podcast in the bag. Thanks for listening to our wild tales, LinkedIn controversies, and our top tips on how to sell and deliver retained search. Get involved in our next episode. Send in your questions and share your experiences with us by emailing podcast at retrainedseech.com. And don't be shy, connect with us on LinkedIn and come and say hi. We don't bite, unless you're a track firm, that is. We want to say a special thank you to our retrained members for sharing what's working for them right now and innovating new ways to grow and evolve. It's an incredible community. If you're wondering what exactly we mean when we mention our communities, well, we have two separate programs. Our Search Foundation's program is for recruiters who want to learn how to sell and deliver retained search solutions consistently. And we have our Search Mastery program. That's for business leaders or owners already at 50% retained or more and looking to scale and grow and structure their search firm. We cap memberships to these programs to protect the integrity of the community. If you want access, just talk to us. Okay, thanks for listening. We'll be back very soon with another episode of Retrain Search the Podcast.