How to never make a bad hire again with Joe Woodward, Vizzy

Joe talks to Juliet about what founders should really look for when hiring, where traditional recruitment falls short and how to use AI without losing the human judgement that helps you spot exceptional people. If you're making your first hires, struggling to spot real potential or wondering how AI should fit into your recruitment process, this episode is for you.

Joe Woodward is co-founder of Vizzy, a hiring platform reimagining the CV for the next generation of talent. Four years in, Vizzy has raised around £7 million in backing, built a talent pool of 120,000 people and works with major clients including Burberry, Virgin and the LVMH group.

In this episode:
00:00:00 Why the traditional CV could be costing you the best candidates
00:06:00 The hiring signal that can matter more than qualifications or experience
00:09:00 The biggest hiring mistakes founders make
00:10:30 When growing your team could actually be the wrong decision
00:23:00 How to use AI in recruitment without losing what only a human can spot

Find out more:
Vizzy: https://home.vizzy.com/
Joe Woodward: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-woodward13/

FF&M enables you to own your own PR & produces podcasts.
https://www.fallowfieldmason.com

Recorded, edited & published by Juliet Fallowfield, MD & Founder of PR & Communications consultancy for startups Fallow, Field & Mason.

Email us at hello@fallowfieldmason.com or DM us on Instagram @fallowfieldmason.

MUSIC CREDIT: Funk Game Loop by Kevin MacLeod.

Transcript

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Joe 0:00

I remember being told by Robert Dodds that the greatest skill is just making something happen is gold dust. Don't do it for your ego to say, oh, we're a 10-person business. Do it because you really need to do it. I'd almost hold on the first hire, which is a bit ironic coming from a hiring platform. The ability to push a button and it say, oh, hire this person. That's not what we're here for. These are amazing tools, but it's still about the person connected to that tool that's going to really make it work or not.

Juliet 0:28

Hi Joe, welcome to How to Start Up. It's wonderful to have you on. Before we get into all things talent, it would be great if you could introduce yourself a bit about the business that you have started.

Joe 0:38

Morning, Juliet. Thank you so much for having me on. My name's Joe Woodward. I'm the co-founder and creative director at Vizzy. So I co-founded it with my sister Jess and her husband, Chris. And really it started with the idea of reimagining the CV for the next generation of talents so they can really show who they are and in turn businesses can hire for what really matters.

Juliet 0:58

And this is incredible because I had a year in New York, and part of our student visa to live in America was that we had evening classes, and one of them was how to write a CV. And it was, I swear to God, the reason my career went the way it went, because the CV was so epic and it taught us all the hacks and tricks and stuff. But if someone hadn't taught me that, I wouldn't know. You just go, I did this, I did that. It was giving numbers and actuals and ratios and percentages and stuff. Where do you feel the world of the CV is failing?

Joe 1:25

I think fundamentally it's just this incredibly limiting tool. When you just try to define a person and their potential and their talents by qualifications and work experience alone, it just becomes an incredibly narrow way to look at a person. And you lose all sense of how does this person think? What are their ambitions? Who are they? What do they care about? What's their kind of learning capacity? And really it's that sort of potential. And particularly when you look at sort of young professionals in the early career space, they may not have traditional qualifications, they may not have any sort of experience yet. So asking these young people to express themselves in this very limiting format is just a bit of a non-starter. And they're not fun to create, they're certainly not fun to read. And I think again, looking at this sort of next generation of talent, the way that they express themselves as digital natives and how incredible they are at using these modern tools. But we're asking them to write this one-sided PDF. And it's kind of a fun fact I always throw out there is that it was Leonardo da Vinci that invented the CV. And so it hasn't been updated in an awful long time. And it's about time that we really tackled that. And I think then when you then apply it to kind of the modern systems and modern technology, it's then almost so easily hacked and automated. And now with AI, we have people writing CV applications with AI, they're then being screened by AI, and it's become this completely automated system. And it's a little bit like we just got to actually bring a bit more sort of humanity back into it and authenticity back into it and really think about okay, what are we really looking for in the people that we're hiring? And it isn't just what's on a CV, it's so much richer than that. And so that's what we're looking to enable people to show and businesses to understand.

Juliet 3:11

Well, for years I've said to my team, if we could recruit on initiative and intuition, we'd be flying. And actually, I scaled up the business year three and four and actually then brought it back down to a few of people because people are the hardest part. They're the most heartbreaking and the most expensive and the most time consuming. And you can do anything if you put your mind to it, you can teach yourself anything. But hiring is so brutal. And every single how to start up guest has said this is like be okay with the weight of responsibility, be okay with a roller coaster and just get really good at recruitment because you're going to become an HR manager the second you scale your business. So we're going to talk a lot about talent and things like that. But you lost your job during the pandemic. What was it that highlighted the need for a different way of recruiting people?

Joe 3:56

Yeah, as the pandemic started, I was actually living in Mumbai and India, working in cricket. My first career was in sports, media, and marketing. And it was kind of a dream job. It was awesome, very special to be living and working in India. But yeah, the pandemic kind of pulled the rug from underneath, and I lost that job and had to come back to the UK. And yeah, after making banana bread for however many weeks, I decided to get back out there and dust off my CV and try and get my next job. And I guess I was just instantly incredibly frustrated with the process and the format. And I think with my kind of career across marketing and media and sport and entertainment, really didn't feel as though the C V was doing it justice in terms of how I could show my work. But I think also a lot of my work up to that stage had been more focused on, if you like, Gen Z audiences and younger audiences. So I very quickly shift the perspective of okay, if I'm frustrated with the CV, then next gen the problem for them must be tenfold. And we remember at the time there's obviously an awful lot of pressure on early career professionals losing their jobs and losing their opportunities. So it felt like a very kind of natural sort of fit at the time as to okay, how can we really reimagine the CV for that audience and allow them to really show who they are? And also, I think from my time building teams and working in very entrepreneurial businesses, I just knew businesses are so eager to build really culturally rich, skilled, ambitious teams from the ground up. And so kind of meeting in the middle that sort of business need. And as you said, hiring is so important, it hits the bottom line. It's the people you spend every day with. They're the people that really drive the business forward. So if we could meet that need for businesses to really find exceptional next-gen talent with that most ambitious next-gen talent, really being able to show their potential, we'd have something pretty special in the middle, which ultimately is busy.

Juliet 5:45

Well, this is it, and I say this with absolute full weight. People make or break a job and people make or break a business. So it is so crucial to bring in the right people at the beginning. So if a CV isn't a reliable predictor of success, what would you say is?

Joe 6:00

So what we've really sought to try and zero in on, and this is what we've all also learned over the last few years, and working with wonderful client partners that we have from sort of Burberry to EY to Virgin, the OVMH group and brands within there, like Louis Vuitton and Tiffany, EY and the Pooche group. So we've got this amazing roster of clients who we've been able to build busy alongside and really learn with them, okay, what are you looking for? What makes a great hire? And I think what we're really zeroing in on now is identifying how people think. And by that I mean how people think, how they execute, the quality of their work, their learning capacity, and as you said, that sort of self-initiated, self-starting capacity. And there's lots of kind of words that get thrown out cultural fit or the sort of attitudes and things like that. And so there's a lot there which I think before were considered, oh, we'll just have to kind of take a bit of a read on that at interview stage with our digital profiles and really allowing people greater freedom to express themselves. We're able to uncover all of those really rich signals right at the beginning of the process and to do it in a way that is very brand specific and role specific and within a candidate experience that's very engaging and fulfilling for the candidate themselves. So I think as well as still capturing the classic CV elements like work experience and education, we're able to go beyond that and really capture all those really rich, colourful areas as well.

Juliet 7:23

This is incredible because I also it puts a lot of ownership on the recruiteur because a lot of companies recruit people, but they haven't really briefed properly or put a decent enough job description together. But what does a generally good hiring signal look like? What advice would you give to people?

Joe 7:40

For me, the strongest signals and what we're seeing certainly our clients really gravitate towards is that sort of self-initiated work and being a self-starter. And that doesn't mean that you have to have dozens of side hustles and all sorts of different things happening in your world. But I think even within a job, that ability to take the initiative and sort of drive the business forward or a project forward on your own terms, I think is gold dust, particularly in sort of the startup world. But I think it transcends into any business. And I think in my own career, they were the people around me that I could see were really flying, were the people that sort of went and did something that was obviously on script. They didn't just go completely haywire, but they were making it happen. I've been lucky to work in some amazing businesses, one of which was Simon Fuller's XIX Entertainment. And I remember the sort of you know being told by Robert Dodds, the CEO, saying the greatest skill is just making something happen. Anyone can have an idea, anyone can have a sort of a project going, but actually making it happen, I think is the biggest skill. So I think any evidence that someone is showing that they can make something happen, I think is so rich. And then with that, I think comes the kind of the collaboration or what skill sets they have. But fundamentally, if they can kind of get up and make something happen, I think is gold dust.

Juliet 8:54

Well, getting shit done, definitely in a startup, is completely crucial. And also everyone says is like, oh, it's a startup, it's getting your hands dirty. I meet clients going, we're not hierarchical. It's like, we know what that means. We're all going to be in the warehouse packing boxes. But the flip side to this is the mistakes that we've all made with hiring. Could you share some of the biggest hiring mistakes you see founders make with their first few hires or at all?

Joe 9:18

I think there's probably some of the mistakes will be the the trying to be a bit too prescriptive on the person that you're bringing into the business. When as you say, particularly in startups, you wear lots of different hats. Everyone kind of will be mucking into different areas of the business. So I think if you're bringing someone into a startup environment and you're trying to be super specific on what the role entails and not at least up front making sure that they're aware that they are stepping into startup world and that even if their role is quite a technical or so to say finance-centric role, those skills and capabilities they have will still need to be applied into other areas, be it operations or kind of the widest elements, as it were. So I think being overly specific and not giving enough room to the the kind of the many hats analogy that is inevitably going to happen at some stage, because that's when I think you could probably end up with just a bit of a clash of, oh, well, that's not in my job description type thing. And that's a kind of a horrible place to find yourself. And the business may pivot away from the area that you initially hired them for. So I think you need that versatility in the person and to make sure that they are willing to be versatile as well as as they come in. So I think that's probably one of the bigger watch outside for for hiring as a startup.

Juliet 10:28

I mean, again, this co-working office, you hear all of the same jargon. A lot of people said hire slow, fire fast. And I was like, maybe hire fast, fire fast. But what are your thoughts on that?

Joe 10:37

Yeah, I mean, ideally you don't want to fire at all. I think it's one of those where it's just you've got to hire well. And I think also there's probably a lot of businesses that maybe try and do it a bit too soon. I think there's a fair bit of pain you can probably carry as founders before making that commitment. But once you do start hiring people, the weight of responsibility is very big, obviously the cost of the businesses increases, uh, you're and there's lots that comes with it. So I think there is almost something in the don't do it for your ego to sort of say, oh, we're a 10-person business or anything like that. I think there's, you know, do it because you really need to do it. Just like when you're building, you're making product decisions and making, we all try to sort of test and make these decisions with as much confidence as we possibly can. So I think not doing it on a whim, I'd almost hold on the first hire, which is a bit ironic coming from a hiring platform. But I think you've got to make sure that you really do need those people before they join. Because also I think as a founder, a big part is I think almost living their job a little bit and understanding the needs of these different areas. Obviously, it then cuts to a point where the best thing you can do is bring in smarter people than you to do these things. And then you will also be able to hire that person better because you understand that part of the business a little bit better and things like that. So I think a big sort of way to avoid failure in hiring is to actually maybe hold on, don't go flying into it just because you think you need to. And that's not just with your first hire, but almost with any hire.

Juliet 12:01

I couldn't agree more, and I found it really interesting that people always say to me, It's like, oh, you run your own business. How many people do you employ? Not what do you do? Do you like it? Are you happy in your job? It is a kind of metric of success of how many people you have on payroll. It's very strange, but that's really good advice, especially coming from somebody that obviously would want people to hire more. What tells you someone is capable of growing into role, even if their CV suggests they're not ready yet? We're taking a quick 30-second break from this episode to ask: are you thinking of starting your own podcast? If so, this is great news because we run a course that will train you how to produce your own podcast yourself. This course is for people who do not want to outsource and pay someone else to do it. You want to learn how to do it yourself. We teach you everything that you need to get up and running with your own podcast show and so much more. Just DM us at hello at Fallyfield Mason to book your spot.

Joe 13:00

That's an interesting question. I think again, it looking for evidence of the self-initiated, and I'll keep saying it because it's just something that I just think is so true. And I think if you can see that person who almost can make it happen, they will figure things out and they will figure things out with you, for you, they'll get there ahead of you, and all this kind of stuff, and they can almost make the role their own, if that makes sense. And so I think any kind of evidence that you can find for that, and again, this doesn't require people who are on their sort of second, third, fourth jobs, the talent on our platform, a lot of them still university students or recently starting their careers, the amount of sort of self-initiated work and self-initiated projects and things that they're doing today is extraordinary, far more than I was doing or a lot of my friends were doing when we first started their careers. So, and I think that then taps into just their attitude and their kind of the ambition that comes with it to actually get a hold of a business and make a role their own. And I think if you have someone who's quickly asking you lots of questions or challenging the way things are done, that's all kind of great signs as well, even if it can sometimes be a not right now. I don't need to hear this today, but it's always a kind of a great, it's always a great sign. So I think the more kind of active that person is, I think is the greater evidence that they can grow into that role. And it's where with our busy profiles, we've tried to give as much room for people to show their existing industry knowledge or their taste and their ideas and their opinions. Because I think that all kind of leans into how when they are given a a place in the business, how they will tackle it or what their perspective will be on a certain area. So I think that's what we've really tried to elevate in our profile so you can see, okay, this is a person that really has that kind of attitude and has this way of thinking that they're going to challenge and they're going to drive things forward, not just the tick box on credentials.

Juliet 14:49

Well, that's it. The CV is very much a one-dimensional piece of paper. I'd love it if you could tell us a little bit more about the Visi platform and how it maybe interactive it might be for employers and employees. How does it stand apart from that PDF email?

Joe 15:03

So anyone can make a Visi profile for free. And when you join Visi, you'd be presented with an empty template of a Visi profile. And you can introduce yourself with our biocards and you can add an introduction video as well. We then have a psychometric assessment. So we partnered with a great group called Clarity4D, and you can take a kind of five, seven-minute test, and that will then tell you your personality type, your working style, and your key strengths because it's not easy to write about yourself. So it's great to get that kind of almost like non-biased appraisal of who you are and what you can do. And then we have the sort of the classic C V element of work experience, education, but you can bring all that work to life with projects and using the multimedia tools to really show your work. And then we have this area in the profile which kind of makes it busy. And we borrowed it a little bit, I guess, from the dating apps where we have prompts like three entrepreneurs you'd invite to dinner or a brand I love or work I wish I had done. So you can really demonstrate your industry knowledge that you've got a finger on the pulse of culture and your ideas and passions.

Juliet 16:05

And maybe humor as well. Because I've always wanted to have that softness around when you meet someone and you have a laugh together and when you're working so bloody hard, you just want someone to have light relief and that you get a flavor of that side of their personality, maybe.

Joe 16:19

Exactly. Yeah, no, the personality, all of that comes through, and whether it is a prompt of a cause I care about, which may be a bit more of a sort of serious theme if you like. But yes, absolutely the kind of wit and humor and tone all comes through. And then we've also created a suite of questions that we've taken from world-leading businesses, like how would you improve the Netflix mobile experience? Or if you were to promote a film that had no major stars in it, how would you do it? So there's kind of these questions that cover marketing, technology, and sort of operations, as it were. So even if you don't have that classic work experience, you can still apply or demonstrate how you would approach a question like that or what your ideas are. There's a great one about what products you think Apple should launch next. And it's amazing what people are then putting into these profiles, but they're all really interesting things as a business to then sort of digest.

Juliet 17:03

Apple needs to pay you for that data as well.

Joe 17:06

Well, yeah, that's certainly part of our kind of future business. And the insights you get are just fascinating when you then allow people this freedom to express themselves in this way. The stuff that comes out is incredible.

Juliet 17:16

It's making me really want to apply for a job somewhere else because I know I'm really good at this stuff.

Joe 17:20

No, it's fun. And I think that was the big thing in a way was when we released it, we just kind of stuck it on Instagram where we got the profile together and sort of said, Okay, let's let's see if this thing really sticks. And people came back who are like, this was fun. I learned so much about myself. I feel seen for the first time. And most importantly, people say, I've landed a dream job with my busy profile. And after months of searching, so we were like, wow, okay, we've really got something here. And it's very simple in many respects. Rather than trying to gamify a CV and do these kind of hacks and word matches and all this kind of stuff, if we just strip that back and just really try to play to who is this person, what do they care about, and what can they do? And then when we kind of put it in front of businesses, it was almost like, okay, with that, okay, tick, this works, but how do we make a business out of it? So that's when we then created the business tools so that businesses could ask their candidates to submit our Visi profiles instead of CVs, and in turn, they could add their own questions to the profile. So Tiffany may ask something like, What trends do you think is going to impact our industry in the next five years? or tell us about a project you're proud of and why? Things like that. So they can customize it around their roles, and then we have a whole suite of tools that allow them to really sort of fairly and efficiently score, shortlist, share and screen the submissions.

Juliet 18:35

It feels like a mixture of right move, meets hinge, meets what was the one? It was like happen and LinkedIn. And I kind of want to use this now for finding tradesmen. I'm renovating at the moment. If I could do the same for finding a carpenter in 30 miles with good reference, that would be amazing. But on that point, you're four years in. I think you have seven million in backing. Is that right?

Joe 18:55

Yes, around that, yeah, yeah.

Juliet 18:56

Talk me through that. How on earth did you manage to raise that much that quickly?

Joe 19:00

I think one of the lovely things about Visi is that there's a lot of simplicity to it. And I think the C V is something that no one loves. No one's sat there saying, no, this is a great thing. Everyone recognises how difficult it is to hire. The problem is getting worse and worse, particularly for young professionals and people starting out their careers. And we have a great solution. So with it being technology, obviously it requires a degree of investment to particularly to work with the kind of businesses that we're working with and the due diligence and the handling data responsibly. It takes some investment to do it properly.

Juliet 19:38

How quickly did you go out to raise?

Joe 19:41

Were you raising from the beginning or we raised the sort of initial kind of friends and family to kind of get that MVP into the market? And we did it bit by bit. So it's not that we were always fundraising, but it became quite cyclical. And then our most recent round of 3.6 million was the bigger chunk that kind of makes up that sort of seven. It was very much kind of product led and built on great momentum of the clients and the early adopting clients and growth on talent side. So we're able to get that proof in the market and then invest against that confidently, bringing quite great partners as we've done so.

Juliet 20:16

That's incredible. You obviously made it work for the candidate, but one of the hardest parts is obviously recruiting those big brands to come in and to use the platform. How have you persuaded those companies such as Virgin, Burberry, Vuitton, to rethink their recruitment strategy?

Joe 20:30

I think in many ways, when speaking to businesses like them, we found these sort of amazing people who are sort of so driven to finding great people. I think particularly in the early career space, making sure they are giving sort of amazing opportunities to everybody and they're sort of coming to discussion knowing that the C V wasn't working, knowing that they're a little bit held to ransom almost by the C V and this kind of automated process.

Juliet 20:53

It's so time-consuming having to screen all of them and speak to all of them before you even get them into the department team to meet them, the HR team who aren't practitioners of say marketing or finance.

Joe 21:03

No, exact exactly. And I think the biggest problem that a lot of them are facing is just that that they're inundated in because they are such obviously popular businesses and great opportunities. They're just inundated in these very limiting CVs, which, as you say, they then have to try and get through, but they're dealing with such limited information. And so then you kind of have to bring in a level of automation, but even though that you're then actually discounting a lot of people who actually have huge potential and huge worth, and they're not really able to consider them. So what they very quickly understood with Visi is that if you broaden the spectrum through which you look at talent, you are able then to sort of discover the people that the CV was missing and the C V was overlooking. And so I think once they understood that, as I say, these kind of businesses, they just latched onto that as the idea. And being sort of businesses that that really want to bring culturally rich, creative, self starting, ambitious people into the business, they knew that they could do that. And we kind of make no better. About it, that asking a candidate to make a Visi profile is going to take longer. And I think a lot of the industry had gone down this one-click apply, easy apply. How do we just remove as much friction as possible for a candidate? Which obviously all that does is compound the problem of bringing in more and more applications. So these businesses, by being quite brave on their part, to say, okay, we're going to get fewer applications, but they're going to be better. They're going to be from people who are really engaged and we're going to learn more about them at the beginning of the process so that we can then make better decisions. And actually, it then saves us time. It all then falls into place. So we are a disruptive tool and we do go against some of these trends. But I think particularly now with AI and almost being catfished by sort of candidates with a sort of an AI-written CV, just getting to that kind of authenticity is now really paying its worth.

Juliet 22:48

Well, anyone in any job ever will want time efficiencies. And I think that's it. When you get and you put something on LinkedIn and you get so many DMs and it just takes time to sort. And we are of the age of AI where we're using tools to be efficient and sort through things for us. On that, AI is making it easier to create a convincing application, but harder than ever to know who's really behind that. Was building something that was naturally more AI resistant, a conscious decision, or has the product evolved that way and has AI become more mainstream for you? Like how is it all working on the AI front?

Joe 23:23

I suppose major releases of things like ChatGPT, they all kind of landed, I'd say almost like a year or so into development for us. So it was quite nice timing for us in a way. And I think almost the obvious thing that lots of people in the market did was, oh great, let's just automate sort of applying for jobs and the platforms where it's a kind of we'll write your CV in five minutes and automatically apply to 1,500 jobs. I think that was the obvious way to go, but it doesn't help anybody. Least of all does it help the talent. It can feel like a very sort of, oh, that's really kind of cool and helpful and a quick solution, but it really doesn't help them. And as I said, it just really compounds the problem that we have, where the CV itself is less authentic. It's more samey as everyone else who's doing the same thing. And then businesses are just getting overwhelmed by still these kind of limiting tools. So we kind of very quickly kind of looked to that and went, well, yeah, we could just automate this. You could have a sort of let's let your an AI bot sort of populate a Visi profile. But that completely defeats the object of really trying to get to understand who this person is. So in many ways, we've become a very nice antidote to the sort of AI application and the sort of catfishing that's happening. But I suppose the juxtaposition is that businesses naturally want to hire people with AI skills. So it's about trying to give, just like any sort of skill or capability, trying to create a the Visi profile in a way that allows people to demonstrate how savvy they are with these great tools, but not use them in a way that just kind of cheats on an application, if that makes sense. And then equally with businesses on the other side of the kind of application fence, enable them with really sophisticated AI tools that help sort and act more like a co-pilot to drive efficiency in the application screening, but not do the screening for them. And the businesses that we work with are brilliant in so much as it say, no, we're going to look at every application. We are going to kind of really consider this. And any AI tools that we'll develop in that space will be very much in a kind of a copilot capacity, not just automating everything, if that makes sense.

Juliet 25:28

Yeah, I learned the hard way with AI because I used a lot within the business, but I've also taken on a house that has a garden that I promised the previous owner I'd look after. And I very much went overboard with all the plants that I bought and it put all my receipts into Claude. It's like, please write me a 12-month plan of what I need to do with what and when. Like, you have 57 new plant varieties. And it wrote the plan, but it was 50 pages long. It's like, I now need to read that plan. It's on me again.

Speaker 1 25:53

Yeah.

Juliet 25:53

And the other thing with AI, I kind of feel like it's plastic surgery. Everyone ends up looking the same. It's like all of the content that's being generated from it. You just see this kind of cartoon character come past, and it's just like, oh, there's no genuine authenticity in there. It's sort of so if you can use it, as you said, as a really good internal, good assistant that can support and automate the perfunctory parts of the role and then give you the crux of it, that can absolutely help. It's fascinating. And I'm sure your business model will change and your software and your platform will change and evolve as things, I mean, everything's moving so quickly at the moment. But on that, in terms of now, next and never, what is the one thing you're focusing on right now with Busy?

Joe 26:35

So we have spent a lot of the last couple of years focusing on the business tools and making them really robust and learning from the great clients that we have. And so with that, we've built the business around the B2B angle in many ways. What we'd like to do now is look a little bit more at the talent side and actually how can we really build up the talent pool. So we have about 120,000 people on the platform already, but that's almost without any real marketing effort or real B2C outreach. And so we want to focus on that area now and really drive the growth of our talent pool and the kind of the community that we can cultivate around that, not in a LinkedIn feed dynamic, but a really vibrant community that can come from bringing together the most ambitious young people around the world and being quite proud that this isn't a platform for anybody. It is a platform for the kind of the most ambitious young people to express themselves. Next, we kind of touched upon it earlier, but we do cultivate the most amazing insights out of the profiles. And I think there's a lot of potential for how that intelligence is kind of cultivated. And doing it obviously in a really responsible way that actually benefits the users on the platform itself and benefits the community. But already it's been fascinating to see businesses in their hiring campaigns, if they have a question like, what trend is going to impact our industry in the next five years? It's a great way to consider hiring that person. But actually, when you then take the intelligence that comes out of a hundred applications and a hundred answers, to then hand that information over to the marketing team or the product team or the leadership team is equally fascinating. So next, a lot of the focus is on how can we really build an intelligence business out of this that benefits the users as much as the businesses. And so that's a really exciting prospect. And then never, I think we touched upon it, but it's that kind of the the idea almost like hitting a button and just having your Visi profile populated by AI to match a given role is something that we would never do. So yeah, and equally on the business side, the ability to push a button and it say, Oh, hire this person, because yeah, that's not what we're here for, either. So yeah, it's being on the right side of that AI narrative and accepting that these are amazing tools, but it's still about the person connected to that tool that's going to really make it work or not.

Juliet 28:45

Well, I'm so excited to hear you're sort of putting human connection back into business because I think we're all so excited by AI and how much it can automate and it's replaced a lot of our junior teams, and it is the next industrial revolution, which is incredibly exciting to be part of. But at the same time, we are human beings, we need connection, we're tribal, we need to belong, have community. So to be able to find those people, those magic gems, and anybody listening that's recruited and has found those people, hang on to them. Because honestly, I've got this incredible colleague Francesca in the team who every email she sends me, I'm like, yep, she's amazing. Yep, she's fantastic. Yep, she's that, and it's just such a joy when you work with people like that. But equally, it's awful when it's not. It's just heartbreaking. So now I'm really excited to hear that Vizzy's out there and I will be absolutely signing up because it is the answer to my problem of why I haven't scaled, because I haven't been able to find the right people. So yeah, thank you for creating it. And then something that we do is a question from our previous guest. Do you know Mother Root?

Joe 29:45

We've got it in the fridge. We've got it here. Oh, it's fabulous. Yeah, it's amazing. They're brilliant. Yeah, it's awesome.

Juliet 29:51

She's incredible. So she was on Dragon's Den and obviously very similar to you. Her question for you, which I thought was really interesting, was how do you best learn to make the hard decisions when you don't necessarily have the perfect information or experience to hand? Because as a founder, you're doing everything for the first time, you're kind of making shit up as you go along, and you have to make very big decisions, but without any work experience. How have you tackled that or haven't you?

Joe 30:14

I think it's kind of one of those, I guess it's almost like that is the game in a way. That's the whole sort of shebang to an extent. I spoke to a chap called Jolion Violet, who's the creative director and founder of an agency called OK Cool, which is very apt because he is incredibly cool. But he talks a lot about just trusting your instinct. And I think now there is so much kind of fed to us in whatever feed of, oh, this is the right way to do it, or this is the right way to do things and this kind of best practice. And I think often businesses like Mother Root will come from completely backing instinct and gut and her taste. And I think you just gotta be quite brave and back yourself on some of these decisions, and they're always rooted in some knowledge. We're not doing things because we're completely balmy, but they're all founded on something.

Juliet 30:59

And there's a slight delusion in there, I think, as well, of like you are so absolutely sure that what you're doing, you've got to have that belief, even if it's unfounded, to go for it. But you're right, you will you can pull from your various resources to find Yeah, and I think that's true.

Joe 31:14

I think there's an element of it, I suppose, that with that, and probably something I've kind of tried to learn to be better at is actually communicate why I think something will work. So if I'm trying to put something into the product, it's one thing for me to kind of just say to the team, oh, let's do this. But if I've already communicated why I think it's going to work or what that kind of idea is really founded on, then it's a lot harder for everyone to actually get behind it and understand it and ultimately execute it as we would like to. So I think with those big decisions, I think getting that out on paper and then circulating it with obviously the team who's expected to deliver it, but also those trusted advisors. And we're so lucky to be surrounded by amazing people with Visi that we can kind of kick an idea around with or explore something. And yeah, so I think there's yeah, that there's kind of getting as much validation as you can, but accepting that actually a lot of it comes down to that instinct and taste and then the good old adage of sleep on it. I don't think even when it feels like you've got to make a decision, there's very few decisions that you have to make in a moment. You can normally sleep on something or wait to have the conversation with that trusted advisor and things like that.

Juliet 32:18

The classic draft that email and don't send it straight away. Exactly.

Joe 32:21

Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of one of those, and I am a big believer that if you're going through the right processes and if you're doing the the right, even if it does take a little bit of time, it will eventually click. You will eventually find the right partner or the right person. So there's a good dose of perseverance to kind of stick with the idea as well, because I think again, in this, let's test everything and sort of you know you can do very bad tests that kill very good ideas. And so I think you need to kind of let things breathe a little bit. But yeah, I think a big dose of it is actually just backing the instinct and backing the taste, I guess.

Juliet 32:50

And what would your question be for our next guest? It could be anything on entrepreneurship.

Joe 32:54

I would go to the what's the most important skill or behaviour that you hire for. Yeah, what's the one thing that a person must have that you hire for?

Juliet 33:04

Because you're right, it's for me, I always say intuition and initiative, but it's also a sense of humour and someone that can just be like, take the sting out of it. Because you do have tough days and bad days, and just because you've made a job up for yourself doesn't mean it's going to be plain sailing in any shape or form.

Joe 33:19

Yeah.

Juliet 33:20

But someone who can have that light relief or kind of twinkle in their eye is really important. Well, huge congratulations on everything that you've achieved, especially off the back of redundancy just a few years ago. You've really gone for it, which is fantastic, and hopefully is encouraging to lots of listeners just to put their best foot forward.

Joe 33:36

That's very kind of you, thank you. No, there's there's a lot still to be done, and so many kind of ideas swimming around, and there's so much potential in what we're doing. We're just really enjoying it, and we're lucky to do it with an amazing team ourselves who make it happen every day. So it's just this kind of big team effort, really. And if anyone is interested in using Busy to hire, then they're most welcome to get in touch. We'd love to help.

Juliet 33:54

Amazing. Thank you so much, Joe, for your time today.

Joe 33:56

Thanks, Juliet.

Juliet 34:00

If you'd like to contact Joe, you can find his details in the show notes, along with a recap of the advice that he has so kindly shared. And tune in next week to hear Vivian Wong answer his question on a what is the one thing that you hire for? And please like, subscribe, rate and review, interact with the podcast somehow through your listening app, because it really does make a difference to me, the host, to know that you're there and enjoying it. Or DM us at hello at fallafieldmason.com to suggest future guests or questions that you might like answered in your own entrepreneurial journey. Thank you for listening and I'll speak to you soon.