Why "Now Hiring" || Season 1 Episode 1

In this premiere episode of "Now Hiring," Sameer Penakalapati joins Andy Weiss and Scott Montminy to discuss why he's excited to start a new podcast series for staffing, recruiting and talent. 

Spoiler alert: it's not to share generic content that you can find just about anywhere in your social feeds.

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Transcript

Scott Montminy: 0:11

Welcome to Now Hiring! The podcast about staffing, recruiting and talent. I'm Scott Montminy, and this is episode one of Now Hiring! so the first of many. So we hope and I'm here to help facilitate some quick learning sessions and conversations between subject matter experts in this field and our host, Sameer Penakalapati, who is the founder and CEO of Ceipal, a talent automation platform. And you can see we have a third person with us, who is Andy Weiss, who happens to be the Chief Marketing Officer at Ceipal, but I'm here to assure you that we do not plan to talk about sepal. That is not a topic of conversation on this podcast. What we really want to get into is one of Sameer's favorite topics, which is building and scaling staffing and recruiting businesses and moreover, entrepreneurialship in general, and business more generally. But before we get into some of that and some of the topics that we will be covering, Andy, I believe you wanted to get into some of what makes samaritic. And you know, what are, what are we up to? What are we doing right now?

Andy Weiss: 1:17

Well, thanks, Scott. And I think here's, what we were thinking about. Is Sameer and I, over my short tenure here, have gotten into a lot of different conversations, just not just about our business, but about the staffing industry, his own origins in this business, and whether it's talking about trends, whether it's talking about where he sees the future of this category going. It struck me that I was the recipient of all of this, these great insights in this knowledge, and it struck me that, hey, we should like capture this for others to be able to participate in and consumed. So that's where the impetus of this idea of doing a podcast came from, and pitched it to Sameer. And Sameer, you bit on that. So what were, what were you seeing in this opportunity? Yeah,

Sameer Penakalapati: 2:13

no, I think. Thanks. Thanks for the introduction. You know, I have, I've been in the business for over two decades, and I have seen building businesses from SAS, tech platforms, staffing, large staffing businesses, digital marketing agencies, even to some extent to the, you know, the commercial real estate side, and I've seen it, and then also now in the media side business. So what one thing that I've learned and fascinated about this industry, you know, the staffing and Talent Management and talent acquisition industry, which is one thing is very fascinating. Things are changing so dramatic in terms of, you know, the technology skills, the manufacturing types and different you know, things that's coming up, and the skills that we are seeing today are changing the skills for the next year. I mean, we haven't seen such a short, shorter life cycle of for the skills. So I think, and this is what excites me, just being is a tech guy and understand building SaaS tech companies. So, and I thought there's so much to share and really participate on these discussions and conversations. So, and when you talk to me about it, I couldn't wait to jump into it. So I'm glad to be here, and thanks for the invite.

Andy Weiss: 3:42

Well, and and what you what you just shared, was kind of our the genesis, or informed the genesis of the name, as we were trying to come up with a name for this podcast where, like, what needs to be about hiring and staffing, there's a lot of fertile ground around that, but it's like you said, it's changing so dramatically, whether it's AI or macroeconomic influences or just the types and variety of jobs and stuff that are opening up. So that's what we lumped now in front of it, and kind of using the colloquialism now hiring. It's kind of a capturing the immediacy in the current state of this industry. So that's that's what now hiring is about. It's not, hey, we're looking to fill a bunch of roles if we keep growing. That may change, but this is a podcast about the staffing and recruiting and talent world. So Scott, what types of things do we have coming up? And

Scott Montminy: 4:41

I should probably disclose to our viewers and or listeners, depending what platform they're on right now, that I also work with Andy and with Sameer, but the one thing we wanted to promise that we talked about this off air is that this is not going to be a podcast about our business. It's not going to be about our work. It's going to be about your. Work in the industries that you're in, the verticals that you're in, hiring in general, recruiting automation. But some of the topics that are already out there, you'll be able to find them sorting through episodes. This is just our pilot episode, episode one. So some that you might want to be on the lookout for in the near future, if they're not there already, is how to build a high value staffing company. A Sameer will be able to talk about automate, automating, sourcing, of building a team that's specific to your verticals. How Sameer is a big fan of specialists, not generalists, when it comes to building organizations. And you're going to learn more about that how to break 100 the 100 million dollar revenue barrier and or evaluation barrier. And that is, that is a big one and a hot topic, and I think a lot of people are going to be downloading or streaming that one. And also we'll get into different verticals, IT and engineering. Also, there's so much to talk about there in terms of talent acquisition and retention and workforce management, and also healthcare recruiter perspectives. There are so many challenging positions to staff in healthcare right now. Nurses in particular come to mind. And then we're also going to have special segments with Sameer's Reading List. If you don't follow Sameer on LinkedIn, I encourage anyone that is a fan of any of these topics to do so because there's a lot of great content in your stream Sameer, and it's it's pretty easy to find, if you sort through some of his posts, something that's useful, quick takeaways, and that's what we want this podcast to be about. And so with that, I'm going to try to wrap up quickly, because we want these podcasts to be quick wins for the people who listen to them or watch them and and we're going to get into a lot of those quick wins, like improving candidate experience generative AI use cases, things along those lines, and we'll deliver it to you quickly, and hopefully you'll have something to take away from it. Well, one, one of the book titles on Sameer's Reading List, I believe, was stop overthinking it. And Sameer's a big fan of that concept now that he sold it to us in such a way that he said same thing with this podcast, let's stop overthinking it. Let's just do it. So I want to thank you guys for letting me be a part of this and for giving your time to it, because I know that it's a big commitment. We're not this isn't going to be a one and done. There's going to be a lot of content that we're going to be putting out there for the folks who are, who are smart enough to LISTEN, FOLLOW and download, stream it, please, on your favorite platform, wherever you can find it, like and share all of these episodes. Once you've decided that it is as helpful as we're promising you that it will be we're really looking forward to it, and until next time, we're Now Hiring!