JOHN KIM

>> Craig Gould: John Kim, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. John, you’re the co founder and CEO of Paraform, an AI powered recruiter marketplace which enables expert recruiters and custom AI agents to work together to fill critical roles faster and better than ever before. And there’s a lot I want to go into about how you’re adding value to a space that is ripe for change and. But I love to start these conversations with one common question, which is John, what are your memories of your first job?

>> John Kim: Oh, memories of my first job. Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Craig, excited for today? yeah, memories of my first job. So I should say, if internships count, you know, I think that’s probably something I can talk about. And I dropped out of college to start my first company. So I will say that I never had a proper sort of full time job. but yeah, no, I think my first sort of proper job that I remember is a internship. so I was born in South Korea, Seoul. And ever since the age of four I moved around, grew up in a bunch of different countries like Singapore, Australia, spent some time in la, in Korea as well. so yeah, I think my first internship was actually interning at the national assembly in Korea. And it’s basically the Congress, equivalent parliament, of South Korea. And I interned under a congresswoman, essentially. and that experience was really cool. I mean, you know, it was a big job for someone who was I think at the time 18 or 19 years old. and got a lot like learned a ton. so a couple things we did was I think, I remember, we were, the congresswoman was working on a housing report for South Korea, to submit to the un. so there was this ambassador from the UN visiting Korea, her name was Leilani Farha I think. And she like talks a lot about housing crisis across the world. And so she was visiting and essentially the congresswoman knew how to speak English a little bit, but definitely not to a point where there could be a full report briefing and all that. So I essentially translated the report, all the way to sort of leading the meeting between the congresswoman and the UN ambassador and talk about Korea’s housing crisis. Also contributed to the research. Spend a lot of like nights at the library. yeah, among other things. so it was really fun experience.

>> Craig Gould: What from that job do you think you still carry with you?

>> John Kim: I think what I remember is this attitude that you can just do things. you know, I think like when I first started that job I sort of obviously a little bit of ah, imposter syndrome, a little bit of like, you know, oh, I’ve never done this before, how am I supposed to. and they were all busy so they didn’t have time to like onboard me or handhold me. They were all like fighting their own battles. so I kind of had to figure stuff out on, on my own. but I think the big unlock for me that that job gave me was you can just do things. You can take real ownership and agency, identify problems. you know, as long as you’re solving a really important problem, it’s, you’re not stepping on other people’s toes, you’re just, you can just do things. So I think that that’s probably what I, you know, still have from that, that job.

>> Craig Gould: It’s funny that you, you tell a story about working in government, kind of opening a door to being an entrepreneur, seeing a need and filling the need. Paraform’s not your first startup. Can you talk about in your experience how you’ve identified needs and how you’ve gone about figuring out how to build unique value proposition around filling a specific need?

>> John Kim: I think maybe I can start with sort of my first company and I think growing up I always liked building stuff, and sort of making other people happy solving their problems. I found great joy in doing that. I also sort of found ways to make money off it. So I would say hey, even to my parents, I’ll help you with this if you pay me this much. I think I was very always trying to find a way to make money and solve people’s problems and help. So I think that’s just like my natural sort of tendency growing up and building things. my first company actually was a very classic college kid idea. So you know, my then co founder at the time who actually joined Paraform, now he’s doing a bunch of things here. But essentially we like at my school at the University of Sydney, the sort of top career choice was going into consulting or banking. I think Sydney now it’s pretty different. But unlike here, the tech ecosystem or software engineering wasn’t really that big of a option. So yeah, everyone was consulting or banking. And I remember at the library when I was sort of studying and doing my assignments, a lot of my friends were actually preparing for these like big consulting case study interviews or like banking super days and I just, they were like stressing out about it and they were saying how difficult it was. And, and so I didn’t believe that. I was like, it can’t be that difficult. And turns out it is. It’s a very competitive process. You actually have like, to prepare for all these things. So I just simply thought what if we could just what if I could help them with that? And I saw that they actually prepped with their upperclassmen who got in, you know, they would die for like a coffee with someone who got into like BCG or like do an interview with them, you know. and I actually found that the upperclassmen or the people who already joined the workforce was actually super happy to help their alumni and like really like mentor them. So I thought, this is interesting. So I built this small mentoring platform, if you will, where basically depending on what job you want to get or what company you want to join, you could connect with your upperclassmen who did exactly that from your same school. So I want to get into Goldman. You click Goldman and then like you see all the people who got there, blah, blah, ah, and then you could actually pay for like interview, ah, prep or like it’s like a tutoring service essentially for jobs. And we also managed to secure the supply side which are these like people who already work and they were very, actually happy to help and also like make some side income on the weekends. Right. and so that was the idea and I think we did LinkedIn growth hacks before. It was like a very, very popular thing. So we used to do a lot of viral growth hacks on LinkedIn, commenting, hijacking other people’s posts. And so, that worked quite well. and I think it’s also when I started learning how to sell because you know, if you really think about it, it was a really tough business. Like it’s consumer in the sense that you’re going after, you know, obviously these college students who notoriously the most stingy, you know, they don’t have deep pockets. and the ACVs, if you will, weren’t that high either. Like they’re not, you know, willing to pay that much for, and we also had to sell to our friends and that was like a pretty you know, difficult experience for what’s worth. Like, you know, you have to basically switch up. Instead of being personal, you have to be professional and then convince them of the value prop. and it was tough. Like our conversion rate was super low. But I think I learned how to still like navigate and tell them why they should do it and managed to actually get them to pay quite a lot of money. We made a lot of good revenue. and then that company got acquired, by a series D ed tech company at the time and we joined as directors of product, like scaling that even further. But that’s probably my first memory of learning just like value, props, sales and all that.

>> Craig Gould: Yeah. So where did you identify the need that became paraform?

>> John Kim: Yeah, yeah, good question. So, I think at the time like, or, or always I, I’ve always wanted. I’ve always thought that, you know, essentially it’s really important to solve a real problem. A, real important problem. I think a lot of companies right around when we started, which was like 2023, early 2023, there were a lot of companies and still are, that just sort of like don’t solve that painful of a problem. and that’s, that’s probably not a great business decision because the amount of money you pay is directly proportionate to how, well, how important and difficult that problem is. Right. and then there’s some like, unique differentiation and all that, that contributes to that value. But I think. Right. So we simply just went around, we were at a co working space. We simply just went around asking folks, what is your number one problem and how much would you pay us to solve it? and like probably 90% or more said some form of hiring. I need to hire my first few engineers. I need to hire our first salesperson. They were all like startup founders and they said they would pay us 30k or 40k to make a hire. And we don’t have an HR recruiting background like my co founder and I. And that number was, you know, pleasantly surprising. Right. It was a lot of money. but it also signaled a lot of things. It’s a painful problem. it’s an inefficient market probably, all these things. So we just had a very simple goal when we started. We were like, hey, maybe you and I should make five hires each this year. that was like maybe equivalent to roughly our salary at the time. So we were like, that’s a good business. So we always set out to solve a problem, that, that problem. And we anchored on that. The first instinct was to become recruiters ourselves. So we were like, let’s just try to fill these roles. and so we got a few customers. They said yes. and we were trying to figure out how to figure out how to fill these roles. A lot of companies back then, like, Web3 Blockchain was sort of like a, you know, the IT technology at the time. So, a lot of companies were Web3 companies. And the challenge you had to solve was, how do I find great engineers who are interested in the Web3 space? and if you go on a LinkedIn profile, you can see if they’re a great engineer or not, more or less, right? You could see where they worked. it’s not perfect and we can get into that, but you can see what school they went to, all of that stuff. But you couldn’t really find out about personal interest. but on Twitter you could, right? Like, you know, you can see who they’re following. Is there a profile picture, an nft, like, all these different fun problems. So the first challenge we solved was how do we link someone’s LinkedIn profile to a Twitter profile? And so we managed to figure that out through, like, a combination of scraping and APIs. and it was cool. Like, we would find an ML engineer at Waymo, who went to, like, usccs, super strong profile. And then you go to their Twitter profile and it’s like they’re following all these, like, meme coins. Like, it was, like, pretty funny. And so, and so we use that to, like, reach out to candidates. And, yeah, I mean, of course it helped a little bit with the conversion rate. So instead of, like, reaching out to a thousand people and maybe a hundred people replying, you only need to reach out to, like, 800 people. But to be honest, it didn’t make it that much easier. It made it slightly easier, but it wasn’t the value, like, wasn’t, like, big enough. and so, we, three months in, we were nowhere close to making a hire. and it wasn’t scaling. So we were like, how do we scale? How do we actually help our customers? Again, still anchoring on the problem of actually making the hire, the outcome itself. And so the next thing we did was we were doing some customer interviews, and we heard that internal referral programs at, companies perform very well in terms of just conversion rate, quality of hire, all that. So we thought, okay, well, our customers, you know, the biggest team is like, three people from mit, and they probably already exhausted their network. You couldn’t do an employee referral program with three people. So what if we let them do an employee referral program but, like, against the entire world? So we made a referral bounty platform where essentially a company could post like 5k or 10k. And they go, hey world, I’m hiring an engineer. So you could turn anyone in the world to your engineer. Sort of like this like bounty economic system, right? it was a cool idea and I think a lot of people were interested. They signed up. but turns out we overestimated how well connected people were and also the difficulty of a cold start problem of a marketplace. Right. You know, if you think about it, like, if I asked anyone, do you know an iOS engineer in New York City, maybe like one or two, and like, are they open to work? not really. And like, it’s just like, it was a weird incentive, right? It’s like I’m pitching my friend, a company that I don’t really know much about, to get this bounty. It was not the most intuitive thing. And also we didn’t have enough customers. the stick rate on the supply side was, not the best. So let’s say a person comes to our platform, they see five jobs or 10 jobs. It’s hard to recommend their friend to something. We also hit a dead end there. And we made this mistake of before validating the idea. We just built the whole thing. and so we were stuck with this platform. But I think accidentally, and luckily we kept the marketplace open so anyone could, just start referring. You didn’t even have to sign up. So quality control, that was all bad. But at least we could see who’s using the platform. And this one user group in particular started showing very strong interests and started repeatedly using the platform. And these were independent recruiters, like recruiting agencies, like headhunters. Right. And that made so much sense. Right. Like they are professional networkers, right? Talent brokers. They have a much larger network than a ordinary person. It’s their job. So it’s not actually weird to pitch things. Like there’s so many things that made sense. And that’s when Paraform as we know it started, I would say, you know, so then we decided, okay, let’s build. Sort of like, let’s build for these, these people. So, you know, and then we had to go through the cold start problem of do we have enough recruiters, do we have enough companies? All that. But fast forward, essentially we built a, you know, recruiter marketplace, like you said, where on one side you have, you know, companies that are looking to fill their most important difficult roles, and then on the other side you have recruiters that could fill those roles. Right. so for recruiters, it’s like business in a box. You know, get access to clients, get access to the tools and support. and then for companies it’s like well you will solve your biggest pain point. and that worked. Right, so fast forward to today. I remember we were struggling, the days of struggling to make one hire over three months and I think there was like a year and a bit more of like no revenue and we just couldn’t make any hires. And fast forward to now. Last year alone we made 1500 hires on the platform and that number is very soon going to explode into something much bigger and is on track to doing that. so yeah, we really found this like sort of marketplace dynamic. Figure out the cold start problem, clear value prop to both sides and things started scaling. I’ll pause there. Obviously there’s like sort of more to that but I think, yeah.

>> Craig Gould: What did you learn about those critical hires and just how important one hire can be to a company’s trajectory or a handful of hires, what that value is to a company.

>> John Kim: Yeah, I’ll start with the second part. I think it’s like a very relevant, very relevant to the current day and age. So of course given our earlier customers were startups, now it’s like startups all the way to enterprise. But given our earlier customers were startups, we Every hire you make is critical, right? Like you know, your first five can make or break your company. and you know, I think there’s just so much impact that they make. so yeah, I mean you know that’s just naturally always going to be important. What I’m seeing actually is that now it’s almost like every hire you make at a company, no matter the size, is just as important as like that those founding hires. And I think there’s like a couple of reasons for that. without going into like too much, I, I, I really think AI is accelerating that trend. Right. You know I remember when I graduated college knowing how to write Python. It was like this immensely valuable skill. You pay a lot for four year CS degree, you become a computer science, a software engineer. Now it’s basically free. I think AI is getting better at a pace that honestly even the most AI bullish people thought. It’s so fast right now and you see things like cloud code and just how much impact that has. I think knowledge work as we know, will never be the same. actually even with AI and robotics, physical work as well now. So I think that trend sort of leads to this sort of notion that one person can do so much more than before and the impact of A single sort of employee or person on your company is I think very, very large. and so then it becomes higher stakes, and it becomes more important and so on and so forth. I actually think the average salary will go up significantly. because of this. I think our parents were born in the six figure salary era. I think very quickly we will be in the seven figure salary era. So each hire means more and so on and so forth. yeah, so I think each hire just means so much. Right. for, for any company now. so I think every company should, you know, have a talent strategy. I mean they always did, but I think it should be their number one line item in every board meeting, leadership meeting, even like earnings calls. Honestly, public company. I think it should be like how, how good are your people? And actually I think the, I think talent, like human talent and human ingenuity is the only thing that cannot be too abundant. it’s the last frontier of scarce resource. Right? Like you know, data used to be that, now it’s commoditized. Compute used to be that, now it’s commoditized, you know, intelligence, or was also that and now it’s commoditized. but sort of human ingenuity and talent is rate limited by the number of great people born each year. Like it’s not, you know. So I think like, I think if you look at the top hundred companies by market cap or top 200 companies by market cap, it’s usually the companies that sort of have a grasp and value created towards the most scarce resources in the world and infrastructure. And I think talent already is and will increasingly become core infrastructure. So the company that really builds and creates value, and somewhat sort of controls that I think is going to be the most valuable company in the world. And we truly believe that at paraform.

>> Craig Gould: So you were talking about the compensation going up and is that because the AI is capable of finding the exact right hire that is able to do more with the resources that we have now? And finding the right fit means more profitability and that person has more value inside of that company. Because you know, when I talk to AI leaders today, they’re talking about not doing headcount reduction but their head count being an order of eight times more productive now on the backside of AI integration than they were before. And so you know, again, you know, eight times the perfect hire is a lot bigger than eight times a good hire.

>> John Kim: Yeah, yeah, no, totally. I think that’s exactly kind Of I think how we should look at it, I think yeah, it is anchored on the fact that each employee can deliver and should deliver more. sort of, yeah, more can deliver because of AI. Right. Simply, put like when you build a financial model of a company and you look at net revenue per employee or some assumptions behind your revenue or. Right. Like you, you look at, oh, this person generates this much revenue and we should compensate. And based on that. Right. But I think with AI now and it kind of supercharges your day. Right. you know, you can kind of delegate the busy work and the sort of those things to you know, AI. So I think each person can carry more revenue, deliver more value to the company. So yeah, I do think the salary will increase, but we’re already seeing that now. Actually our platform has pretty interesting data. I think Paraform is building the most interesting hiring data set in the world. and I think you know, one of the things obviously on salary we see that average salary is going up. so, yeah, I think that’s exactly how I see it.

>> Craig Gould: Why are recruiters excited to partner with Terraform?

>> John Kim: There’s a couple things. Maybe I can kind of start with how we started. So when we started, and this has, this was all sort of coincidental, but I believe around 100,000 recruiters got laid off in the US so recruiting has this very, vicious cycle of two to three year sort of repeated layoff cycles. I don’t think that’s, I don’t think we should put people through that. You know, I don’t think that’s like a good thing. it’s obvious statement, but it happens. It happened for the last two decades. So no one’s fixing it clearly. but anyways, when we started, that happened. and so maybe that helped a little bit with our cold start of just sort of like recruiters willing to try something new and everything. But the reason why that happened. So recruiters, have among white collar professions, have the highest attrition rate, in the United States, one of the highest. and if you think about why is hiring is inherently, maybe episodic is the right word or it’s inherently there’s like surge and troughs. Right. Peaks and troughs. Because you know, it’s really hard to predict like business needs and economy, economic changes. Right. and so let’s say a company like Amazon has a hiring search. you need to hire a thousand more headcount in next quarter. I think the Traditional approach has been let’s hire a bunch of recruiters full time. and actually recently the demand for recruiters are really, surging, in the tech industry, which is probably a signal of increased demand, but also a signal of a couple years later, another dip. and so that’s how companies solve that problem. And then once that hiring is finished, it’s sort of like, okay, well we don’t really need them. And then the layoffs happen. So I talk to recruiters. If you grab a beer with a recruiter, anyone in the audience and sort of keep talking, they probably will at some point bring up, I’m worried about when I’m going to get laid off. Right. Like that’s what they go through every day. And I don’t think that’s a good thing. Right. I think that, you know, what Paraform sort of offered at the time was, hey, like you could start your own business, you could be an entrepreneur and you could, you know, work with, the clients you like, fill roles that you find passionate about or have a network in. work whenever you want, wherever you want. Right. and earn actually more than you used to. So there’s this win, win, win, win situation for them. but I also think this is a good thing for the companies because I think talent leaders should really be thinking about staffing their internal talent team in a more flexible way. you know, they should be able to handle a really big surge, but also a really big drop off. you don’t want to be a talent leader that’s sort of like, hey, you just laid off like 100 people on your report recruiting team. Right? So I think Paraform, benefits from that sort of structural, complexity of how the recruiting industry works. So I just want to start there. That’s kind of how we start. When we, when we started Paraform, I noticed that trend. but I think why recruiters love Paraform, yeah, similar things to what I brought up. Right. I, think Paraform fundamentally makes you a better recruiter, makes you a better matchmaker. So there’s a couple things. So if you work internally for one company, and I’m not saying internal recruiters are bad or we don’t need them or anything, it’s absolutely needed because they don’t just do sourcing, they do a bunch of other things too. talent brand, like recruiting ops. Right, all that stuff. but yeah, I think like, you know, when you work internally at a company, you can only recruit for that company and so you’re inherently a less effective matchmaker. If you just think about nodes like you interact with 10,000 candidates. The disqualification reason is just, I’m not interested in that company. You can only interact. The candidates you interact are only as useful to you as what company it goes to. But if you’re a recruiter on Paraform, you have many, many different clients you can work with. So inherently you just become a better matchmaker. I think, external recruiters, headhunters, sort of these entrepreneurial recruiters actually have that advant. and Paraform has, many clients. We work with thousand plus companies. Right. or thousand plus roles. Sorry. so there’s that I think also, you know, there’s other benefits. Like, like I mentioned, like, you earn quite a lot per hire. it’s like, I think on average you earn 28k per hire as a recruiter. So, you know, you make like five or ten hires a year. Then it’s like, okay, that’s like a pretty significant, earning, and we already actually paid out $50 million to our recruiters and it hasn’t been that long since we started really, like, it started really working. So really, really proud of that. and again, you can work whenever you want, wherever you want. We have a, we have someone who used to like, lead talent at a, like a series C company. You know, his wife, sort of had, their first child. So, he kind of like actually started the Paraform journey. And he’s earning more than he has. He’s spending more time with his wife and his newborn. And like, he’s, he’s just happy. And so I think we’re really giving recruiters that control and stability, and being an entrepreneur. And then on top of that, I think we have what we call our recruiter os, which is the tool suite. We have to make them a lot more effective at their job, so they’re a lot more efficient. And I would say lastly, we have AI that helps them make more placements. So, you know, we, you know, I can get into this a little bit more, but basically we have AI agents that help our recruiters make more placements. Help, them with matchmaking surface opportunities that could be a good fit for their candidate. So all of a sudden all these recruiters are like, wait, not only am I getting clients, I’m actually making my candidate base much more effective with Terraform. So I think there’s a bunch of advantages there.

>> Craig Gould: So we’ve kind of opened the door to agentic AI here. So exactly how are the agents providing this additional value for the recruiters? Maybe increasing their funnel, decreasing their turn time, which, which all, you know, all of that equals more dollars. Right. But how are the agents helping in that, in that area?

>> John Kim: I think like, first and foremost it is, it’s basically increasing your candidate, utilization, if you will. That’s a very crude, way of putting it, but essentially it’s increasing. It’s like if you have a hundred candidates that are in your network, you can make 100 placements as opposed to in the past, maybe you make ten placements or five placements. and so how that works is we have, you know, the sort of short version of this is that we work with a lot of our companies, and we understand their hiring preferences, what they want, what they don’t want, all these things really well. And these sort of custom AI agents, sort, of go surface, matches that are a good fit for these companies. Right. So let’s say a recruiter knows a candidate from, I don’t know, like three years ago called Jeff. he’s a great engineer, blah, blah, blah. our AI agent would actually go, hey, recruiter, a Jeff in your network is actually a really good fit for Facebook’s engineering manager role. and in fact the hiring manager is interested in talking to you. And so the recruiters absolutely love that because it’s sort of like they’ve never, I mean they probably didn’t forget about the candidate, but at least weren’t actively thinking about this. And I think it’s really important to distinguish. I think a lot of AI recruiting companies are sort of thinking about replacing recruiters and all that, but we obviously are clearly doing the opposite and making them better. I think there are things that humans are good at that only humans can do, and there are things that AI is significantly better than humans at. And I think one thing is this sort of taking a large ingest large amounts of unstructured data and doing something about it. It’s definitely better than a human by a large margin now, but also like memory and context. Right. so I think that’s how AI helps recruiters. So recruiters, ah, love our AI agents because it helps them make more placements and it’s actually aligned with the candidates too, because for candidates that’s like more opportunities surface through them. so it’s like a win, win, win situation.

>> Craig Gould: So why are companies excited about Paraform?

>> John Kim: Yeah, yeah. I think with companies, even in the early days, what we found to be pretty straightforward is they are sort of willing to try, sort of solutions that will allow them to attract great candidates fast. why? Because it’s just sort of such a painful problem. and so I think, you know, we can just kind of start there. Like, I think companies are just sort of really yearning for, things that make hiring easy, make hiring exceptional talent easy. why do companies love Paraform? not to just sort of repeat myself, but I think it’s because we make hiring exceptional talent incredibly easy. Not easier, like just easy. you know, I mentioned our founding story of sort of, using like, some web scraping to like, find some signals and like, surface slightly better candidates or reach out to better candidates. Again, it introduced efficiency, but it wasn’t that much of a delta to like, have claimed that you solved hiring. we always anchored on the outcome, making the hire itself. We get paid when we make hires, not improve a small part of a process. So I think that was, that’s, I think why companies love us. and so, but if we kind of specifically dig into the value prop here, I think, traditionally companies work with agencies. actually a lot of people don’t know this, but among the whole talent acquisition, recruiting, HR global budget, the biggest one is outsourcing recruiting. but 90% of VC dollars over the past 20 years went into recruiting software. and that’s like 10 billion out of like trillion plus. so, you know, we can kind of talk about that too. But, essentially companies work with agencies and outsource recruiting all the time for various reasons, all the way from executive search to hiring, temporary workers. so we’re going after that budget, right? And I think with Paraform, you know, companies used, to. I think what we do is we drastically reduce the procurement cycle and therefore, aka we basically surface the best candidate for that role faster than anyone else. I think that’s why they use us. Right? So traditionally speaking, if you want to, you know, let’s say. Let’s say I’m a hiring manager. I want to hire my, you know, sales manager, enterprise sales manager. I would. Then I would write up a jd like, kind of think about what I want, and then maybe give it to my internal talent team. Turns out it didn’t. Like, we’re not making that much progress. They’re like, okay, maybe I need to like, maybe focus them on something else and outsource this. So they go reach out to their network and say, hey, like, do you know any really Great agencies that really specialize in these enterprise sales reps and managers. And maybe they get like six names, meet each of them, they all pitch and sound fine. You will work with all six. Turns out four are bad. They send you three candidates with LinkedIn links and a huge blurb over email. You don’t even have time to read it, don’t even have time to respond or give feedback. And then you look back and it’s already been six months. That’s the status quo. But with Paraform, it’s like, okay, I want to hire this role. We understand what you want very, very quickly. And then you’re the largest network of expert specialized recruiters in the world already, and we haven’t been around for that long. And so based on what they’re looking for, we match you with the specialized expert recruiter for that role within seconds. Right? and so how we do that matching, pretty simple. Like we look at, you know, have they filled similar roles before? have they worked with similar clients before? And we now, given we’re a marketplace, we also have like, ratings and performance, right? Like, similar to like Airbnb hosts. You would want to stay with a host that has a lot of five star ratings. So we have performance like what is their interview conversion rate, you know, what is the average rating, all that stuff. And imagine being able to match with a select few expert recruiters who already have warm candidates in their network. And so we reduce that procurement cycle to this, like a matter of seconds. And basically you get good candidates. Right? so once that we’re very proud of, we call it found time internally, which is how long does it take after you post the role where you meet the candidate you end up hiring. The interview process varies by company. So if you look at time to hire, it’s a little, there’s a little bit of variance. But actually how quickly can we send that right candidate? And it’s actually 11 days on average on our platform. So within 11 days of posting on Paraform, you essentially find the candidate you’re going to hire. and we don’t work with sort of like any company, out there. We work with some of the best, most difficult to hire for companies. So I think we’re very proud of that number. but yeah, I think that’s kind of, why I think companies use us.

>> Craig Gould: You know, if you’re providing advice to somebody who is in the middle of their career, you know, may maybe you have an opinion, maybe you don’t. But you know, if I wanted to get on a recruiter’s radar. If I have a specific skill set that I think is kind of unique, but it, it kind of gets lost in the mix because, you know, there’s visibility to, to everybody and there’s, you know, there are ghost postings and people that are posing as recruiters and there’s a lot of noise. Do you have an opinion on how someone can develop that relationship with the right recruiters?

>> John Kim: I think whether we’re in the age of AI or not, I think what’s still true is, just sort of this unique specialization. Like, what is your value prop? You know, kind of thinking about products as well, right? It’s like, what is your value prop? what can you do? Super. Well, maybe you’re, you want to, maybe you are a incredible generalist that can just do anything in biz ops. Great. Like now who needs that? Probably, an early stage company, right? Or maybe your value prop is a director of product marketing. You’re just the best at coming up with categories and positioning. Okay, what companies need that? And then like, do you want to do B2B? Do you want to do B2C? Do you want to specialize in an industry like healthcare? I think just thinking, really just like sort of taking a step back, like, okay, like, what am I uniquely positioned to do? Well, I think whether we’re an AI or not, that’s always been true. and if your question is maybe more specifically how you get discovered, sort of like maybe by any and all recruiters who use all these systems, you probably need to optimize like your LinkedIn profile or some public presence to really cater for that. so I would encourage folks to think about it that way. and then in the age of AI, I think it’s more general upskilling of the population. Like, I’m very optimistic about what’s going to happen to humans because of AI. At the end of the day, it’s technology built by humans for humans. And like any technology disruption, whether it’s the Internet or personal computers or even the assembly line, you know, there’s going to be some adjustment period. But the economy and the GDP is not a zero sum game. It’s, it’s a, it’s an abundance game. It will and keep going up. Right? So I think, you know, I think there’s some adjustment period and upskilling, but I think it will sort of be fine. Like humans will adapt. but again, thinking about what is AI so great at, that is undeniably sort of like this thing that is probably going to go away and then how do I sort of, I would make sure I’m not only upskilling myself with those things, but actually the others. so I think that’s probably how to think about it. If the question is how do you specifically develop relationship with recruiters? specifically like paraform recruiters or like call it expert headhunters. I would actually reach out, I would reach out to the recruiter. it’s funny, my uncle, he, I think he was in private equity. he still is. And he told me that he has his recruiter on speed dial and has been working together for the last 10 years. So he has his like real estate broker, his recruiter on speed dial. I thought that was really funny. This was like back when we were just starting Paraform. and yeah, he just like keeps in touch with them. Like you know, like think about how exact recruiting works, right? It’s like sort of like you keep in touch. It’s a relationship game. Like you know, it’s, you know. So I think, I actually think a lot of recruiting will resemble exec recruiting more and more. So as again humans can be more and more valuable and more higher impact. So I would totally encourage actually reaching out to recruiters first. One of one of our top performers, she obviously was hired through fair form. But one of our recruiters who specialize in helping early stage teams hire AES account managers, go to market that niche, posted on LinkedIn saying, hey, I’m working with 10 of the best companies in San Francisco right now. If you’re a new grad or looking for something, reach out to me. And she reached out to him and he you know, submitted her on Paraform. And you know, you know we love working with her. She’s crushing it. And then she told her boyfriend that I think you should reach out to this recruiter. And that recruiter got him also a sales job through our platform. Right? So I think, I think reach out to the recruiter, they have access, I mean especially a paraform recruiter. If you see a paraform recruiter they likely have access to some of the best companies. especially you know right now are we started with early stage companies. Now we have early stage growth stage and enterprise, I would say predominantly growth stage but you know, more, increasingly more like bigger companies as well. And we actually launched a new vertical in legal. So you know we also learned that 70% of lateral attorney and partner and paralegal hiring in the United States is done by recruiting agencies. so that’s our next vertical. We want to scale this not just for tech companies, but beyond, like legal, private equity, health care, manufacturing, and not only in different industries, but also all. All across the globe. Right. So I would just recommend reaching out to like, a Paraform recruiter or any headhunter you see on LinkedIn that you think is good at what they do.

>> Craig Gould: John, I really appreciate your time today. If people wanted to keep track of you, keep track of Paraform, reach out if they want to contact you or someone in the company. Where’s the best place to direct people?

>> John Kim: I post quite frequently on LinkedIn. so, yeah, if you want to follow Paraform’s journey, I would encourage just checking out my LinkedIn profile and following my LinkedIn profile. but yeah, in general, I think, you know, visit our website. You know, there’s a bunch of stuff, exciting stuff we’re working on. We are hiring across the board. Like, we are aggressively expanding our team, and whether it’s engineering, aiml, product sales, so, yeah, you know, you can check out our website, too.

>> Craig Gould: Awesome. John, I appreciate you being my guest today. Thank you for your time.

>> John Kim: Thank you, Craig.

>> Craig Gould: Awesome.