DN #21: Recruiter as a Service & Why Juniors Belong in an Office (w/ Adomas Pranevicius)

Niklas:Hi and huge welcome to you my lovely listeners. So glad you're here. Today you're joining me for chat with Adam. Adam runs Remotely Talents. Adam, so nice to have you.

Adomas:Hello guys, nice to be here.

Niklas:For listeners who don't know you yet, give us a 60 second version of who you are and what remotely talent does.

Adomas:⁓ Well, I think I'm ⁓ first of all entrepreneur ⁓ who is doing and did a lot of different projects for the last four years. I'm running remotely talents is a it's remotely talents is a remote talent recruitment agency and we help ⁓ businesses both in Europe and the US to hire remote talent, mainly marketers, developers, ⁓ sales, ⁓ operation type of roles. And we are doing it in a bit different model, which is I'm always pushing for saying that we are working as a recruiter as a service, which basically means that we are not charging these ridiculous placement fees that the old school type of recruiters charge. So yeah, I mainly focus on online businesses and online ventures.

Niklas:It's interesting if you say we are not charging these very large fees. Maybe for people who don't understand this kind of business, maybe you could walk us through how traditional ⁓ placement agencies work.

Adomas:Traditional recruitment agencies work in a staffing model where we first of all they just rent talent and add the markup which is very popular right now in the US when hiring global teams. I don't like this model because in general recruiter when he does the job he doesn't add any value after that. So in my opinion recruiter is someone who is matching the talent and when he's matching the job is completed. Another type of companies like these typical recruiters who are charging placement fees. So these placements fees start at 5,000, well, let's say 20, 25%, there are companies that are charging 35 % yearly salary. And this is as well, I think for some of the roles, I think it's unreasonably high. That's why we are offering Recruiter as a service, which basically means we assign a senior level recruiter to work on a specific recruitment project. And we assigned Recruiter plus our infrastructure, databases, applicant tracking system, all of that. And we just charge a monthly fee as long as the recruiter is working on a specific project. And when the project is completed, we do not charge any more. Simple as that. And in the long term, it's way more efficient and cost effective.

Niklas:think there's a bit of a trend not to hire as much remote anymore. Do you already feel that or does it for you? Doesn't it really matter?

Adomas:Well, I think we already established ourselves in the market and we already have a decent portfolio of clients who are just getting back to us. So a big part of our clients are companies with whom we are already working. ⁓ Yes, there is a general trend to hire less, ⁓ but when we're talking about small to medium type of enterprises of companies who are like, let's say, between five to 50 people, And if we're talking about agencies, e-commerce businesses and these type of businesses, software as a service companies, typically for them to be able to stay competitive, they don't have any other choice just to hire globally, not locally. Because globally, your market, your talent pool is just bigger and you can choose from wherever you want. So I... don't see this as a very big trend, ⁓ these headlines are coming from these big corporations that are hiring less ⁓ remote, less work from home, all of that. So obviously for these big guys, the trend is ⁓ that they want employees to go back to offices and do the, as I say, eyeball management.

Niklas:Yeah, I think that's a very interesting topic as well and how this can go like one way or the other. I feel the trend has been shifting in one direction or another for long time. So now we are seeing a lot more in-person. But maybe the next wave is once again less in-person. So I'm not sure about this one. So I feel that it's been back and forth. We had a very high... rate during COVID in 22, I think, where everybody was sort of remote and people came back. Now we are at least in larger companies. feel it's a lot, lot in person again. Maybe the next wave is the other way around again. I don't know.

Adomas:You see, like ⁓ in general, in my market where I'm playing at, ⁓ most of my clients are, I would say remote forest companies. So they don't imagine a way or a way how to be competitive without global team. And when you start and when you realize, for example, ⁓ most like more than 90 % of our clients, they are US based companies. I still meet business owners. who are surprised that they can hire more educated people, for example, in Europe or Latin America, than locally in US and pay, let's say, 40 % less. So they're still surprised. Somehow, I'm sad to say that, but there are people, business owners in US who are still surprised that outside US, it's not wilderness.

Niklas:Yeah, that's maybe interesting. think this back to office trend, what might people be getting wrong when they enforce that? there are very strong arguments, I think, for hiring remote talent.

Adomas:First of all, I do not suggest, I never suggest to hire junior level specialists for a most roles. In my opinion, I'm a big fan of hiring only mid-senior level, preferably senior level talent who already are professionals in their field. They know what they're doing. They have the habits and they know how to work and execute the tasks. For these low level, like low experience level or junior level roles, I never recommend hiring them. I know it's a stupid saying, but it depends. It depends on the business. It depends on the philosophy. But when I talk with the business owners, usually I try to educate them and say to them that, for remote roles, it's better to hire senior level talent.

Niklas:And I can understand that. So probably training is a lot harder in remote setup. What do you think typical mistakes that companies make like in onboarding when, what should they look at when they hire remote?

Adomas:I think one of the biggest mistakes when hiring remotely, assuming that this person will integrate somehow magically in the company and the culture and some business owners, are not spending enough time ⁓ creating this feeling and a right environment for this person to feel that he's part of the team. ⁓ Weekly calls, standups. you know, some kind of just friendly, friendly video calls, maybe once a year, meetups in some kind of location. Some companies are doing this and I strongly encourage that. those who are hiring a person remotely and do not spend any time making this connection. Typically, these type of employees at some point just they leave because they don't feel the connection. So yes, you need to spend time. Yes, you need to work on this. And it's an important part. So the successful companies and successful clients that I see, they actually spend time and effort. trying to make a system or create this feeling that this employee and this remote team member is part of the family, part of the team.

Niklas:Really, yeah, this is really interesting. And I think especially in remote setups, it's one of the bigger challenges, right? So how do you get the integration done? How do you transfer culture? But there are large examples of companies who are remote first, like Spotify, I think is a very big example, who have built a competitive advantage on being remote first.

Adomas:Yeah, for me it's difficult to say about these big corporations and how they're managing this, but ⁓ I can take as an example from our company, like our remotely talents is fully remote. ⁓ For example, my main partner, ⁓ senior like head of recruitment, she's ⁓ in Kiev and ⁓ in Ukraine, in Kiev, she's located there and we started to collaborate once after. months after the war started and ⁓ we're still collaborating and I didn't have a chance to see her face to face. ⁓ We have recruiters in Latin America, in Portugal, in Romania and the way how we are making this connection is video calls, ⁓ chats, some kind of a personal connection, personal communication. ⁓ It's a work. It's a bit, yeah, you need to do extra when dealing with remote teams.

Niklas:Yeah, it's interesting. And also I think it's an interesting decision to get into remote recruitment. I think you have been there before you started Remotely Talent. Maybe you could walk us through what made you get the idea of starting this business and moving into it yourself.

Adomas:So my story is a bit longer, I would say. For 10 years, I had a business which was related entirely, ⁓ which was in an entirely different field. It was my drink beverages. I had a beverage development and beverage consulting company where we had laboratory in Lithuania and we were developing recipes, sourcing raw material for beverages and managing the production. And I was building this business for 10 years and in the end of 2017, it was acquired by my competitor from US. After that, I tried to, because I always was ⁓ interested in digital marketing and media buying and all of that. I started doing ⁓ e-commerce. So I built several supplement brands. ⁓ One was for liposomal supplements and one was for dog supplements. ⁓ And one was acquired, ⁓ one was a complete loss and one was acquired, I wouldn't say, let's say for a small profit. I wouldn't say it was a very successful venture, both of them. And then the story about remotely talents is that once I sold these e-commerce businesses, the war started in Ukraine. and I'm located in Lithuania. I like Ukraine is Kiev is like 700 kilometers, 600 kilometers away from me. And I live near the border like I live in Vilnius. So it's 50 kilometers from Belarus. So it's, you know, it's a region. ⁓ Let's not go into politics, but it's like a ⁓ interesting region. Let's call it. ⁓ And a months after that, decided, like, because I was very emotionally affected by that, and I wanted somehow to help, I just... decided to know just to try it out. And in one week, I built a website and started out reaching potential clients in the US because I already had, I still have a network in the US. And I started getting these projects, recruitment projects. So basically a website, I just built a website and started promoting it and new projects just started to flow. And after some time, clients were interested to get projects, to get So to do recruitment in Europe, in other countries, then in Latin America. Right now we also also do in ⁓ recruitment in North America. So, you know, the business grew clients had requirements. So I was trying to adapt to this and, and, and yeah. So today we, we are covering these three regions. And I think we, we managed to build a quite. decent brand because majority of my leads are coming from organic traffic. I'm spending a lot of time for search engine optimization and getting backlinks, articles, all of that stuff. So we've built quite a strong, let's say we have quite a strong organic traffic and presence on Google. Yeah, but it took four years.

Niklas:Yeah, this is really interesting, I think, because these days, ⁓ one of the challenges that people talk about a lot is scaling and marketing their products. It's always been a challenge, but ⁓ currently, think building software is easier now than it was like four years ago with all the AI tools that we have available. And it's shifting. If you say you have a lot of traffic, Can you give like numbers? How many visitors do you have a month? How's the conversion funded on the website and how did you get it done? You said it took four years. know SEO takes a long time. That's true. But how did you do it? I think that's very interesting.

Adomas:I'm not a SEO specialist, but I try to keep it simple. In the beginning, I just wrote a lot of blog articles. I started manually, then I hired a copywriter, then I started to use AI. Right now, AI plus copywriter, so just playing with these models. But it didn't work. I started to see that. results once I started to build backlinks. So in my opinion and my hypothesis is that Google is a backlinks network basically and the more backlinks you have, the more trust you have. The same for GPT traffic right now. We receive our GPT traffic is growing because probably of backlinks profile that we have, GPT is easier for them to find it. to anyone who is starting and who is interested in organic traffic, would recommend focusing on backlinks and building this domain rating, collaborating with other companies, getting guest posts, all of that. ⁓ But this is a long game. What's important to understand, this is a very long game. There is always a risk that the algorithm will change or some kind of updates will be released by Google. You need to have an alternative, for example, whether it's a referral system or some kind of ⁓ like media buying, you maybe you buy traffic on Google ads on search or display or or meta, whatever. So I don't think and I would strongly recommend not to focus organic traffic shouldn't be the key focus.

Niklas:Yeah, it's interesting. So maybe very quickly to the Google algorithm, it's correct. So this is exactly how they started, right? They tried to rank websites by relevance. That's how Google started. And the idea was the website has an importance. And if it links to other websites, then these websites are also important and websites that are linked to a lot are important. So this was the foundation, very simplified of the Google algorithm when they started. I think a lot more complex today and I don't know completely how it works, but it was research. We ranked the websites by relevance and we built an algorithm that is very strongly backlink driven ⁓ first place. this makes a lot of sense. you say beyond that, you are using other channels as well. I heard you had some network, which is a huge start, I think. ⁓ Outside of that, do you also use paid ads? Have you ever tried that?

Adomas:⁓ For agency, I tried Google search ads and for no Google search is an entirely different beast. ⁓ To crack it, you need to invest minimum probably in our vertical between 10 to 20 K. If you have less, I wouldn't even recommend to start doing this unless you have some kind of inside information from the competitors. what keywords are converting. And as library doesn't count. ⁓ I would suggest I'm still a big fan of paid advertising. I think it's working and you just need to be creative and search what's working, what's not. So for example, in my case, I, yes, I tested Google ads and I spent around 7k and I didn't crack it. So, and I still, I understood that I just touched the surface. I learned only the, and I need to spend additionally probably 20K just to get a better understanding of the market. ⁓ And I didn't want to do that. So, know, ⁓ decided not to proceed doing this. ⁓ I still have a plan to test Meta. ⁓ I tested lately Xads, ⁓ terrible experience, a bunch of traffic. like ⁓ bots, mainly no engagement, nothing. So though right now I'm following what they're doing and I see that they're updating their ads platform. They're making a lot of updates and the only update I'm waiting when they announce that the tracking, the ⁓ targeting is fixed and or will be improved. once this is published, then I will restart the campaign. But so far after testing, see it's a terrible traffic source, at least for time being. But I believe in X. I think they will fix it at some point.

Niklas:Yeah, think so for me, is a great platform. I've like built genuinely really great connections. I would agree that the advertising, I have not heard a positive word about the advertising to make it simple. Maybe if you have really large budgets, it works, but if you don't have like huge budgets, I don't think it works. I always hear that TikTok is the one that is the easiest.

Adomas:No doubt. But know, CPMs are crazy cheap right now. We're talking about $3, $4 CPMs in comparison on, it depends what vertical you do on methods, method 80, 70 CPM dollar. So, X has a ton of potential CPMs. There is an opportunity for traffic arbitrage, obviously, ⁓ but They are under development and I'm still waiting for them to improve. But I see that in the last even months, few months, they did a lot of changes. So I strongly recommend to keep an eye on this source, traffic source.

Niklas:Yeah, they want to roll out something new. Back to remote work, which I find very interesting. think everybody, a lot of people have the feeling that the remote work boom that we had post COVID is slowing down. If from you that you are more inside the market, do you see it the same way? Do we have a different opinion on that?

Adomas:I don't think that right now the main discussion is about to hire remote or not remote. think the main discussion is ⁓ how AI is changing the landscape, hiring landscape. And I think it will have a dramatic impact. What I'm seeing from like mainly small businesses that I work with, ⁓ I see that they are firing. their teams, they are hiring senior level people and they are giving them AI or hiring only with AI experience. And this senior level person has to do multiple roles with the help of AI. So smaller teams, micro teams, ⁓ more senior teams. And I don't know how the juniors will get their experience. Honestly, I have no clue what they will do. but it will get more, it will be more difficult for them. But in general for maybe juniors for remote, it's as I said, if you're a junior, you should go work in an office. ⁓ Now, ⁓ so did I answer your question?

Niklas:Yeah, so I agree. So first of all, I think I also have no good answer to what the juniors will do and how this will work. Because when I go back, like I did a PhD out of university, then I joined a consulting firm. If I look at the work I did when I joined a consulting firm and I look what I can do with AI, like in cloud coworker something today, ⁓ probably 80 % of the work I did can be automated. And that was the training ground. So if you now need somebody like me who has spent a few years there and you maybe need like one junior for four that you had before or zero juniors and just more like engagement managers that talk to the client and also do topic work, or you have one person that you have really small teams that are efficient, I think that's really feasible in consulting. You don't need these... roads anymore that are the training grounds to get to senior level. And also in software engineering, when I look back, like I started software engineering when I was young, ⁓ most of the stuff I did, it's very helpful now if I build something with Claude Cote, for example, because I know the architecture, I know which questions to ask and how to push it in the right direction. But honestly, the work that I did when I learned it, it's not needed. the AI can do it. I, you, I have no answer to that. I think it will be really challenging.

Adomas:I can give an example from my case. ⁓ When I was building before something, every single time I needed, like if I build a funnel, need a designer, ⁓ I need a developer, like minimum two roles that I need to hire as a contractor to fulfill, to complete the task that I want to do. Nowadays, like... ⁓ I'm doing the copy myself. I'm preparing the front end myself. ⁓ Like I build the funnel myself with code. I'm not working with cloud. I'm working with codecs, but ⁓ I'm already not using the services of two, probably three contractor that I was using before. So ⁓ the times are changing. So for example, in our case, so my bet is that ⁓ I'm betting that the more ⁓ in the next six to 12 months, we'll have more people who are looking for employment and ⁓ we already see a trend where companies, big companies are firing ⁓ thousands of employees, thousands of developers, marketers, whatever. And ⁓ so we'll have a lot of more people who are desperately looking for a job. ⁓ on our side as a remotely talents, that's why I launched just Actually, today is the launch day. Just a few hours ago, I launched it officially. So this coaching program, because I see that though in the days of AI, can answer, you can get most of the questions yourself, get most of the answers to most of the questions yourself with AI. But some people, are looking for handholding. So that's why we launched this ⁓ Academy basically for people to get coaching training on how to find a remote job. But ⁓ because there are you wouldn't believe we meet people who are like, like just another day. And I received an email from ⁓ one of the candidates. He was super mad that we we are not accepting him into any of the roles. that he was applying and he said he was during the last two years I applied in multiple job roles that you were posted and I checked his profile and I see that this person like he's first of all he's applying to the jobs that are not in his region like because we typically when you are hiring remote it's not global the client has some kind of time zone requirement location like at least country sometimes a country requirements something like that so ⁓ And this guy was just applying to random roles, probably applied to more than 20 projects, to 20 open job roles. And not a single one was related to his experience. And he's mad because obviously they need some kind of training, some kind of education. So I'm betting on this, though I'm smiling. But yeah, it will be a problem. AI will change the job market. We're already seeing this. I'm seeing this in small businesses. They are hiring less. They're hiring senior and the teams are smaller and they will be getting smaller. So yeah, it's happening.

Niklas:Yeah, definitely. So I don't know where this will end. I also think we will have significant productivity increases. So we will just see more things built, more things done, but these things take a bit of time to adjust. So having a prediction from me would be really hard. also believe that there will be downsizing and a lot of roads and a lot of companies. So I would be surprised if this wasn't the case. On the other hand, I think that there we will just become more productive as a society. And the expectations on roads will change. But if you go back to remote hiring, I think if you look at it, which regions are really the ones that are most in demand? think you work a lot with Ukraine, but outside of that, what's your feeling, especially from the US side? What do they ask for?

Adomas:We're talking about US type of company. So ⁓ lately, ⁓ when we started, ⁓ biggest market was Europe. But right now, probably 65 % of the roads that we close are located in Latin America. ⁓ Simple requirement just because of time zone, time zone friendly. And Latam in US became popular just like probably four or five years ago. ⁓ Because before that they were crazy about hiring from Philippines. I don't understand the logic of this. You cannot hire a senior level person from Philippines with such a huge time difference and who will be working during the nights for you and to expect that he will perform long term. It's just logical. ⁓ So, yeah, so to answer your question, now talking about vertical. So what I'm seeing is that for marketing talent, we see that typically ⁓ for digital marketing, affiliate, media buyers, ⁓ creative strategists, Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe is a very strong region and has a lot of really high quality senior level candidates, top level candidates. ⁓ For finance type of roles, America is a very popular region. For developers, always, Eastern Europe, like Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, countries, Nordic countries became, like with Poland included, Baltic included, became more expensive. So right now for developers. But in general, I would say that When we started, the beginning we had ⁓ probably 80 % of the roles that we do were related to development talent, tech talent, engineers, and right now it's probably less than 10%.

Niklas:That's crazy.

Adomas:⁓ That's crazy. Yeah. And I don't see a lot of like, yes, we are hiring, but it's, it's, it's not like a major right now. ⁓ 70 % 65, 70 % of the roles that we do are related to marketing and e-commerce talent. And it's probably because of the, you know, ⁓ this period when companies are spending more. for marketing and probably in the next 12 months when we'll start to feel the ⁓ Trump oil crisis and all of that ⁓ due to Iran crisis, Iran this war probably will see decrease of ⁓ demand for marketing talent. At least this is my hypothesis.

Niklas:Yeah, I think the prediction is so hard. it's an interesting prediction. have no clue to tell you. If you ask me what the world will look like in six months from now, currently, it feels extremely unpredictable to me. So I can't make a bet on it. I would also... Yeah, that engineering hiring is going down. ⁓ doesn't...

Adomas:Yeah, it's crazy.

Niklas:me because engineers can be so much more productive. And I think companies just need to reorganize first around this new situation and then hiring will pick up again, I think. But it will not, I doubt that it will ever go back up to like the golden days pre-COVID, I doubt it, in engineering.

Adomas:Just a few, like a week ago, I saw an interesting graph that in US, before talking only about US hiring market for developers and engineers. So after the release of AI, though everyone were ⁓ saying that, tech talent will basically, demand will be an existent. But the graph said ⁓ entirely different story that after AI, the hiring is increasing for tech talent step by step. It's a slow increase, but it's increasing. So, well, as you say, it's difficult to predict, but I was not expecting this. On our side, I don't see this increase of demand for tech talent.

Niklas:Yeah, I mean, you can make the case for the other side as well, right? So you could say that more companies will start building software themselves because it got a lot cheaper. They will hire in-house teams, small in-house teams. If a lot more verticals instead of buying software from like normal vendors, just hire a small team, which they can do now and afford now. ⁓ Maybe total demand increases. Also the people that do software engineering or tech talent. usually are problem solvers. have a varied skill set. So as long as you don't want to write code and that's everything you want to do, I think there are lot more opportunities than just writing code. Like these problem solving skills outside of that implementation and processes. I think there's a lot of room outside of just purely writing code. I think that's also true. Maybe asking you again, I'm a company and I'm now thinking about hiring remote. Could you walk me through the process? How would that work? How would I begin with it? And especially if I'm hiring remotely for the first time, like I want to maybe onboard somebody from Eastern Europe, for example. What would I do? For an engineering role. I think that's easiest. can relate best to that.

Adomas:For what role do you want to hire? ⁓ well, it depends. For example, if you do have like, is this hypothetical, ⁓ situation should I ask more analytical questions? Yeah.

Niklas:No, it's a completely hypothetical situation. would just like to understand like the proven steps. How would this work? Like, how do I get to a situation?

Adomas:Well, one way is for you to do it yourself. ⁓ Try to post job posts everywhere and try to check the profiles that you will receive, schedule interviews, decide on whatever method you have or logical reason. Though what I noticed is that in most of the cases, hiring decisions are purely emotional and very unprofessional. And which was very, I was very surprised because of that. ⁓ So the right, like I wouldn't say the right or wrong. So this is a way how you can do it yourself. You will spend a lot of time probably and ⁓ you will have a ton of interviews and sooner or later you will decide whom you want to hire. What I typically recommend is to give some kind of test task. Just to see, well, in the days of AI for developers, probably the most logical test task would be to do some kind of live coding session or live thinking and solving some kind of problems section, session. It would be more realistic than just to give us some kind of email task. Some clients are doing this and so yeah, and. Another way how to do it is how we do it is like when clients start to work with us, we do a discovery call with them. After that, the recruiter will ask a ton of questions about your requirements, expectations, all of that. Immediately, we start sourcing. So we publish the job description. Our job description is like the way a recruiter, I see that a lot of people, don't understand that. For example, in our case, like recruiters are using special tools. For example, one of the most popular tools in the market is ⁓ LinkedIn Recruiter. LinkedIn Recruiter is ⁓ just a license fee for one user for one year is around $12,000. But ⁓ in this case, when the recruiter is using this tool, he has all the potential LinkedIn capabilities in his hands, how to filter the talent who fits the profile. you as a simple free user, will never have this capability. So additionally, we have our applicant tracking systems and our applicant tracking systems is like CRMs for business. when we publish, for example, in our case, when we publish a job opportunity, it's being republished in around, if I'm not, I don't want to say incorrectly, but probably 140, 150 other Websites and we get this huge traffic. We have we're using different type of tools how to filter these Candidates that we receive then that we have a screening call with a recruiter Recruiters typically are specializing in verticals. So if we're obviously in your case, we would assign a recruiter who is specializing in tech talent and ⁓ Probably a high chance that he will he had a ton of experience doing multiple roles for, ⁓ and he already knows a bunch of candidates, a list of candidates who might fit the profile you're looking for. So it's a more, let's say, I would say we just throw a wider net into the market and we have the tools how to do it quicker and more efficiently than you do. So. ⁓ two options, which one is better. It depends. It depends how much value your time probably.

Niklas:Thanks. think those are very good and nice, finer words. Adam, thank you so much for being on the podcast and you my listener. see you next time.

Adomas:Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye. Cheers.