Christian Idiodi: preference

Transcript context

…use or less than a mile closer to their home." Now, the engineer is with us and he's thinking about it. It's like, this is really interesting. About half of the people showed up. He hired one in five. If you really want to solve this problem, playing the laws of averages, we probably need to send this man close to 200 people. We need to go bigger. So we are storming the office, we called the McDonald's guy again. I was like, "Can we try again next Monday?" And he's like, "Do I only pay for the people I hire?" We're like, "Sure." It's like, "Oh, go ahead and kill yourself on this." It's a pain. We've been trying all kinds of things for years. Now, we start doubling down our efforts. We start calling back all the people that didn't show up for interviews like, "What's going on? Did you get lost? Don't you want a job? What's wrong with you?" We start figuring out what portals worked well for us the last time, what wasted our money, what was the cost to acquire a person. And we spend a week doubling our efforts on those channels. We probably have about 120, 130 people on the list. The Sunday beforehand, we start calling them up like, "Please show up. Don't embarrass us. Don't you want the job? Do you need that address? Should I call you a reminder, set your alarm." We're trying all the techniques to try to get more people. There we go the next day and at the end of the day he has about forty-five to 50 people. He comes to us, he shakes our hand. He's like, "Whoa, the quality was excellent. All my recruiters were engaged. The day was smooth," [inaudible 00:41:17] how successful we are. He's like, "I want to use you for every new McDonald's I open in the area." Now, I don't know I have a product. I just know I was able to help one person at McDonald's. But I feel like I have enough learning. So I called up my friend at Starbucks and I said, "Hey, man, remember the problem we talked the about?" He's like, "Yeah. I would love to help you solve it." He said, "Oh, okay. What do you have in mind?" I said, "Well, I think we need to send you about 3000 people to interview." He said, "3000 people? I told you I only need 800." I said, in this industry, most people don't show up for interviews, right? He said, "Oh my goodness. You know our industry well. I like this. I'm going to take this up, I think we'll give you this contract." I take my designer, my engineer, we go to San Francisco. We're out there recruiting because this is where it was based. We have to get a whole hotel, hire people. We are working all the channels we knew, working in the area. Remember, we don't have any software, no technology. The designer, we're doing this manually, Excel spreadsheets, phones, emails, in that way. In one week, Starbucks hired 784 people. I get an email the next Monday morning from the contact at Starbucks. He copied Howard Schultz, then CEO of Starbucks. The email read, "These guys just saved our butts." I sent it to my CEO, but then I said, "You know what?" I only know now I can help on McDonald's and a Starbucks, but that doesn't mean I have a product. But I now have enough of problem definition. I reached out to the head of marketing, the head of sales. only know now I can help on McDonald's and a Starbucks, but that doesn't mean I have a product. But I now have enough of problem definition. I reached out to the head of marketing, the head of sales. I said, "Tell us who has this problem you've come across," because we need to work with more people to try to uncover a solution that is scalable, maintainable, reliable, and works for our business. Weirdly enough, the next opportunity we had was the Los Angeles International Airport. They were opening up a new terminal and they said, "We need 200 people to manage all the stores in the new terminal." And we were like, "200 people? We just hired close to 800. We got this." We go to LA for the briefing with the staffing group and they tell us the people that work at an international airport have to match the demographics of the travelers. We say, "Say what? Yeah, we have 13% Chinese-speaking travelers, we need 13% Chinese-speaking employees." We say, "Sorry? We've got 5% Korean speaking." I mean my team is in LA, we're in Chinatown. We are speaking, trying to recruit people to come and work in an airport. If we expect 10 people to show up, only one person shows up. We start calling job seekers up like, "What's going on?" They say, "Do you know what it means to work at an airport?" First, I wake up at five o'clock, I drive to the employee parking lot. I get into a bus. Then I go through security. There was not like TSA pre-check back then. Then if I want to break, I go to security again and then you pay me minimum wage. It took us close to three months to staff this. We had to negotiate with the union to raise the price to like $15 an hour to attract people. When we come back from that, you know what we're saying, that is not our customer. Never again. We are never doing airports. That's a pain. Around this time, it was the holiday season, so we reached out to the person at Macy's. We told them about our work with McDonald's. They say, "Oh, we'll try this." We started working with them. You can imagine through this, the engineer is thinking, how can I use technology to improve this? I always tell this to people, I never wrote a requirements document, I never wrote a story. So the designer is thinking, how can we improve the end-to-end experience? Okay, we need a recruiter experience, a job seeker experience. We had a funnel. We need to build a scheduling tool so that they can scale the interview. Oh, what about notification? Maybe text message. We can send them a map so that they can know how to get to the... I mean, all of these things, because they were involved from the very beginning in defining the problem, they were immersed in the solution to the problem. It takes us about eight and a half, almost nine months to build this. When we launched this product in its first 90 days, it booked $32 million in sales. Why? Because you got McDonald's probably until today using this product to open up every new store. Well, Starbucks went to the global contract. We say, " Well, we've only done discovery in the US so I only know where it works in this market." til today using this product to open up every new store. Well, Starbucks went to the global contract. We say, " Well, we've only done discovery in the US so I only know where it works in this market." And we started finding, if you look at NASCAR, some of these big sporting events, they have to bring a lot of people together very quickly for a short amount of time. And this is the same kind of product they use to do that high volume hiring in a short amount of time. If you think about it, I was discovering who had the problem and developing the customers that have the problem. At the same time, I was discovering and delivering a solution to that problem.…

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