Do as much good as you can in this world, have honest intentions, and the universe will look after you.
MEDIA 7: Thank you for your time, Arran. Let's begin with your professional journey. What was it like?
ARRAN STEWART: I was born in the UK, in a town called Luton—both my wife and I are from there. We have five beautiful children and moved to the US four years ago in pursuit of my business career. After completing my degree, I went to work in London for SThree, a large publicly traded recruitment agency that owned IT Job Board. That’s where my passion for helping people feed their families and pay their bills came from. I recognized the important role of HR technology and the recruitment industry in helping people throughout their career journeys. I have always been entrepreneurial and struggled to work for others as I naively (and arrogantly in some cases) believed that I could do things better. I should add that, over the course of my career, I have learned the hard way that I do not always know better, and have learned how to be a student of life and not a “know-it-all.” I founded the company, I own now, in 2011, with my business partner, friend, and mentor Paul Sloyan. It started as MyJobMatcher.com, and over the years we have grown and acquired a number of other companies, including Job.com—we completed the acquisition in 2017 and rebranded the business. Our objective has, of course, remained the same—to help people feed their families and pay their bills by using the best tech to bring the most relevant opportunities directly to them.
M7: What an honorable mission! With Job.com, you've intended to reinvent the process and deliver a new way of hiring with the use of AI, ML, Blockchain, SaaS, and BaaS. Would you like to share the strategies that you have used to implement this?
AS: We have targeted the staffing market and the various processes a candidate and recruitment consultant goes through, to source, shortlist, screen, schedule, validate, place, and retain candidates. It's the entire candidate lifecycle from placement to retention, thereafter. Typically, many HR tech suppliers may choose one of the above components of hiring to offer SaaS or more recently BaaS services. But we recognized - for the purposes of capturing data, validating it and using it for ML - that creating a digital experience that catered to that entire process was something we wished to pursue. With over 20,000 staffing agencies in the US and the vast majority of them doing less than $100 million in revenue, the market consists of a highly fragmented industry of small businesses that are low in tech sophistication and have a high human capital cost to run the operation. Job.com is acquiring great staffing agencies and uplifting them with tech as part of the staffing industry’s digital transformation.
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We believe in people and technology working together—not displacing one another.
M7: You believe that understanding people is paramount. How do you incorporate this in your workforce at Job.com?
AS: We have a family culture in the business, and we believe in people and technology working together—not displacing one another. As stated, our mission at the company is to help as many people feed their families and pay their bills as possible. We are driven by passion and a desire to digitalize the staffing process for the benefit of candidates, recruitment consultants, and clients.
M7: That is very interesting! Given your mission at Job.com, what are your thoughts on Artificial Intelligence gradually replacing human interaction and the need to re-humanize the hiring process?
AS: Let’s welcome AI replacing the mundane tasks—who wants to sit and figure out where to advertise a job opening? Or which resume is a true statistical match? AI is our friend, if we use it in such a way. But never forget that it’s people who hire people, so we’ll always need a human element in the end. Uber takes the human part out of hailing a cab, but a person picks you up. DoorDash takes the human part out of ordering take out, but a human cooks the food, and a human delivers it. In the foreseeable future, I can’t see that changing just yet. And when it comes to such a precise art of hiring the right candidate, you need human judgment. Hiring is still a very subjective process, and one size does not fit all. So, for this very reason, in my lifetime and my opinion, I can never see AI completely replacing humans in this process.
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Hiring is still a very subjective process, and one size does not fit all.
M7: Job.com is turning recruiters into advocates and partners, not just matchmakers. Could you please elaborate on this?
AS: We empower recruitment consultants by using AI and blockchain to overcome many of the friction points in the hiring process that inevitably add more time and cost. By doing this, we create partners to the Job.com platform and business.
M7: Your work has been published in everything from Forbes to Bloomberg and you are also a contributor for NASDAQ. Would you please impart some wisdom you gained throughout your experience, to our readers?
AS: Do as much good as you can in this world, have honest intentions, and the universe will look after you. Life is a team sport, and if we all assist each other, not only will our world continue to drive forward, but you will also accelerate forward as a person, an entrepreneur, and a valued member of society.