Bridging the Gap Between Frontline Work and HR Recruitment | Interview with Jason Radisson, CEO of Movo
Bridging the Gap Between Frontline Work and HR Recruitment …
In this episode of the Digital Workspace Works podcast, we welcome Jason Radisson, Founder and CEO of Movo , a platform that provides custo…
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May 3, 2023

Bridging the Gap Between Frontline Work and HR Recruitment | Interview with Jason Radisson, CEO of Movo

Bridging the Gap Between Frontline Work and HR Recruitment | Interview with Jason Radisson, CEO of Movo
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The Valuu Makers

In this episode of the Digital Workspace Works podcast, we welcome Jason Radisson, Founder and CEO of Movo, a platform that provides custom tools for the high-volume frontline workforce. With a background in entrepreneurship and extensive experience working with top-tier VCs, Jason shares his insights on the challenges of large-scale HR recruitment in frontline work and the need for efficient hiring and onboarding processes.

He emphasizes the importance of technology in removing hiring biases and the shift towards a digital record of employment history. As Jason puts it, "At least where the frontline is concerned, there's really no reason that you shouldn't have a digital file with your work history anymore. It shouldn't be a piece of paper, self-reported, with a bunch of bullet points on it. It can be the digital record of your employment."

Join us as we delve deeper into the world of frontline workforce recruitment and learn how Movo is helping to solve the global shortage of skilled frontline workers with its innovative approach. Listen in to gain insights that will help you navigate the challenges of workforce management and unleash the potential of your frontline employees.

Meet Our Guest
Jason Radisson is the Founder and CEO of Movo, a real-time massive platform for frontline work. Jason learned startup skills early in life. He was born to a 16-year old single mom, and worked blue-collar jobs from short order cook to HVAC technician to fund school and climb out of poverty. From that inauspicious start, he went on to Harvard, a Fulbright Scholarship, and McKinsey & Company.

Since becoming an entrepreneur, Jason has worked with more than a dozen first tier VCs, firms like Softbank, Accel, DST, Andreessen Horowitz, Monashees, and Sequoia. Together he and his teams have built and scaled multiple tech unicorns, platforms that today provide work and improved living standards to millions of workers, from Bogota to Boston.

In the early days of Uber he was a launcher and Regional General Manager in the western US. From there, Brazil’s 99-Taxis as Chief Operating Officer, where he grew the business 10x and sold it to Didi for $1B. He is also a member of the Rappi-Mafia, where he was an early investor and helped the Co-Founders build their Operations and Growth teams in the initial expansion across Latin America.

His latest venture is Movo, where he is Founder & CEO, a platform that is helping solve the global shortage of skilled frontline workers, with more than 300,000 users from nurses to solar technicians.

Learn more about Movo: https://movo.co/
Connect with Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-radisson/

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Transcript

Ryan Purvis 0:00
Hello and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to grips with a digital workspace inner workings.

Welcome onto the digital workspace works podcast, you want to introduce yourself and your company.

Jason Radisson 0:33
Yeah, thanks for having me. So I'm Jason Raddison, founder and CEO of a company called Movo. Movo is a real time massive platform for frontline work for all things related to frontline work, and enables large teams to be hired to be deployed at scale in organisations, working in healthcare, working in energy working in retail and many other sectors.

Ryan Purvis 1:03
Right, and how did you get into this? What was the what was the spark?

Jason Radisson 1:07
You know, I have been active throughout my career on labour topics, and particularly ones relating to sort of technology and large teams. And I studied economics, in particular with kind of labour and development focus. And I've been working, whether large blue chip companies in their frontline workforces, or in the gig economy for a number of years, those were all topics that were very interesting to me. And I think as some of my experiences in the gig economy, I saw that there were there were gaps and things that we could do that were there were a win win, for sure, Win Win situations possible. And I sort of set out to build a company that would take those gig economy technologies, but improve upon them and above all, improve on the deployment of technology, so that workers could also get ahead, and then people could have a family supporting wage, and finally supporting career in the frontline workforce. So that was really the inspiration

Ryan Purvis 2:12
and attention to the gig economy, because that to begin with, was sort of the empower the person to do their own thing in their own time, without all the rigmarole bureaucracy of working in a corporate to almost becoming a human rights violation, in some respects, with some, you know, look at some of the Uber drivers and how they were in effect, I've got a story of someone in South Africa that I know, you know, who's basically at the, at the mercy of, of an algorithm, with no rights, no protections, but also, with some stuff that's very seasonal, having the ability to onboard and offload workers with some, some process some automation, I can see the huge benefits to that. And I think about sort of some of the sporting events, we have a temporary store for six months, and then they go offline, to come back again in six months. You know, how do you make that useful? I don't know if any of those resonate to what you set out? Or what you've seen it with, with what you're doing?

Jason Radisson 3:09
Yeah, totally? Well, I think it at the crux of the issue is people need different things. You know, there are certainly folks who are looking for that kind of flexibility, who wants to work part time or want to work seasonally. There's another group of folks who really do just want to get ahead and want a full time, a full time career. And I think that's a little bit of where the platforms were particularly good for companies and not always, not always so great for workers, you know, that we look at it. And I think that's a big part of the opportunity, right? If you sort of say, you know, as we did when we were when we were starting the company, what's the best application of this technology for full time, careers full time, you know, well paying jobs. That's where I'd say, you know, it's sort of evolved. Because largely, what we've been doing the last couple of years is just sort of plugging gaps in the supply chains. And helping people literally stay fed. We've done a lot of work in food, manufacturing, and dark stores, in a lot of the infrastructure behind getting food to people throughout the pandemic, I think is it's evolved. You know, we're now in this phase where largely what's happening is we're just dealing with these chronic shortages. So you know, if you look at the developed world, we just have less people entering the workforce and more people retiring than we ever had before. And it's not going to get any better for the next, you know, foreseeable future, ie, you know, 10 plus years. And so, really, what that means is we're all going to have to sort of deploy ourselves are working talents, sort of the resources in society, in the more equitable and in a more optimised way. And I think the way you do that to put a word on it is Travel jobs, I think, you know, we're about to see a boom in travel Work and Travel careers and exactly that it's a little bit the opposite of what's going on with remote work. But, you know, literally the work is going to be where the work is, if you look at the US, it's in really large cities, you know, where the population centres, and yet people work everywhere. And I think that's where you're going to see the engineer, the technician, the nurse who's working locally, will have the opportunity to get on a plane and earn the national level wage, which might be 50%, higher than where they are locally. And I think it's just going to be a broader societal trend, particularly the poll that we have, and the demand we have on on healthcare on that side. And in really clean energy and the energy transformation in our country. I think it's just massive, massive opportunity. So I think I think that's what, that's what ultimately happens. And we're very excited about that transition and sort of our ability as a platform to help employers with that problem. And on the other side, help the person who has a professional is kind of dealing with opportunities locally, sort of get visibility into national level opportunities level up and, you know, take off in their career.

Ryan Purvis 6:14
I think it's a great analogy. One of the benefits of having this pandemic, everyone was forced to work from home. And obviously, you know, we never discount those who died. And in the tough times we went through is that everyone got the level up on technology that they could actually do, for the most part, not every job is was remote working. But for the most part, there were jobs that could be done remotely, could always been done remotely. But because of archaic mentalities, you had to be in the office, or forced to be in the office or in this, I'm not saying you shouldn't be, you know, there's a hybrid view, which I think is the way forward. But you realise very quickly that you're limiting your talent pool, by only hiring next year office or within driving distance. And you could literally, nowadays, hire someone to three hours timezone difference from you either direction, with the benefits of potentially being a cheaper resource, because they're not, you know, living in a first world country with first world pressures. And, and also, because they are, you know, I've just come back from South Africa, and you see it there, you know, you can pay that person really well. But by Western standards, it's not that it's, it's not the the same number, but they live very well in their economy. And I think that's the interesting thing. So, you know, having something like your platform that could potentially bridge the gaps in legislation, regulation, all those things when you're bringing somebody on, and sort of offloading, because that'll happen too. I think that's a huge help. And it just takes away the noise of doing it, or the friction.

Jason Radisson 7:39
Totally. And with us hiring, because we've, we were, you know, in that in that pandemic mode, and really, workers were so scarce, and in some of the roles, we engineered hiring down to literally a few clicks. And it's a very, it's very, for most HR teams, it's a very different experience, it's, you send somebody a link, and they download an app that that essentially has the job and all of the onboarding process, you know, as the payload and your professional candidate goes and in five minutes basically hires themselves. It's a, it's a very different modality from where most people are coming from, but the you know, it is we're coming from exactly that sort of goal of like, let's engineer all of the friction out of somebody starting a good job. Once they're on the platform, they can, they can move around. And you know, you get that visibility, which I think is another piece that we're kind of getting into today. And people look at load balancing and city I've got all of my different stores and distribution centres in Atlanta. And I should be able to kind of move people between schedules and between sites, based on what's going on in the business and based on who's sick and you know, who's gotten vacation time coming up in these kinds of things. And, you know, that's another sort of very modern application for our platform, where we just again, wanna kind of engineer all that friction out. And I think as we kind of step back from the tech, it ultimately ends up being good for society and good for the workforce. Because you're just there it's it's, there's nothing in the way there's not human bias in the way there's there's not out frankly, algorithmic bias, either. It's just who is ready and able to do the work, gets more work on the platform and sort of has more flexibility on the platform they could otherwise.

Ryan Purvis 9:36
Yeah, I think, you know, skills based or experience based work allocation is I've often talked about concept, but I don't think anyone really does it. Yeah. And it's, you know, you should be able to do it because because the data is usually there or the information is usually there. But think back to your point about onboarding. There was a study done and I can't remember who did it. I'm gonna say Microsoft, but it probably wasn't them. Might have been forest that, that the experience of a worker in their onboarding process is really that is really the the decision point, whether they stay on long term and become a motivated employee, or they leave in the short term or they stay or the lead, they stay in long term, whether they're always a demotivated employee. And it's, it's amazing that that little first contact, and have such a such a widespread impact on on that aspect.

Jason Radisson 10:26
Totally, totally. Yeah, we've kind of, we've ended up in, you know, a lot of trial and error, some of the things, some of the lessons and playbooks that we carried forward, you know, from Uber and some of the other places that we were, but our experience has become, you know, essentially, we, we provide access to a huge pool of people, you know, we've got jobs that when we're running hot, we'll have 5000 applications a day. And, and, you know, we'll provide access to all 5000. And ultimately, by the time you get through a funnel, and people figure out what schedule they can or can't work and everything, we end up with a with a large orientation class. And that's really how we've sort of work things. And that's it's a little bit of a process reengineering with our clients, but, but essentially, what we're saying is, don't bog down the process with steps, and really don't stretch out the time like nobody, nobody benefits from a two week hiring process or, or from having your recruiting team take a week to get back to people and schedule an interview and this kind of thing. It just really just has the top performers drop out. Really, what you want to do is get everybody started. And then our modality has been we have an orientation session, we'll do large group orientation sessions and hiring managers can go there, the new workforce can kind of get a feel for the working environment. And then generally, you know, up to 50% of them will drop out after that process, they'll sort of get that orientation and get a feel for the working environment for that day, and the culture of the team and these other things. And we found that doing that process is 10x 15x, many, many a factor at least a step change in the productivity of sort of your hiring function. And it's, I think, for a lot of teams, it's just it's a kin to the process that we had in the gig economy. And I think for a lot of traditional businesses, it's part of, you know, some of the things that are just very different from how they're used to doing business. Ultimately, we wouldn't, you know, have gotten to this point if it weren't extremely successful. And, you know, that's one of the things that we've been doing kind of throughout the pandemic is we've been able to deliver teams, when others, frankly, haven't been able to, and I think the process in and of itself, as you mentioned, is is a big part of it.

Ryan Purvis 12:56
I mean, I've worked in some corporates, and I remember when specifically where I got an email account, I started the Monday had access to Tuesday. And I was shocked there was guys had been there for a month that hadn't got the email box, you kind of go in how do you get the hack in the case, you know, a month from, you know, what do you do for a month? You know, that just sets the sensor up. So yeah, within 24 hours, you shouldn't be up and running out, I would think, how have you? I mean, do you own the entire process? Or do you integrate into a business's already available? infrastructure?

Jason Radisson 13:31
We can integrate there's, there's usually not much advantage to integrating is what I would say. So I guess the way I would describe it as we have a modular process, so have a core process where there's there's kind of no no friction in the onboarding. You know, as mentioned, including we're doing a bunch of you know, there are compliance regulatory credentialing checks, we do them in the background, as fast as those databases run, you know, so depending on the background check standards or the nursing licencing, and credentialing standards, those things can can run in a few seconds that can run in a few minutes, we tried to get everybody essentially the vast majority of the candidate flow to be sort of instantly credentialed and hired. And then from that point, if there are things that one of our employers need differently, we add it essentially as an extra step. And we always caveat it in for those of your listeners who are ecommerce folks, still, they'll recognise this from shopping behaviour, like any extra step means that half your people leave the pipeline is the good rule of thumb. So we always do that with extreme caution. You know, you kind of say, we spent a couple of years getting this process, you know, engineered to optimum, but we did we do realise it's, you know, there are Are there are additional things that folks need. And we've had to build it that way, because we're in a couple of countries and a couple of different jurisdictions, and they're just, they're things that you need, and, you know, assets. So we will have, you know, employers have those extra steps. But, but yeah, we try to avoid, you know, we don't really want to an onboarding process, have an ERP integration that costs as the, you know, two days of run time, or have to schedule a meeting with the hiring manager who's only only available every second Friday, just anything that sort of detracts, we said, we usually come with the data and tell our clients Yeah, you know, if you want to build a process of that you have 80%, less, you know, high calibre starts, you know, you happy to do that, but we think you're gonna like this process, the way we built it.

Ryan Purvis 15:54
Do you keep I'm just curious, if you keep resources on your books, even if they're even longer with when your clients for that burning need to almost connect them or not this recruitment, that probably is recruitment, in a sense.

Jason Radisson 16:09
Yeah, I think, throughout the pandemic, we had just a massive professional services presence. Because we were backfilling and helping clients and, you know, all kinds of crazy situations, I think where we are now it's more of we from time to time, help our clients with a fast start, but our goal really is to have the client with our platform, and and with some support, quickly get to a position where they have the self sustaining talent acquisition and and engagement programmes, and they're just a lot, you know, sort of their frontline workforce is just a lot healthier because of it. Yeah, you know, and these are, they are long term benefits, you know, once you get a really nice and sort of self supporting, right, it's, if you have a much better hiring process, then, you know, sort of your scores, and all of the channels will go up a lot, you know, from Glassdoor to, indeed, and any of the others, you know, you'll start to see those those improvements in job boards and ratings and employer ratings out there. And then you know, you, if you, you are managing a lot of candidates at scale, you'll do a lot better and SEO, around the job categories that are important to you. So we sort of help clients also on a very macro level kind of level up on their talent acquisition. And, you know, ideally, we don't really want to be there as the long term outsourced labour partner, we really more want to get the clients to a spot where they're sustainable.

Ryan Purvis 17:49
Now, that makes sense. I mean, it's it's a, you know, pick the battles you want to be in, I suppose. With with the product and how you've built it, I mean, you know, going through your deck here, and it's, there's a lot to it. I mean, what was the? What was the part that that? Got you going in there? And how does that lead into the other pieces that I'm seeing here? So you've got the automation and marketplace for HR, the frontline workforce management, obviously, the upskilling, automation and payments? I mean, how does it all fit together? Maybe as well?

Jason Radisson 18:21
Well, the product vision from the very beginning, my vision was that you had to have an end to end real time marketplace. You know, and I'm using marketplace kind of in, you know, in the in the capitalised M version, you know, it had to be this, this online system where supply and demand could be and be optimised anytime, in real time at any location. And I think if you if you sort of come from that framework, you've got to build a lot of plumbing before, you know, you kind of get to that point. So a lot of what we've done is sort of foundational tech, for, you know, let's call it real, real time HR, you know, if that's really out there in most people's minds, you know, in terms of what we're doing, but, and I would argue that Uber is a real time EHR platform, I guess. And, you know, it's sort of you have to, you have to build that. So, you know, you need a really efficient way for, for demand to get onto the system, which basically, you know, you need smart scheduling, you need some really good tools to put schedules into the system. And you really need need really efficient ways for workers to come onto the platform and, and then you need a bunch of optimization, yield management, a bunch of collaborative filtering. So there's a lot of kind of groundwork technology that have to build first. So that was the vision all along. In order to sort of do the crawl, walk run, we first build talent acquisition, we first build hiring and onboarding, and and job matching You're, and then we kind of expanded from there. It's been, you know, it's been quite a journey, I would say, I'm generally not shy as a technologist, you know, I build ride sharing platforms, I build massive platforms in the cybersecurity industry with hundreds and hundreds of millions of users. I think what is so awesome and so challenging about this particular build is, you know, mobile, we've had to, we've had to sort of land a feature set that is broadly applicable for the front line. And I think it's, it's the change management as well, these aren't, these aren't internal, Uber or Rapi, or delivery hero resources, who are operations, research trained startup folks that are running the platform, we've got to build a new way that is broadly applicable, and your HR operations team can drop in and run the platform. Your plant managers, you know, with little or no training can drop drop in and run the platform. That's been, you know, the additional UX work and what's very different about this build.

Ryan Purvis 21:12
Very interesting the you mentioned the USPS, I mean, what has changed? You said it's different what what is different?

Jason Radisson 21:20
Yeah, so I mean, I think you mean, in terms of in terms of functionality, or, or UX, or,

Ryan Purvis 21:27
like, you mentioned that it's been different to before. So what's been Oh,

Jason Radisson 21:31
just Yeah, so, you know, I think I think when you're running a platform a marketplace, it's only for your company internally. And not, you know, not the gig economy marketplaces don't have external users. But but you know, no one, no one ever sort of, tried to package the Uber engine room and then sell it to an airline, you know. So there's, there's, there's sort of the internal workings of how a massive real time platform work, you know, we're sort of tilling a lot of new ground there in terms of what the UX should be like, and making those tools broadly accessible to a much broader corporate audience. And I think that's, that's very different, right, because really, the last time a major corporate audience got got sort of trained on new technologies we had, we had desktop, right, we had sort of like desktop applications. With ERP, broadly, you know, most of the corporate world knows how to use some form of ERP system at this point. But we haven't had a moment yet where we've sort of trained the corporate, the corporate world to work in a real time massive platform. And I think it's, it's just, it's really interesting. You know, an inspiration is maybe developer tools. And it's not the tip, technical part of developer tools, but more of the involvement and engagement with with sort of bigger levers, you know, like a, for instance, is in our world, somebody sitting in headquarters at one of the biggest retailers in the world, can can issue a task to 17,000 people that put up holiday decorations, and have it come back, live completed, geo stamped in a live dashboard and watch the returns come in for the next two hours, you know, depleting inventory. And just, you know, it's just, we have a very, you know, and we call that an HR system. It's a very different set of tools. And so I think, I think, you know, what's, what's definitely different about about this is, is that we have, we have our, our corporate users who, who are getting to experience this really cool attack, you know, and it's really good our jobs to put it in the right UX, and they put the right training and onboarding for them around it, too.

Ryan Purvis 24:08
Yeah. Okay. So we let you explain that, because we're always trying to work out what was different now I've been thinking about the sort of PeopleSoft and the steps and the, those interfaces that you'd working as an employee, and they, you know, for one of a better term I disgusting to work with. This is much I'm envisioning your universe sort of interface, which I'll be honest, I opened for the first time this weekend, a long time, and I was shocked to see the amount of services available. And I'm kind of thinking it's like the same thing where you've got this ability to use a new service straightaway. And it's and it's that intuitive. pneus and that modern commercial experience. Yeah, I want to order a cup of coffee before I get to the coffee shop. I can order it so I get this. It's really in the same token, I want to book my lever it needs to be approved straightaway. Or I need to be told straightaway that I'm before you can book it that day. As clashes or you know, there's some sort of key person logic that's built in or set up, you know that you can't have people at the same time or whatever it is, all those things that are almost impossible to do. And in what I call the legacy applications, you know, and hadn't hadn't even thought of that use case of getting 70,000 people to go and put up decorations as a task, because that's normally handled, as you know, some email or some chat, you know, filter down exactly. Slowly and surely.

Jason Radisson 25:29
Yeah, yeah, cool. The delegation of that task and the time keeping on that task, that task is an intelligent object in our system, it has all the information has geo stamping, and time stamping. And if a store manager wants to farm it out to an independent contractor for an hour, that contractor can check that item out and check it back in when it's completed and attach the pictures and that can all roll up to the headquarter reporting, we see our completion rates. So, you know, it's just, there's, I think that's, you know, and, you know, we, I think common metaphors we use are things like, like Twitch, or, you know, like Minecraft, or, you know, if, you know, you're a cyclist, or a runner, like the Strava is, and the lifts and those kinds of things. It is we're sort of putting this this sort of massive community layer on top of your organisation, you know, said for any of our clients that have, you know, really, it begins with 1000 workers, but really, you sort of get the full benefit if you've got a really big fun, fine, like 10,000. Plus, is where the platform really shines.

Ryan Purvis 26:43
Yeah, I can imagine, I can imagine. And I'm looking at the one thing that caught my eye here is in your mobile payments, you've got a virtual virtual currency that is used to purchase goods and services. Now, how did that? Yeah, yeah, I mean,

Jason Radisson 26:56
we're, we've got some roadmap, and we've got some early features on what it broadly call the professional, sort of the professional off the clock functionality. And, and some of them are really basic, like, you know, say, I'm in a high trust environment, say I'm a night, I'm a nurse on the night shift at a particular hospital, I might want to coordinate with the other people who are on that floor, you know, there might be there might not just be two shifts on that floor, because we might be working three by twelves, or something like that, or four by 12. So there might actually be 5678 shifts on my floor, I might want to coordinate with all those guys that may want to, you know, be able to casually message them, I might want to be able to swap shifts with them, I might want to be able to interact with them socially and just kind of follow up on whoever's getting some new training, I might want to be able to informally have some things around sort of patient experience. So that was sort of where we started because it's a product already sort of, from the very beginning had good robust communication, chat and track groups and, and whatnot embedded For Your Life team, the the folks you work with and, and your supervisors. And then we expanded to the adjacent teams. And now we're adding another layer, which is basically giving access and information and the ability to follow people who aren't even at your workplace. So, you know, I'm that nurse on, on nightshift, I can follow somebody, you know, across the country working in a different group in a different environment casually and get information and kind of playbooks about maybe some techniques that they're using on the job, maybe some training that they're going through, and career opportunities that they're seeing in California, that I'm not seeing in my local market. So we wanted to enable all of that stuff. And part of the core that goes with that is also being able to have sort of experience on the platform and levels on the platform. And we're, we're developing both virtual currency, but also experience points. We do both and a bit of a different way right now. But as the features continue to emerge, we're going to have it be more robust in the sense that you'll be able to use that virtual currency to buy different things, and potentially to enhance, you know, let's say shift swapping and schedule changes and other things like that and potentially use it for training and upskilling on the platform. So I mentioned the same breath as as experienced points because experience points are really sort of a big part of what we were talking earlier about having an unbiased view on who's doing what on the platform that comes from, you know, a shared anecdote when we were when we were in the ride sharing Business, a couple of the 10 team members and myself, we had this, it doesn't make a lot of sense after explaining that, like, we have this way of sort of getting to special assignments. And for us, a special assignment was anything from policy related. There's a VIP, maybe the governor, maybe somebody around the governor, maybe somebody, you know, in a political job and elected official in the state that we're operating in, who needs a favour of this other the other day, and obviously, they paid for the service and whatever, but you don't want to just send them a random driver. And, you know, nor is it super fair to sort of pick your favourites and and the approach that we had was on the city teams, our city teams would select the very best drivers in the city by our performance metrics. So ratings over time experience points on the platform, essentially hours times ratings, and if you pick the top top of the file, they're extremely talented people. And we would sort of deploy them anytime. The adversary sort of was also known for stunts, you know, we do things with helicopters and other programmes like that. And same thing, we always go from the top of the file. And I think that's, broadly speaking, when you look at a lot of frontline work, one of the fairest ways that we can evaluate people, it's not one supervisors say overview, it's it's a pool of feedback that develops over time in the rating system. And then it's your experience points in that role in that particular skill set that we're really looking to. So that's a that's a big part of of where we're going overall with social interaction on the platform, and kind of this ability to enable performance management and massive scale. And, frankly, access at massive scale, our algorithms already have a really solid idea of who's good for what job because the amount of skill matching we do. And because of the outcome data that we have, we see who has done really well with the job and who hasn't. And we can of course, map it back and are continually improving our algorithms based on that information. And as we look forward to more sort of training offering, we're working with some third parties to bring additional training offerings onto the platform. If we look at deploying people around the country, all of that sort of career pathing all has a really great basis in on biassed. And that's really sort of the direction that we're going with the platform and with, you know, some of these things like virtual currencies and some of the other programmes.

Ryan Purvis 32:55
And that's just getting back to you your view on the top people is that feedback from from other people as well to say, you know, Joe Bloggs did the right thing here, they're great, or is it? Are you measuring? I mean, I guess the crux of the question.

Jason Radisson 33:10
Yeah, you know, most of it is informed if you really wanted to simplify it these days, in most frontline professions, it would, it would literally be, you can simplify, probably 90% of it is driven by time and role. There are some other behavioural things like attendance, sort of time and timeliness, enrol. And sort of the frontline professionals who accrue the most hours are generally the best. And it's sort of, they have better access to schedules because they're doing a really good job. And they're, they're working in the work environment that they're working in, they're getting a lot of work done. They're not necessarily the most vocal, if you you know, it really kind of takes all of sort of the, you know, I would say, interviewing, sort of subjective performance management kind of out of the picture. And there's a little bit of subjectivity, you could argue that, you know, and we're never going to have it completely take all of the subjectivity out of it. But it's sort of the amalgam of all of the different people that are interacting with that person, right. So if a nurse is doing really well, at a hospital, he is going to get a lot of hours. And they're also going to have really good attendance and these kinds of things. The ratings are sort of secondary in that the last 10 or 20% is sort of the cumulative effect of all the ratings. So if you've been rated by 30 different people, and have the most hours worked on the platform, at that point in that particular role, chances are pretty good, you're good performer and the inverse is true. If somebody drops into a role, and they only stick it out for a day or two, you know, and we know that everyone else is doing fine in that role at that particular facility, we've also got a really good read that there's something about that person that that fit with that job. So it's, you know, it seems, and I don't want to overly reduce it. But, but but it's less complex than then a lot of folks would kind of make it out to be assuming that, you know, you've got good skill compatibility. And that's sort of easy enough to filter out particularly in more skilled roles, the are either coming into the job with years of experience in the job, or they're not. And once you kind of get past that hurdle, and the basic competence, and licencing and lack of sort of disciplinary measures and the other things that we screen for, you know, once you get to there, you can almost boil it down, as said to like, sort of productive hours in the role working with us. And by that point, we have a really good read, and you no need to put a finer point on it, that's when we think about resume that to us is the resume of the future, at least as far as the frontline is concerned. Because there's really no reason that you shouldn't have a digital file with your work history anymore. It shouldn't be a piece of paper self reported with a bunch of bullet points on it, it should, and it can literally be the digital record of your employment. And we've got that kind of data, you know, we've we've got it very much in the manufacturing environment also, very much in the logistics environment, a high performing kicker walks miles during the shift, a lower performing one doesn't, you know, the job's not for everyone, you know, a packer is stationary. And, you know, if a person can't walk, we would assign them as a packer or hire them as a packer not a picker. But but there are these, you know, they're just data characteristics of people who are doing the job really, really well. And that's part of our promise to is, once you're working for a mobile company, and it's not every employer, you know, wants this in the same way or, but we have the option, and we do generally offer the option for an employee to take their entire employment file with them. And those, those, those credentials are all verified, they've all been third third party verified, it's us, in essence, sort of putting our seal on the envelope containing all of the credentials in any of the work history. And certainly we do that for any of our direct employees. And we have a number of employers that that also support the programme.

Ryan Purvis 37:49
Yeah, that that makes a huge amount of sense. I mean, I'm thinking about obviously, people live in the sort of knowledge worker frame where you got your LinkedIn profile is pretty much your main CV, and then you would have the PDF, Word version, etc. But all that stuff is subjective. It's whatever used to whatever you've reported, but you've got the aid, I guess, in order to make it less objective and more objective. And I like that you've simplified it down to some key simple matrix that sort of is relevant to the to the job, you'd know if someone was doing the job, because they would, you know, have these sorts of behaviours. Yeah, I wish it was that simple for so many other roles to be quite honest.

Jason Radisson 38:28
Yeah, totally. I was just going to add, it's sort of the, the predictive version, the it's the mirror images or quiet cleaning, or or, you know, of the retention and engagement problems we've been having. I think broadly in the economy, essentially, our platform is predicting who is going to be an engaged good worker. And we're able to do that super early in the application process. So you know, it's just, it's just super helpful. And, and like I said, it can be reduced it, you know, it's not just attendance, but it's also it's not a it's not a 700 variable model by any means.

Ryan Purvis 39:08
No, no. It doesn't have to be. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about developers and, you know, is a good developer, someone that writes less code, or someone writes more code? If you can't really say either way? And yeah, you know, you could, you could say about quality, as well as how many bugs are returned through the process, you know, to write all those sorts of things, and that's where it gets a bit murky, because it's part of the value chain, but frontline, less of that.

Jason Radisson 39:38
Totally, totally, I think on on, you know, on, on knowledge workers. The corollary would be, it wouldn't be lines of code, it would be it would be sort of application footprint. And you know, what I mean, if you if you looked at the number and impact of the features that developer had developed and pushed and their success out there in the market would probably be about the closest frontline is it's a lot more straightforward. And ultimately, we are very interested in sort of the subjectivity of that working environment, you may have an equally qualified surgical nerves, who really works out in one facility and really doesn't work out and the other one, and it doesn't serve anybody Well, if we're putting people into roles that they don't fit well to. So we do want to remove sort of individual bias, and you know, other things from the process, but, but we do, ultimately, our platform is trying to help people fit and, and succeed. And, you know, and obviously, they have multiple, multiple, chances are, we're going to try to find the right slot. And then even once a person has started with an employer, we want to enable as we were speaking, that internal mobility and really kind of remove frictions on internal mobility so that people can kind of be put into the best possible fit internally. So we have a kind of a much more practical in there, you know, there's a lot of tech out there, you know, you know, can I kind of get a better reading of my internal employees based on their social media data and other things that I would, I would sort of, say, data to sort of feed human processes and our, our sort of approaches, that's all well and good. But if it doesn't result in a better outcome, if it doesn't result in, you know, my nurses being assigned better internally, then it's nice to have, it's nice that HR now has better data. But, you know, our system fundamentally is trying to make all of this very easy to action on.

Ryan Purvis 41:50
Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, the thing that I think about, with what you've been saying is that this is this is plugging so many holes. And I know you mentioned sort of 1000 users, and I guess that depends on not so much pricing, but just to pick abilities to some of the functionality. Yeah, I mean, is your is your model to go into the sort of more knowledge worker stuff, or you're gonna stay in the frontline worker space?

We've got a

Jason Radisson 42:18
lot, we've got a lot of space to cover in the frontline worker space. I think that's, you know, I think that tends to be tends to be our clients, and I can see us we do some knowledge of it, probably five to 10% of the workers on our platform in any country are knowledge workers. But it's more, it's more additionally. And honestly, it's more dealing with kind of remote work topics, right? Because you can have your knowledge workers, sort of log into the system and collaborate on the system. So it's more as a as a tool set for remote workers than specifically solving knowledge worker assignment internally or something like that.

Ryan Purvis 43:05
Right. We would people want to get a get hold of you is the best place to go.

Jason Radisson 43:10
The best place would be our website movo.co m o vo o.co. Also, you can find me on LinkedIn, and Jason Radisson

Ryan Purvis 43:19
Fantastic. Thank you very much.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. Hey, the big news app producer and editor. Thank you, Heather. For your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DWW podcast. The shownotes and transcripts will be available on the website https://www.digitalworkspace.works/. Please also visit our websitehttps://www.digitalworkspace.works/ and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.

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Jason Radisson

Founder and CEO of Shift One

Jason learned startup skills early in life. He was born to a 16-year old single mom, and worked blue-collar jobs from short order cook to HVAC technician to fund school and climb out of poverty. From that inauspicious start, he went on to Harvard, a Fulbright Scholarship, and McKinsey & Company.

Since becoming an entrepreneur, Jason has worked with more than a dozen first tier VCs, firms like Softbank, Accel, DST, Andreessen Horowitz, Monashees, and Sequoia. Together he and his teams have built and scaled multiple tech unicorns, platforms that today provide work and improved living standards to millions of workers, from Bogota to Boston.

In the early days of Uber he was a launcher and Regional General Manager in the western US. From there, Brazil’s 99-Taxis as Chief Operating Officer, where he grew the business 10x and sold it to Didi for $1B. He is also a member of the Rappi-Mafia, where he was an early investor and helped the Co-Founders build their Operations and Growth teams in the initial expansion across Latin America.

His latest venture is Shift One, where he is Founder & CEO, a platform that is helping solve the global shortage of skilled front line workers, with more than 300,000 users from nurses to solar technicians.