Welcome to the The Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.
 
Now we'll move on to the panel discussion. So I'd like to invite on stage our wonderful panelists. MeAnn Batallones from 24[7}.ai , Hazel Camacho from Inspiro, Jarrod Kagan from Probe and  Omer Molad from Vervoe. 

Okay. Omar is on. Hi, max. Hi Hazel.

Max: Perhaps, so a quick introduction for looking at the list. Hazel. If you would please introduce yourself to our audience. We've got 168 people on the line listening to you now under 16.

Hazel: Wow. I'm just so excited to be here. Max. Thank you so much.And all of you who actually signed up and decided to be with us in the next few minutes. You are really investing on you know, how you would really move forward with your job, hunting up DVDs and all that stuff. So, yes. So my name is Hazel and I work for inspiro.  It's a BPO company that has over 30,000 customer champions in 35 different locations worldwide. So I take care of a team that takes the lead in bringing at least 20,000 new hires in a year. So that's a pretty, not so boring job. I would say, you know, most of the feeding job, I would say, you know, because it's not this job that they're giving, but it's hope, you know, it's worth any nowadays where things are quite often in short, I would say so.

Max: True. 20,000 lives changed every year. Anybody jazzed up in the morning. Thank you. Hey Jarrod welcome.

Jarrod: Hello. Thanks for having me very excited to be here. Yeah I think this is a really exciting topic to be discussing because I'd say all businesses, people are the most important. And for us as a business we were absolutely passionate about our people and. Every time we recruit people into our business. It's just what we say. It's bringing people into the family. So look as the world changes and there are new and exciting ways to recruit people and bring them into our family. I just think it's a really exciting topic and look I am  sitting here today, obviously, but we just have an amazing team in everything that we do in all the investments that we've made in terms of the recruitment process and automation. And it really goes down to them. We employ close to 14,000 people now across five different countries, obviously Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa, and. Yeah, really excited to be here.

Max: Thanks Jared. For the listeners who don't know about Probe, can you tell us about the Probe group, the Probe family? Cause I think you've had some additions to the family.

Jarrod: Yeah. So Probe we've been around actually for 40 years. We started in 1978. Originally our background was more in the credit and collections outsourcing space, but we've grown significantly, especially over the last five to six years. We've invested heavily into the upstream. We call it customer managed space, but for want of a better word, BPO space that  we provide customer service, customer attention, digital automation as process simplification really invested heavily. We've probably grown up probably in the last two and a half years. We acquired a business called  cellmate's contact center, which was at the same time as us Australia's largest contact center.And then in the Philippines, in the last couple of years, we acquired micro sourcing, which is a managed service operation, providing knowledge process serving and shared services. And another smaller company called Beepo, which employs around 500 people in the Philippines. And most recently. About a month ago, we settled on another business called Stellar, which employed about 6,000 people as well.So taking our total head count to 14,000 globally.

Max: Okay. Well I, for one, knew all of those names from before. So, and I did not know Probe until this year, so. I guess yeah. Different types of brand equity in different geographies. 

Jarrod: World's best kept secret. Great. Thank you, Jarrod and MeAnn.

MeAnn: So good afternoon to everyone. And thanks for joining recruitment hackers. I think it is a good two hours that you'll have with all of my co-panelists. And of course the Talkpush team. 24[7].ai has been in the business for 20 years. It's a BPO and technology company, specifically in the Philippines and just during the last seven months of the pandemic. We've shifted our recruitment to a recruit from home model and quite surprisingly towards our road to recovery. We did not just recover, but I think I mentioned to you that we managed to get, I think, four new accounts, even in the midst of a pandemic, something that was unexpected because we thought that we were just going to continue with how we were doing things, but.I think the pandemic pushed us to really make our process a hundred percent virtual, but at the same time, be opportunistic and really be able to tap into other accounts or other clients who were in need of our service. So the last seven months, as you described it earlier, were amazingly painful. And I think I'd like to agree with that. My team has been working from home for the last eight months, all of us. And it has been. Amazing. Yes, but also amazingly painful because of the changes that we needed to do, how we needed to be adaptive and how we of course needed to still continue with the business. Good. Overall it's still so much reason for us to be grateful.

Max: I'm sure everyone agrees. Omer, did you have a painful year? Tell us about, so a Vervoe. 

Omer: I personally had a great year because we just had a baby. So  I'm feeling good, no complaints, but thanks Max. Thanks for having me. So I'm with a company called Vervoe and what we do is we predict job performance.

We put job candidates in situations that they would normally face on the job and give them an opportunity to showcase their skills by doing tasks. And then, and we do that at scale and we then use machine learning models to automatically grade and rank those candidates. And so we do that for a range of roles and industries from, you know, including call center, customer service and retail, but also for software developers, sales reps, and designers, and pizza cooks and everything you can imagine. And really we are about testing skills and showing you whether someone can do your specific job at your company or not. And, you know, here on this panel, we partner with Talkpush and we work together on clients like Walmart at very high volume. And we also work with Probe and it's group of companies as well. So that's great to be on this panel and look forward to discussing some of these very real issues around, you know, can you automate, and does it need to be human can machines process these sort of things, and you know, very interesting questions to discuss those.Thanks max for inviting me.

Max: Yeah pleasure. And I hope you'll get to meet. So some of the panelists in person when traveling is allowed again, I'm sure. It's going to be one of the first trips you get to take. Look forward to it. One of the first trips I took to the Philippines, I think we have a lot of our audience coming from the Philippines.

So I'm tilting my presentation a little bit towards that audience. Was that in every recruitment office that I visited. There were these small phone booth setups where people would have the verse saunt assessments where you'd have to walk down and sit in front of an actual touchdown phone. I don't know if those things are stil...