Max: Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today I'm delighted to welcome Roy Baladi, who is the new founder of take this, Jobs for humanity. It's a new company with grand plans, and I really love the initial intent of helping humanity, connect them with jobs. I think all of our listeners will connect. So welcome to the show, Roy. 

Roy: Thank you so much. Thank you for having Max. 

Max: Pleasure. So, Roy, we had been connected sometime back when you were the head of the marketplace at smart recruiters, which is an ATS company based in San Francisco, and you're now back in your home country I believe after a long time in the US. 

Roy: I'm in Lebanon now, and I left in 2001 to study computer science and finance, and math at Virginia Tech. And now 20 years later it was my birthday this past weekend and I celebrated my very first birthday in two decades in Lebanon, surrounded by family, which feels really good. I'm not here permanently, but I'm enjoying the fact that the world has turned remote and I can actually explore a lot more than I could before. 

Max: Of Course I hear Beirut is a great city to celebrate birthdays I believe. Very good things. So, maybe without going into the whole career path. But how did you end up in recruitment I should just ask, I suppose it was you, came in on the product side. And you said you were studying math and ended up in recruitments, a little bit by through the accidents of a career. 

Roy: Yeah, well my first job was on Wall Street. I was a derivatives trader on Wall Street, and within a year I realized what the heck am I doing here. That really doesn't resonate with me, I love the quaint side, but it didn't bring purpose. And then financial crashes that were 2006-2010 and the world came upside down and as we came out of this crash, I told myself where do I fit? I'm going to find myself at age 35 with no skills that I'm interested in, that thinking led me to start to ask myself a question, where do I fit? And that got me down the rabbit hole of psychographics, which are able to identify career paths based on natural skills and natural interests, and that was the genesis of my first startup that got me into the recruiting deck on the candidate side called fresh ground, which did exactly that in 2010.

Max: Behavioral assessments for young jobseekers right?

Roy: Pretty much.

Max: Great. And then after that, smart recruiters and now Jobs for humanity. So, tell me more about this new project,

Roy: Jobs for humanity is honestly a cry from the heart. It is not something that I came in and said I'm gonna put together a business plan, this is what I'm going to do. It's a global movement of job creation for overlooked communities, and the communities that we really want to start to work with either blind. There are 285 million blind and visually impaired individuals in the world, 36% are unemployed. And if you go on Google and you look for jobs for the blind, you're not going to find the job word for them, you're not going to find out. Then, other clauses are jobs for the neurodivergent. Most people don't know what that term means and this is where you have all the autistics, Asperger's, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and that's if you add them all together whether diagnosed and there's a lot of people not diagnosed, yet it's about 1 billion people on earth, 70% of the population and is growing very fast. You've got your geniuses there, Einstein, Newton were on the spectrum. A lot of people say that Bill Gates is on the spectrum but that's not confirmed. Sir Richard Branson is on the spectrum, a lot of scientists, yet they're having a hard time. 80% underemployment in that community. Then you've got single moms. A lot of people don't realize that one in seven women above the age of 18 on earth today is a single mother, raising children. In the United States that translates to 14 million single moms raising 16 million children. Their average income is $35,000 a year when the national income is 80,000 a year. So imagine over $3,000 at the US expenses, a month is what you have to raise a child and work, and pay for yourself and one or multiple children.

Max: At least you aren't to pay the beers for that lazy husband. 

Roy: Yeah.

Max: I shouldn't joke. Of course, it's very difficult to be a single mother, but I never thought about it as a disfavored population on the employment side. In fact, as an employer, I've always looked at single moms like that's absolutely a place to go because they have so much great work ethics and purpose, compared to, maybe, I don't want to call out the other groups.

Roy: The unemployment rate among single moms is double the national average apart from the normal average. And the national average in the US is about six point something percent. Global is about 5.6%, single moms are 13%, blind is 36%, neurodivergent is about 80% underemployed, underneath or less.

Max: Did you say 80% for neurodivergent? 

Roy: 80% underemployed yeah. So they could be working but they're working in something that really does not utilize their brain and the barriers are honestly not that hard, that's the big opportunity here, is that companies just don't know how to open up. Like for example, I've interviewed hundreds of recruiters and asked have you ever interviewed a blind person? The answer is almost always no. If you interviewed a blind person, do you even know, you can send them a follow-up email. Will they be able to read it? Do you know what the analogies are?It's not hard and this stuff is not in recruiting school, because the training doesn't need to cover that. But there's such a big margin of the population that really needs it. A lot of people were not blind when they started their lives, they have regular jobs, and they lost their eyesight so they couldn't really do any job, and with the system technologies like screen readers, magnifiers, apps like be my eyes, then you can do pretty much any job, complex big sheets, done, presentations, yes, all of that, be a developer, yes, you can do that as a blind individual. The three other causes are returning citizens from incarceration, we are refugees and black leaders, the black community.

Max: Well, I'm super interested in digging a little bit deeper into the blind problem because it seems to me that, I must admit personally I've interviewed 1000s of people but I don't think I've interviewed a blind person. So I'm part of that statistic. And I've never really thought about it, to be honest. But now I am and I'm wondering, isn't the biggest impediment I mean the fact that I don't know how a blind person would see my job ads. And I don't know exactly what you said if they can open and read my emails. I've met blind people who have corresponded with me through email and I guess they have an app that reads it out loud for them. How do you approach this from your angle as a technologist, looking at the blind community, do they need to have an Alexa for job search?

Roy: That's one way, that's a really cool way. And actually when I worked with smart recruiters just hacking with few developers and we have built an Alexa for...