In this episode of Job­Board­Geek, we talk to Ric Bur­ley of Bintl­Hire. Ric has flipped the nor­mal job board mod­el by hav­ing employ­ers pay the can­di­date to see their resume. On the oth­er hand, employ­ers post jobs for free.  Jeff Dick­ey-Chasins of Job­Board­Doc­tor and Steven Roth­berg of Col­lege Recruiter dis­cov­er how Ric – with a back­ground in health care man­age­ment – end­ed up build­ing an uncon­ven­tion­al job board that tar­gets start-ups and small busi­ness­es. Jeff and Steven also dis­cuss the recent announce­ment that 70 Mil­lion Jobs is shut­ting down – and why the announce­ment comes as a sur­prise.

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Tran­script:

0:00:32.8 JD: Hel­lo every­one, and wel­come to Job Board Geek. It’s the pod­cast about the busi­ness of con­nect­ing can­di­dates and employ­ers. I’m Jeff Dick­ey-Chasins. I am the Job Board Doc­tor and your host. And with me is the mind-bog­gling Steven Roth­berg of Col­lege Recruiter. He’s the co-host. Hey, Steven, how you doing?

0:00:51.2 Steven Roth­berg: Hey, I’m good, Jeff. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing you in a week. It’s been a while. But did you and your wife get your pass­ports updat­ed? Because you’re gonna be dri­ving from Iowa to Min­neso­ta, and I’m pret­ty sure that we check every­body at the bor­der.

0:01:05.9 JD: Yeah, actu­al­ly the only thing we real­ly have to do is get rid of the corn just before we cross the bor­der, and then pick up, I don’t know what you guys have up there, cheese or…

0:01:16.3 SR: Oh no, that’s Wis­con­sin.

0:01:18.2 JD: Well, it’s one of those states up north, so.

0:01:21.0 SR: Yeah. No, we have the… And this is true, we’re the World Head­quar­ters for Spam, the com­pa­ny. Hormel is here, and you pass pret­ty close to the Spam… I hes­i­tate to call it a pro­duc­tion facil­i­ty. It’s more of… Well, let’s not get into how Spam is made.

0:01:40.5 JD: It’s a con­struc­tion facil­i­ty, is what it is. But any­way, so we’re gonna have Ric Bur­ley on here in a lit­tle bit. He runs a site called Bintl Hire. It’s real­ly inter­est­ing, at least from the time that I’ve looked at it. But before we get start­ed with that, I want­ed to chat a lit­tle bit with you, Steven. You had actu­al­ly sent me an arti­cle from Richard Bron­son announc­ing that he’s shut­ting down 70 Mil­lion Jobs. And if you’re not famil­iar with the site, he start­ed this back in 2016, and it’s aimed at peo­ple that have a crim­i­nal record and try­ing to rein­te­grate them back into the work­force, which was a great idea. I remem­ber chat­ting with him about it a bit when he was launch­ing it. He worked with Y Com­bi­na­tor, had a bunch of investors putting mon­ey into it, appar­ent­ly was doing quite well, then the pan­dem­ic hit.

0:02:27.1 JD: As you know, we’ve talked to many job board oper­a­tors that saw the bot­tom fall out when the pan­dem­ic hit. The same thing hap­pened to him. For him, it got a lit­tle bit worse. He actu­al­ly end­ed up hav­ing to lay off all his employ­ees. He was putting mon­ey into the busi­ness from his own per­son­al account, man­aged to scrape through, and then the busi­ness start­ed com­ing back. But appar­ent­ly… And part of this is the fact that his busi­ness is not just a job board, but sort of a staffing firm as well. He ran into a sit­u­a­tion where the peo­ple that he was putting into posi­tions and send­ing out would not stay in their job or they might not even show up for the jobs. And this is some­thing I’m a lit­tle bit fuzzy on at this point when I look at this. It got in to the point to where he felt like he had to shut down the com­pa­ny. And the thing that’s fuzzy about it to me is that, if this was the case, I feel like all the staffing groups out there would be in a lot of pain right now. And some of them would have already gone out of busi­ness, same thing true for recruiters, same thing for job boards. And yet I’ve seen no evi­dence of that. So it’s sad that he’s shut­ting it down, but the rea­son just seemed kind of fun­ny to me. I don’t know, what do you think, Steven?

0:03:33.9 SR: Well, this is one of the rea­sons I’m real­ly grate­ful to have you as a co-host, because that was not an angle that I had real­ly con­sid­ered. We bring our strengths and weak­ness­es to this pod­cast, I enjoy your wis­dom and you enjoy my beau­ty, so we’ll call that even. One of our devel­op­ers sent me the link yes­ter­day, and then I sent it on to you and to a cou­ple of oth­er peo­ple. The ghost­ing piece of it, with can­di­dates not show­ing up for inter­views, first day on the job. Ini­tial­ly, my thought was, “Well, that kind of makes sense in this labor mar­ket.” And then when you and I were talk­ing about it, it’s like, “Well, that applies to just about every staffing com­pa­ny.” That would apply to Uber, that would apply to any kind of a mar­ket­place where you’re gonna have peo­ple search­ing for jobs and hope­ful­ly show­ing up. So is there some­thing sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent about 70 Mil­lion Jobs than every oth­er staffing com­pa­ny and every oth­er job board and every oth­er mar­ket­place?

0:04:31.1 SR: One I think you hit on, they do focus on peo­ple who have recent­ly been incar­cer­at­ed. Is that pop­u­la­tion that dif­fer­ent? I think it is dif­fer­ent than the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion, but I don’t think it’s sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent from what a lot of mar­ket­places have in with a lot of staffing com­pa­nies. If you’re a staffing com­pa­ny spe­cial­iz­ing in ware­house work, man­u­al labor, etcetera, I think you’re going to have a fair num­ber of peo­ple who you’re work­ing with who you’re help­ing to enter the work­force who were incar­cer­at­ed. But we’re not hear­ing any­thing from those orga­ni­za­tions about enough peo­ple not show­ing up that they’re gonna go out of busi­ness. Yeah, I won­der whether this is an exam­ple of an orga­ni­za­tion that ran out of invest­ment mon­ey, and that the pan­dem­ic and the after effect was just enough to push them over, and that their investors just cut off the flow of cash. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see as this comes for­ward.

0:05:34.6 JD: Yeah, it was an inter­est­ing sto­ry. And just one oth­er point I wan­na make is, in my expe­ri­ence in work­ing with sites that focus on this aspect of the work­force, peo­ple with crim­i­nal record, have been incar­cer­at­ed, it’s actu­al­ly the oppo­site. One of the points that they sell to employ­ers is that these peo­ple very, very much want to be employed, and tend to be very loy­al to the com­pa­nies that employ them, and don’t tend to ghost the employ­ers, don’t tend to… They tend to have a longer tenure, etcetera, etcetera. So the whole thing just, it just seems a lit­tle bit odd, but I’m sure we’ll find out more about it.

0:06:12.1 SR: And real­ly dis­ap­point­ing and frus­trat­ing, because boy, is there a need for this kind of a source. We throw so many great peo­ple into prison in this coun­try, and it’s, just it’s rep­re­hen­si­ble.

0:06:24.2 JD: Switch­ing tone entire­ly. We’re for­tu­nate today to have Ric Bur­ley of Bintl Hire on Job Board Geek. And Ric, wel­come to the pod­cast.

0:06:35.6 Ric Bur­ley: Hey, thanks guys. Thanks for hav­ing me.

0:06:37.2 JD: Yeah, yeah. Well, I appre­ci­ate it. I remem­ber the first time that I learned about Bintl Hire and I’d reached out to you. And I was sort of pok­ing through the site and it real­ly made me curi­ous about the whole thing. And then as I was prep­ping for the show today, I start­ed look­ing at your back­ground on LinkedIn, and that made me more curi­ous. And I say that because before Bintl Hire, you were work­ing for the State Depart­ment for a num­ber of years. So any­way, why don’t you tell me a lit­tle bit about your back­ground, how you got into recruit­ing, how you came up with the idea for Bintl Hire, and who is it tar­get­ed at?

0:07:11.1 RB: Oh, for sure. I just wan­na say again, I’m real­ly excit­ed to be here with you guys. This is awe­some to meet you, Doc and Steven. So I just want­ed to thank you guys upfront for hav­ing me join this pod­cast and the Job Board Geek. This is real­ly cool for me. I’m kind of a geek myself with job boards and learn­ing about the recruit­ment process as I have over the last few years. And so with Bintl Hire, my back­ground is actu­al­ly in health­care man­age­ment, but I start­ed with a non-prof­it back home in South Flori­da as their HR spe­cial­ist. So it was a com­mu­ni­ty non-prof­it that dealt with health­care, but they need­ed some­body to help recruit and cre­den­tial the physi­cians that they were bring­ing in. And that was my first start in recruit­ment and kind of learn­ing the ins and outs of job boards. We used Mon­ster and Career Builder at the time, this was around 2008. And so 2009, I moved up to DC and con­tin­ued in health­care, but more along the gov­ern­ment con­tract­ing route. And I worked close­ly with recruiters with that orga­ni­za­tion as well, doing recruit­ment and fill­ing jobs for these gov­ern­ment posi­tions. It was­n’t until about 2014 that my wife got a call from the State Depart­ment to move over­seas.

0:08:36.2 RB: So real­ly, the tran­si­tion, this jour­ney that my career has been on is real­ly due in part to her. Because when she got the call to go to South­east Asia, I went along, dropped pret­ty much every­thing and almost start­ed fresh as a con­trac­tor with the State Depart­ment. And that’s not always guar­an­teed when you trav­el along as a spouse, so I had to apply and kind of learn a whole new field. I became a social coor­di­na­tor, social media coor­di­na­tor for the State Depart­ment and the US Embassy in Cam­bo­dia. So I was in that role for about two and a half years. And dur­ing that time, I would go back home on R&R and vis­it fam­i­ly. And peo­ple were still strug­gling even after the finan­cial cri­sis. They were still look­ing for work and still look­ing for new oppor­tu­ni­ties. And so I got a lot of ques­tions when I went back to Flori­da about what I’ve been doing, how I end­ed up work­ing over­seas. And so I built a job board from all the help that I thought my friends and peo­ple back home need­ed. That’s real­ly where Bintl Hire start­ed. It start­ed as a gener­ic job board. And the rea­son that I start­ed it while I was over­seas was because I was able to con­nect with the Amer­i­can busi­ness­es that were a part of The Amer­i­can Cham­ber of Com­merce over­seas.

0:10:06.1 RB: And so there’s a chap­ter of the Cham­ber in pret­ty much every coun­try. It’s where Amer­i­can com­pa­nies kind of get indoc­tri­nat­ed into the coun­try that they’re try­ing to do busi­ness in. And so I had con­nec­tions and I had some friends that worked for the Cham­ber. I noticed that they did­n’t have a job board, and they often need­ed more skilled work­ers. So that in turn, it put me into this posi­tion of try­ing to con­nect peo­ple in the states with these orga­ni­za­tions and com­pa­nies over­seas. And so that’s where a Bintl Hire began. It did­n’t quite work out that way though, as things tend to go. It did­n’t real­ly work out. They had their own bub­bles that each Cham­ber was already in, and they had their sources. And peo­ple kin­da get stuck in the way that they’ve always done things. And as we know, we hear that a lot nowa­days, like that’s the way we’ve always done it. And that’s what I encoun­tered when I tried to bring this job board idea to the Cham­ber. And they were pret­ty much iso­lat­ed in Cam­bo­dia. So in every Cham­ber, in each coun­try, they don’t real­ly talk with oth­er cham­bers, which I thought would be some­thing that I could change with this job board and kind of build some­thing for peo­ple to get involved in and bring more Amer­i­cans over­seas and find more oppor­tu­ni­ties that way. I thought it would be big.

0:11:31.6 RB: But it did­n’t work out. And as I did research, as it was start­ing to kin­da sput­ter and not get to where I thought it should, I did research and real­ized that all the val­ue that job boards hold come from these job seek­ers. And as we were men­tion­ing, as you guys were talk­ing before about the great peo­ple who come out of the prison sys­tem or who’ve been in jail, who have been incar­cer­at­ed and come out, val­ue is the same across the board for every­body. Every­one has val­ue. Some of us are more skilled and some of us know cer­tain field bet­ter than oth­ers, but we all have val­ue. And that comes through on a resume. Whether it’s well-writ­ten or not, a resume has val­ue. And so I want­ed to try and build some­thing that gave back to those job seek­ers dur­ing the job search process. Because there was a lot of pain in not get­ting a job. You feel kind of worth less in the process. And so that’s what start­ed Bintl Hire on the tra­jec­to­ry that it’s on now where we are able to pay job seek­ers when they resume with you. The way that Bintl Hire works for employ­ers, is that employ­ers get to post all their jobs for free. In doing so, they name their price for the resumes that come from the can­di­dates that they choose. So that’s real­ly where I thought I could turn this job board into some­thing new and some­thing impact­ful, not only for the job seek­ers, but for employ­ees as well.

0:12:56.6 JD: So just a quick fol­low-up on that, employ­ers are nam­ing a price. One of the things I’ve found that job boards that are try­ing to do some­thing real­ly dif­fer­ent like you are run into is, like you said, HR peo­ple are, inher­ent­ly, seem to be very con­ser­v­a­tive, “This is the way I’ve always done it, I only got 10 min­utes to do this, and I’ve got­ta deal with all this oth­er stuff.” So how do you find employ­ers that are will­ing to actu­al­ly do the whole process dif­fer­ent­ly, where they’re actu­al­ly nam­ing a price to look at resumes?

0:13:24.7 RB: Right, that’s a great ques­tion. We’re in the ear­ly stages of get­ting this rolling, but I reach out to peo­ple like Net­work, and there’s a lot of inter­est sur­round­ing it. Where I think the most inter­est, where it can do the most good, is for these employ­ers that post jobs local­ly. So when they have a region that they oper­ate in, reach­ing the best can­di­dates can be a chal­lenge. Because on a nation­al stage, a lot of these small busi­ness­es kin­da get drowned out. And that’s when they turn to job boards to kin­da get a broad­er reach. And there are so many oppor­tu­ni­ties out right now that I think it’s hard for them to get a foothold. So I’ve heard from a lot of local orga­ni­za­tions, I’ve con­nect­ed with local Cham­bers here. So that’s kind of where we’re head­ed. There are a lot of inde­pen­dent recruit­ment firms that I’ve spo­ken to as well that have post­ed jobs. We’ve had jobs in the past, and it’s some­thing that I’m gonna go back to the well for, but I real­ly wan­na focus on pro­vid­ing local tal­ent to these small busi­ness­es.

0:14:32.9 SR: As peo­ple who’ve lis­tened to this pod­cast for a long time know, this pod­cast is an effort by Jeff and me to help our lis­ten­ers explore dif­fer­ent ways of doing busi­ness, and dif­fer­ent rev­enue mod­els in par­tic­u­lar. Yours is def­i­nite­ly an out­lier. And so it’s so fan­tas­tic when we booked you, and now we’re here talk­ing about it. So from a nuts-and-bolts stand­point, Ric, maybe walk us through. You have a sounds like most­ly small busi­ness­es, star­tups that are gonna be the employ­ers who are post­ing a job. With­out nam­ing names, walk us through like a typ­i­cal trans­ac­tion, what do they pay? And fol­low the mon­ey. You don’t need to share with us the per­cent­age that you keep. If you’re will­ing to, awe­some. But it’s pret­ty clear that you’re gonna take some of that mon­ey that the employ­ers are pay­ing and pass along some to the can­di­dates. So let’s fol­low the mon­ey. How does that work?

0:15:31.0 RB: When I cre­at­ed Bintl Hire, I pur­pose­ly made it dif­fer­ent. I want­ed to be unique. And that was in part because when­ev­er I cre­ate some­thing, espe­cial­ly with busi­ness, I look at the com­peti­tors. And the com­peti­tors out there already have such a huge mar­ket­share, when you look at the Indeeds and LinkedIns. And even the small­er job boards, when I first start­ed out, they’re already ahead of me hav­ing jobs post­ed and can­di­dates avail­able. So I had to be unique. And how I dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed myself was cre­at­ing this process that’s total­ly dif­fer­ent. And so what I did to kind of sweet­en the deal for not only job seek­ers but also employ­ers is that, I allow employ­ers to name their price for resumes, but they start with a bud­get for resumes. So the bud­get can be as low as $10, so they add their bud­get to the job board and go from there. They can name their price for each can­di­date resume start­ing from $1 to send that to the job seek­er. I take an admin fee as Bintl Hire. There’s an admin fee when you add your bud­get. It’s about 15% of your bud­get, so it’s kind of like a ser­vice fee. In turn, that’s real­ly where I take in some rev­enue for the job board, to keep it run­ning and take care of oper­a­tional costs.

0:16:55.7 RB: We add a tax to the resume bud­get that employ­ers include. So from that bud­get, they get to pay the job seek­ers for their resume and an includ­ed response. So there’s respons­es guar­an­tee from the can­di­date, and they’re informed of this as they reg­is­ter from their end. Real­ly, Bintl Hire is designed to do exact­ly what job boards set out to do in the first place, which is to con­nect employ­ers and job seek­ers. And so it real­ly puts them in con­trol of the process. The employ­ers com­pen­sate the job seek­ers and the job seek­ers feel empow­ered to pro­vide their resume and a response to the offer. And so that was what I envi­sioned job search­ing should look like, so I cre­at­ed it. And that’s what we have now. It does­n’t get too much more com­pli­cat­ed than that. It’s pret­ty straight for­ward. You add a bud­get, you start post­ing as many jobs as you want. And you can deter­mine how much you give to the job seek­er. And I do get ques­tions from time to time about why not… When would it ever be nec­es­sary to pay the job seek­er more than $1? Well, it may be a high-lev­el exec­u­tive role that you’re try­ing to fill, so maybe $1 isn’t con­vinc­ing enough to some­body who’s at that lev­el. Maybe it’s a real­ly hard role to fill.

0:18:16.8 RB: So in that case, you might wan­na reward the job seek­er a lit­tle bit more, put a lit­tle bit more incen­tive behind it for their resume and for their time. Because the job seek­er does­n’t have to respond. And in this case, we have a sys­tem where we’ll refund you if the job seek­er does­n’t respond, if there’s any dis­crep­an­cies in the resume or any­thing like that. All of that is tak­en into account. So we want­ed to be use­ful not only for the job seek­ers, but for the employ­ers too. So I’ve tried to cov­er all the bases in that so that Bintl Hire real­ly does that.

0:18:57.6 SR: So the employ­er posts the job, the can­di­date sees the job, the can­di­date applies to the job. And then the employ­er gets the resume, and that’s when they pay for that. And then that pay­ment, 85% goes to the can­di­date, you keep the 15% as a ser­vice fee.

0:19:15.1 RB: So we take a 15% ser­vice fee. It’s an addi­tion­al ser­vice fee added to the bud­get. So the can­di­date gets the entire amount that the employ­er sends to them. So when they name their price, if they decide $2 is a good price for the resume and the guar­an­teed response, that’s what the job seek­er receives. We’re tak­ing a ser­vice fee from the employ­er. There’s an addi­tion­al fee on top of the bud­get that they have for their resume, it’s about 15%.

0:19:49.6 JD: I had one last ques­tion for you, Ric, that I want­ed to sort of throw out there. And this is main­ly tak­en from me look­ing at the web­site, because I always… I’m very good at being a dumb can­di­date. I go to a job board and I look at it like I’ve nev­er seen any­thing like that before, and I have to fig­ure out exact­ly what you’re try­ing to talk about. So one of the things that you men­tioned a num­ber of places on the site is that the job seek­er has… And actu­al­ly, job seek­er has an NFT as opposed to tra­di­tion­al resume. In prac­ti­cal terms, can you talk to me about the dif­fer­ence between a tra­di­tion­al resume ver­sus the job seek­er NFT, or is it just pure­ly a tech­ni­cal issue?

0:20:28.6 RB: So what I explained to you guys just a moment ago was how the mon­ey trans­acts through the process. Job seek­ers, when they reg­is­ter on the site, when they reg­is­ter for Bintl Hire, they actu­al­ly cre­ate a pro­file that pro­vides their skills and their accom­plish­ments, kind of like a sum­ma­ry of a resume, but it does­n’t pro­vide any of their con­tact infor­ma­tion or their iden­ti­ty. So that is with­held until the employ­er pays them for their full resume, which they receive. So what I incor­po­rat­ed that at one point with Bintl Hire was NFTs and that blockchain tech­nol­o­gy that had real­ly, it seemed like it was going to real­ly become of val­ue if we could find some­where to use it in an every­day use case. Because right now NFTs are pri­mar­i­ly used for the art­work and things that we see on a des­ig­nat­ed mar­ket­place. And so, real­ly what it does is it assigns a receipt to any­thing dig­i­tal, so that you can say, “I own this,” and here’s the receipt that says, “Wher­ev­er you find this online, I’m the own­er of it.” And that’s basi­cal­ly what blockchain tech­nol­o­gy did and what NFTs are, a non-fun­gi­ble token. That receipt can only be cre­at­ed once, and there’s no oth­er like it.

0:21:53.5 RB: So on the back­end, the tech­ni­cal side of this, is that the resume includ­ed in NFT. It includ­ed that num­ber. My goal for that was to make resumes even more unique and add more val­ue for the job seek­er. Since rolling out job secret NFTs, I’ve actu­al­ly retract­ed it, and we no longer use NFTs on the job board. Because NFTs and the nature of blockchain being that it’s decen­tral­ized, there was too much, too much noise about the unsta­ble side of blockchain and some of the mis­us­es of it, so that’s what peo­ple heard first. And when I intro­duced a resume NFT, it added anoth­er lay­er to the already unique process. And real­ly, Bintl Hire actu­al­ly does, it still pays the job seek­er, it still pro­vides a unique resource for employ­ers with­out NFTs. And I thought it would be a draw in the begin­ning, but I’ve since retract­ed and we no longer use NFTs because not only did we not nec­es­sar­i­ly need them, the way that it had to be explained and sep­a­rat­ed from the oth­er type of NFT was just a lit­tle too much to… It became a hur­dle. So I removed it, it’s in the back­ground for now. We don’t use NFTs, but if it would ever come up again, we could prob­a­bly tran­si­tion back to that.

0:23:18.2 JD: Yeah, it’s a good rule to go by when you’re doing any kind of busi­ness, but par­tic­u­lar­ly with job boards. Well, well, lis­ten, Ric, it’s been great hav­ing you on the show, and a very inter­est­ing project. I hope that you have a lot of suc­cess with it. I know it’s ear­ly days at this point, but I expect we can come back in a few years and you can tell us how it’s grown and where it’s gone in all that time. So any­way, if peo­ple wan­na get to touch with you and chat with you about Bintl Hire or any­thing else, how do they do that?

0:23:47.7 RB: Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn, Ric, R‑I-C, Bur­ley. And I’m also avail­able through Bintl Hire. You can check out the job board there. You can get in con­tact with us at bintlhire@bintlhire.com. But yeah, LinkedIn is a direct route to get in con­tact with me if any­one has any ques­tions.

0:24:08.9 JD: Well, thanks again for com­ing on the show, I appre­ci­ate it. And Steven, if peo­ple wan­na get in touch with you, how do they do that?

0:24:16.8 SR: They can email me at steven, S‑T-E-V-E‑N @collegerecruiter.com. And Ric, I wan­na thank you and your wife for all the ser­vice that you’ve pro­vid­ed through the US Depart­ment of State. It’s real­ly impor­tant work. And thank you for paving this new path in the job board indus­try.

0:24:33.6 RB: Absolute­ly. Thank you guys for hav­ing me on.

0:24:35.5 JD: Yeah, excel­lent. Yeah, three job boards geeks. So that’s it for today’s… I got­ta call it the way it is. That’s it for today’s episode of Job Board Geek. I’m Jeff Dick­ey-Chasins, the Job Board Doc­tor. I wan­na encour­age you to sub­scribe to the pod­cast via Spo­ti­fy, Google, Apple, what­ev­er you like. And remem­ber that if you like the pod­cast, give me a thumbs up. If you don’t like the pod­cast, don’t tell any­one or give Steven a thumbs down. We will be com­ing back to you next time around. We are the only pod­cast that focus­es on the busi­ness that con­nect can­di­dates and employ­ers. That’s all for now, and I’ll see you again next time. Thanks.

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