Archives: News/Press

By BARBARA ORTUTAY, Associated Press

The original article is posted here.

Ahryun Moon got into programming because she wanted to automate the tedious parts of her job as a financial analyst. She did, becoming an engineer first, then founding GoodTime, a startup that helps businesses schedule job interviews and more, in 2016. Moon spoke with The Associated Press about automation, diversity among startup founders and how the pandemic changed job interviews. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

“For female founders, I think it’s harder. An investor I know told me that while no one talks about it, there is a ‘female founder discount’. If we can fix that, that could really generate a new, larger community of female entrepreneurs.”

Ahryun Moon

Q: How did you start GoodTime?

A: I decided to throw accounting and finance behind me and really pursue engineering. For about three years in San Francisco, I just decided to create a bunch of websites, web apps, mobile apps, and so on. The other founders of GoodTime are engineers, too and we decided to go to a bunch of hackathons. The last one we went to, we won, and the person giving out the awards was a recruiter. She said in passing that she spends most of her day scheduling interviews, rescheduling interviews, tracking people down when they don’t show up, and so on. And I was thinking, “Oh, what if I can automate that for her?” That’s how GoodTime was born.

Q: What kinds of companies use GoodTime, and who would you like to see as your audience as you expand?

A: Brand names like Airbnb, Dropbox, Sparks, Shopify, Snap, Salesforce, and so on. Right now, I would say early adopter technology companies are using GoodTime but we really want to expand to the rest of the market.

Q: Is there anything you took away from how our use of technology changed or accelerated during the pandemic and how it applies to GoodTime?

A: At the beginning, it was kind of chaotic. No one knew what was going on. But quickly, people, the industry, really adapted to the new mode of working, which is remote interviews — which actually, at that time, was a foreign concept.

“How can you hire someone that you’ve never met in person?” was typically how people thought. Then that quickly changed. People adapted and GoodTime was really crucial in that a lot of our customers said “Now that interviews are over Zoom and you are not coming into the office, candidates actually want to do the interviews over multiple days instead of all on one day.” So GoodTime can support breaking that down to multiple dates so that it’s catering to the candidates’ needs.

Q: What can you tell us about your experience starting a company as a woman, since women still make up a small fraction of founders? In 2021, companies founded solely by women garnered just 2.4% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups in the U.S., according to PitchBook.

A: While I was fundraising, I realized there’s a trend that female founders don’t get the same valuation that a male counterpart may get. And it may be because of the way we pitch, the way male founders pitch, and so on. The impact of not getting the valuation that you deserve is that if you raise a small amount of money at a lower valuation, then it’s harder to grow at the same rate as male founders can grow their companies.

You know, female founders help out other female founders. But if you get the valuation that’s lower than what you really deserve and you still have to raise a certain amount of money to grow the company, then you end up actually selling a lot of your shares. So your portion of the company shrinks really dramatically after each fundraising event. What that means is you cannot do a secondary round, meaning you don’t have any money to actually invest back into the female entrepreneurial community, which creates a negative cycle.

So a lot of male founders actually end up becoming investors, angel investors, because they can get a really high valuation. For female founders, I think it’s harder. An investor I know told me that while no one talks about it, there is a female founder discount. If we can fix that, that could really generate a new, larger community of female entrepreneurs.

Q: There’s a lot of talk about automation replacing people’s jobs. Has that been your experience? Do you feel that jobs are in danger because of the products that you build?

A: Recently, I met with one of our users and she said, “Hey, I was hired as a recruiting coordinator, but I was able to do my job in two hours every day instead of taking the full eight hours. Within two months, they actually promoted me into a recruiter position because I got my job done so fast.” So we see people getting promoted because of the time, and what we automate is the portion that humans really shouldn’t be doing.

“We want to replace Google Calendar, Microsoft, Calendly or any other software out there that’s utilized for meeting coordination,”

GoodTime co-founder Ahryun Moon

The original article can be found here.

In her time as a financial analyst for chip company Freescale Semiconductor, the tasks Ahryun Moon hated the most were the mundane things like inventory analysis, which took up most of her time.

In her frustration, she learned to code and automated this process for herself and her entire team. That, Moon said, ended up saving her team a month of time each quarter, and led her to a realization: Automating mundane tasks can make a world of difference in productivity.

Moon is the co-founder of goodtime.io, an enterprise software company that automates workplace processes. GoodTime’s two main products are Hire, its flagship software that schedules interviews with candidates from start to finish, and Meet, which automates scheduling meetings based on people’s jobs and availability. Since the company’s inception in 2016, it’s notched major clients like Zoom, Pinterest and Patreon. Now, she wants GoodTime to challenge calendar giants like Google and Microsoft for users’ attention.

Moon sat down with Protocol to talk about the power of automation, tips on how to make meetings more efficient and the pandemic being an accelerant for the company’s growth.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Tell me about the beginning. What was the inspiration to start GoodTime?

I come from a financial background; I was a financial analyst. At one point, I felt like there was a pattern in the work that I did, and it dawned on me that I could probably automate the work that I was doing. I learned Python and I created a software that was able to automate a really large portion of my work. It was really eye-opening for me. Then everyone in the finance department actually adapted my software. It saved the entire finance team about a month of work per quarter, and we were able to bring financial results to the business division a month earlier every quarter.

After, I decided to really change my career into engineering. I [taught] myself how to code for three years, using free resources online. Then, just kind of for fun, [GoodTime’s] three founders — myself, Jasper [Sone] and Peter [Lee] — we decided to go to a bunch of hackathons together. We thought it would be nice to make some money on the weekends.

The last hackathon we went to was the Launch Hackathon, put on by Jason Calacanis. And we won. We had to go to the Coinbase office to get the [reward]. We had coffee [with a recruiter, who was in charge of giving us the reward] and she said in passing that she spends more than half of her day scheduling and rescheduling interviews and wasting a lot of time doing that instead of actually recruiting. And that kind of dawned on us: What if we can automate that part away?

So at the time, I just told the other two founders to quit their full-time jobs. Let’s just do this and see what happens. That’s how GoodTime was born.

I want to talk a little bit about your flagship product, Hire. How does it work?

Hire automates the entire coordination of the interviews. Whether it be extremely high volume, simple interviews, just one-on-one with the recruiter, or really complex interviews as well, like when a candidate for a final interview has to meet with eight different people from eight different departments. The recruiter or coordinator just has to click a couple of buttons, a candidate would get an email telling them to pick a time that works for them. Then their agenda is in there, interviewer profiles are there. Everything that they need, including Zoom links.

Using interviewer data — such as their training status, their location, their diversity and inclusion status and so on — we can pick the right interviewer to be in each interview, and match them with the right candidate.

I can imagine that your products are really remote-work friendly. How did the pandemic affect your business?

During 2020, things changed overnight. Everything went remote, and that’s when GoodTime became extremely valuable to our customers. Before then the last interview was always in person, because hiring managers didn’t feel comfortable hiring people that they’d never met. So when that went away, you still had thousands of interviews that were supposed to be in person.

Then in 2021, everyone was hiring like absolutely crazy. Automation became really, really important. Corporate America has really learned the lesson that you can’t just throw more people at the problem anymore. People leave all the time, churn is crazy. So digital transformation, automation technologies aren’t just lip service anymore. That’s the tailwind that we utilized in 2021, and we really grew rapidly.

 Ahryun Moon with co-founders Jasper Sone (middle) and Peter Lee at a hackathon in 2014 before they started goodtime.io.Photo: goodtime.io

Things have changed a bit since 2021, though, specifically in these last couple of months. How have things changed for your clients in terms of hiring amid the downturn?

The last couple of months have been filled with uncertainty. It’s not like there’s a clear signal for a recession, there are no clear signals in terms of the job market, because typically a recession is accompanied by job loss and high unemployment rate, which is absolutely not the case. The job market is stronger than ever.

I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in the future. And I think that’s how our customers feel. Which means they’re in a somewhat of a hunkering-down mode. But what we’ve heard from our customers is that they are actually doubling down on GoodTime and automation technology in general. They’ve learned the lesson from 2020 where it felt like the whole demand curve shifted overnight. But then, within about a quarter or two, we saw our usage spiking like crazy. So everyone is telling me that, based on their experience in 2020, within a quarter or two they’re going to have to hire like crazy again.

How has your company managed to snag major clients like Zoom, Box and Pinterest? What’s drawing them in?

I think it’s changed over time. So when companies were hiring like crazy, they really needed to automate the entire process so that they could get the candidates in the door faster. The market still is extremely competitive — there are 1.9 jobs per candidate — meaning those candidates get snatched up from the market really quickly, within just a couple of weeks. So our software with automation can really help them put their candidates through the entire interview process quickly and get to the offer stage very quickly. You want to be the first offer on the table, and the best.Recently another benefit that has actually come up quite a lot from our customers is actually payroll savings. So when they use GoodTime, a recruiting coordinator can actually double the output, meaning you don’t need to hire as many recruiters to do the same job.

So GoodTime’s other product, Meet, automates the process of scheduling meetings. Do you have any tips on making meetings more efficient?

The first pillar is automation, so that you don’t waste time trying to book that meeting that works for everyone. Relationship is the second pillar, meaning you want to have the right people in each and every meeting, people who can actually add value in that meeting.

The last one is insights and data on meetings. Typically, meetings fall into some kind of process, whether it be sales meetings or customer success meetings or job interviews and so on. You want to try to see a pattern across the entire process and see if you can improve the quality of each and every one that happens in that process, which means you need to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of those meetings and continue to improve upon them.

What do you hope the future of GoodTime looks like? What are your goals?

We’d love to see GoodTime getting bigger adoption. We want to replace Google Calendar, Microsoft, Calendly or any other software out there that’s utilized for meeting coordination. We do sit on top of Google Calendar and Microsoft Calendar, but what we want to steal from them is people’s attention.

We would love for GoodTime to be one of the heavy hitters in that market. The number of meetings on everyone’s calendars is growing — everyone is meeting more than ever. So I would love to see the meetings market getting a lot more attention. Calendars are one of the last spaces that haven’t really been transformed yet in the corporate world.

Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.

Courtesy of ERE.net Original article can be found here.

For decades, companies have enjoyed a talent marketplace where employees generally enjoy the stability of their current job and a robust pipeline of talent every year. If your employee left to take a more lucrative position somewhere else, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of candidates eager to take their place. 

But this dynamic has been shifting over time, as more people switched jobs more quickly, were less inclined to take a job they did not want, or were open to nontraditional opportunities like consulting, freelancing, or other gig work. In other words, the Great Resignation.

Covid was not the cause of the Great Resignation; it was the accelerant. It’s now a seller’s market where potential employees are interviewing with more companies, receiving more offers, and making decisions quicker. 

Indeed, GoodTime’s recent 2022 Hiring Insights Report reveals that talent leaders are now struggling to keep up with hiring demands. The normal supply of job candidates has dried up, and those looking to join companies have new motivations. Inducements like bonuses, gift packages, and other one-directional perks no longer work when candidates are more interested in a meaningful job and a greater sense of community.

Unfortunately, many companies are using an antiquated playbook. Specifically, a key reason why employers are struggling with talent acquisition and retention is their approach to diversity.

Deprioritizing Diversity

According to the report’s findings, the biggest talent challenge companies are facing is retaining their employees. Not only that, they expect that to continue as their biggest challenge over the coming year. While it’s true that external forces have made hiring more challenging (by virtue of fewer candidates for more open roles), companies that struggle may have a slight misalignment of priorities. 

Surveyed HR, talent, and recruiting leaders said the quality of hire was their most important metric (24%), while only 13% cited diversity of candidates. While this makes sense on a practical level, failing to prioritize diversity may hasten employee resignations, as well as make it more difficult to hire quality candidates going forward.

Not Meeting New Candidate Demands

While 90% of respondents agreed that conveying company culture to candidates is important, only 53% said they actually did so during the hiring process. That’s a clear misalignment. 

Additionally, only 31% of companies have been making diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) a measurable priority in the past 12 months, while only 38% of companies plan to make it a measurable priority over the next 12 months. Organizations really should do better.

The Way Forward

Remember: Candidates are interviewing companies just as much as the reverse. Talent executives need to tap into the diversity of their workforce and empower employees to make the case for why their company’s culture and approach to DEIB make it a rewarding workplace to join.

Ultimately, companies should prioritize DEIB because it’s the right thing to do. But even beyond that, the data is clear: Potential and existing employees all say DEIB is a huge priority. And many companies that struggle to recruit employees may not realize their lack of communication on this pertinent issue is the cause. Thus, employers need to first address their DEIB initiatives and then communicate what steps they’ve taken. Otherwise, they will continue to lose out on talent.

Technology cannot replace human recruiters, but it can make it easier to connect with candidates.

The original article can be found here.

BY AHRYUN MOON

For years, talent acquisition professionals have warned about impending talent shortages due to shifting job requirements and more people exploring the gig economy and other unconventional ways of working.

The COVID pandemic turned out to be the great accelerator of the shortage, and the Great Resignation ensured its lasting impact. But even before the pandemic, there was a huge imbalance between open positions and available workers, flipping the recruitment model on its head. Now, best practice hiring processes are more important than ever to keep talent happy and fill open positions.

Ultimately, this shift has reinforced how important developing relationships are when looking for employees, which may have fallen to the wayside when companies received thousands of applications per position. Candidates became lines on a resume instead of fully formed humans that companies spent time getting to know.

Recent data demonstrates the power employees have. Both job openings and employees who quit reached record highs in March 2022. Many hired candidates do not show up to work – as many as 20% of those hired at some companies. Reasons cited include “the hiring companies had previously ignored them after interviews or applications.”

It’s clear companies have some work to do in a candidate’s market. A recent study we conducted of talent acquisition leaders in the U.S. found almost half (46%) of those surveyed said cultivating meaningful candidate relationships is their number one priority for the next year.

Candidates, not companies, are now in control of the hiring process. Candidates are now interviewing at four times the rate versus before the pandemic and are more likely to have multiple offers when talking to your company. In addition, we’ve found candidates are making decisions faster (often within 15 days). They won’t wait for a company that does not respect their time or does not try to get to know them.

Candidates pay close attention to how a company treats its employees. A candidate’s first meaningful conversation must happen with a human; otherwise, you send the message that you do not prioritize building real relationships with your employees.

Companies struggle with cultivating positive candidate relationships through Zoom and a slide deck. Considering you are likely hiring new employees without meeting them in person only reinforces the need for technology to aid human interaction, not replace it.

And we know to make time to cultivate these relationships, we need a smart tech stack that improves efficiencies to make it happen. With such uncertainty and the importance of getting recruitment right, more companies are investing in technology to win at recruiting. An estimated $24.6 billion will be spent on HR software by 2026.

That said, technology can also hinder the hiring experience, especially for companies committed to more equality. For example, companies should avoid over-reliance on technology that scans résumés to automatically vet candidates or risk missing under-the-radar workers who lack traditional credentials, but more than make up for it in hard work, passion, or ingenuity. And while advances in natural language processing and machine learning can power chatbots that can interact with prospects, you will send the wrong message to candidates if you force them to interact with a computer instead of a human.

Technology cannot replace humans during employee recruitment, which is about putting in effort to build a relationship.

The good news is that technology can help companies manage many administrative tasks and make it easier to connect with candidates so recruiters and hiring managers can focus on building those all-important relationships.

3 WAYS TECHNOLOGY ENHANCES THE HIRING PROCESS

Automation. Candidates are moving fast; companies need to move faster. By automating things like scheduling and enabling sharing of candidate assessments, companies can more quickly move towards an offer and meet candidates on their timelines. By eliminating any time lag in the hiring process to expedite decisions, you can find, meet with, and make an offer to the best candidates. Companies spend too much time manually scheduling candidate interviews with multiple executives, who have to dig through emails for résumés and then compile notes to share with the hiring manager. By minimizing the set-up work, both candidates and employees interviewing them can focus on establishing a connection and asking the right questions.

Stronger relationships. Technology can help companies connect candidates with interviewers that can best forge strong relationships during the recruitment process. Left to manual routines, recruiters often pick the interviewers they can depend on or know will accept the scheduled time. This leads to overuse and detracts those employees from their actual jobs. It also fails to demonstrate the company’s diversity or potentially misses using the perfect employee to interview a specific candidate based on shared interests or diversity. Automating this process finds the right interviewer based on the unique candidate situation and ensures no one employee is overbooked on interviews.

Insights. Companies are always searching for better insights into their hiring processes. Absent automated technology, companies must ask candidates to provide feedback about the process manually, and someone must compile and analyze the data. By automating surveys that ask candidates how they are feeling at any given point of the interview process, companies can measure their recruitment approach and then take actions to continuously improve the process.

Technology is an aid, not a replacement, for human interaction in your HR or recruitment process, so you must use it wisely. It cannot and should not replicate the human experience you provide candidates that entice them to join your company. What it can do well is demonstrate your commitment to using automation for good, building relationships and harnessing insights for a better employee experience.

---

Ahryun Moon is the cofounder and head of company strategy at GoodTime, which creates a tool to optimize meetings. Her mission is to build automation that frees time people from manual tasks and helps build connection.

GoodTime’s Co-founder and Head of Company Strategy Ahryun Moon met with Recruiting News Network’s Editor in Chief Martin Burns to share her perspective as a leader in the TA space. Ahryun dove into the solutions that GoodTime Hire’s Candidate Relationship Intelligence provides to customers, along with the future of the industry.

The original interview with Recruiting News Network can be found here. Read on for the TLDR.

The Beginning of Ahryun And GoodTime

As an immigrant from Korea, belonging to a small minority of female SaaS founders, and without a large network in Silicon Valley to tap into, Ahryun started GoodTime from ground zero. She recounts having to learn everything the hard way, including earning trust from investors, customers, and employees. But Ahryun took every challenge that came her way in stride.

“I found it exhilarating to face those challenges and to prove myself every time,” she said. “Who wants to have it easy? What is life without challenges?”

GoodTime arose from an encounter that she had with a recruiter. Earlier in her career, Ahryun met a recruiter who complained about the time that it took to manually schedule interviews. Bam—a “eureka” moment. GoodTime was born.

During GoodTime’s early days, Ahryun spent time as a shadow recruiter for several companies—some of which are now GoodTime clients. She gained a deep understanding for the difficult job that recruiters take on. Ahryun knew that GoodTime would be crucial to lightening the workload and creating better connections with candidates.

“While I’ve had a winding path to GoodTime, I absolutely would do it all again,” Ahryun said. “The messages I get from our customers about how they can finally do the jobs they love doing—the rewarding work of meeting with and getting to know candidates. I’m so happy we’re helping companies and candidates find the right situation for each other.”

GoodTime Hire’s Candidate Relationship Intelligence

GoodTime Hire, the company’s flagship product, helps TA teams stay ahead of the competition in today’s fiercely competitive job market. Hire tackles three issues: automating interviews, building better relationships with candidates, and developing deeper insights into the interview process. These issues all intertwine into Hire’s Candidate Relationship Intelligence solution. Hire provides TA teams with the automation, candidate relationships, and insights that they need to reach their goals.

“Our goal is to be the foundation of a technology stack that empowers both companies and candidates, and we encourage others to keep building meaningful solutions that make this process easier.”

— Ahryun Moon, Co-founder and Head of Company Strategy at GoodTime

One of Hire’s newest features is Candidate Pulse. This feature measures candidate sentiment and granular feedback after each interview, making this candidate feedback extremely actionable for talent teams. By gathering feedback and making candidates feel heard, Candidate Pulse further improves recruiter-applicant connections.

Challenges Along the Way

In the face of failure and challenges, GoodTime has turned every stumble into an opportunity to learn. For instance, the team recently released a revamped interviewer training module, equipped with an elevated training management system. Ultimately, they underestimated the success their customers had with the previous version of the module.

Ahryun has found that the biggest challenge in closing deals with clients is inertia. Often, companies convince themselves that the way they currently run their recruitment process is either the right way or good enough.

“But I can point to our clients, some of the most innovative companies in the world, and say they understand how powerful it is to automate the interview process and maximize hiring efficiency to compete in this insanely hyper-competitive job market,” she said.

The Future of the Recruiting Industry

Ahryun sees clear changes coming to the industry. Employees no longer want to stick around at jobs that they don’t like. They’re also not joining new companies unless they feel a strong fit.

She added that companies must act fast to refine their recruitment process and avoid getting overpowered by the competition.

“Companies need to demonstrate immediately in their recruitment process their culture, the relationships they develop, and how they use technology to enhance their employees’ jobs, not replace them,” Ahryun said.

GoodTime’s tech solution elevates both companies and candidates in today’s tumultuous job market.

What’s Next for GoodTime

Most recently, GoodTime released their 2022 Hiring Report, jam-packed with the latest HR trends. GoodTime surveyed 560 U.S. talent leaders to uncover the most pressing challenges facing their teams, and what should be done to attract and retain top talent. The report can be downloaded here.

Read the original article here.

Dive Brief:

• Companies fell short of their hiring plans in 2021, with 50% of human resources (HR) pros surveyed saying their hiring goals weren’t met last year, according to a survey by GoodTime.
• The hiring process has also lengthened. Sixty percent of HR pros surveyed said time-to-hire has increased in the past 12 months. Hiring managers are struggling to keep up with backfill hires amid the Great Resignation, the survey noted.
• Retention remains a top challenge for HR pros, but especially so for those with remote work, the survey said. Notably, while 34% of mostly or fully remote companies surveyed said they struggled with a lack of qualified candidates, only 22% of fully or mostly in-office companies said the same, pointing to the downsides of a widened talent pool, GoodTime said.

Dive Insight:

Hiring woes have followed employers throughout 2022. At the beginning of the year, local chamber of commerce leaders reported that businesses in their respective regions were struggling to find new workers and that a lack of workers was the biggest factor affecting their local economies.

GoodTime’s report notes the difference between in-office hiring and remote hiring, which may reflect ongoing tensions regarding the choice between moving to a hybrid or fully remote structure versus retaining a mostly in-office workforce. Employers may underestimate the power of flexibility as a company benefit; an August 2021 PwC survey showed that while employees saw flexible work scheduling as a top incentive of their jobs, employers assumed “company purpose and values” were a top incentive.

Hiring has gotten harder over the course of the pandemic, lengthening already tough time-to-hire. But virtual hiring stepped up to bridge the gap, according to employers surveyed by Indeed, especially at the pandemic’s height. Respondents to the survey said they would likely retain virtual hiring processes in the future, as they tend to shorten time-to-hire and improve candidate experience.

To combat troubles with hiring, experts recommend that employers broaden their search nets in a variety of ways. One strategy is to drop college degree requirements from certain job listings altogether, especially as alternative means to gaining work experience emerge.