Staffing Industry Spotlight: Nicole Clarke, Co-Founder of Shazamme

Francis Larson:

First off, who is Nicole Clarke, and what do you do?

Nicole Clarke:

I am a serial entrepreneur, I've been in the recruitment industry for many, many years. I started out really in sales, and I dabbled in journalism, and where my passion really was is helping business owners be more successful using technology. Where I am today in technology for recruitment came out of a passion for really helping people and wanting them to be using the best technology that they possibly can be. I've got one daughter and a dog, and I live in Melbourne, Australia. I do a lot of travel around the world, and very excited to be talking to you right now.

Francis Larson:

Great. Tell us about Shazamme. What is Shazamme and how did you come to found the company?

Nicole Clarke:

For 15 years I have been working in recruitment website technology, starting out in commercial job boards. When the global financial crisis hit some time ago, that wasn't a viable option, so that technology was then used to be the first fully mobile responsive recruitment website technology. Since then, I've been in the industry. When Shazamme came about, which was about three years ago now, it was out of desperation for more modern technology. We've got things on the market like Canva and lots of different platforms that make marketing easy for people, we thought, well, why are recruitment websites never evolved with modern technology that's drag and drop, that needs no coding, that gives people the freedom to do everything that they want to do? So we started with a blank sheet of paper really to solve all the issues that we'd seen across the world working with enterprise staffing and recruitment agencies all the way through to startups, and there were all very similar problems that needed fixing.

So that's what we set out to do, and that was three years ago. We looked at so many different technology platforms to settle on what we did, which is called no-code. This is really revolutionizing the way people use marketing in recruitment and use their website as a tool to be more successful online. When we started Shazamme, we wanted to solve customer service and success as well.

How can we help our clients really power through and move with the times, not be stuck in old archaic technology? And all the underpinning things that are required in staffing, as you'd be aware, Francis, it's very complex. It's not an easy industry to get right, there are lots of people out there doing things very sort of half-hocked and not very well as far as integrations are concerned. And that's something that we've really, really wanted to make a massive change. We've got so many integrations now with our platform. And we're solving problems for people not only with their websites, but also the way that the data talks from websites to your ATSs or your multi-posters. And also all the data, and the analytics, and the tracking to truly understand, where am I spending my money, and am I getting a return on that? It's so important.

Francis Larson:

Tell us about the name Shazamme. When I talked to your co-founder, Rick, I got the pronunciation wrong. I would love to know how you met Rick in a second. But first, the name Shazamme: What does that mean, and how did you come up with that name?

Nicole Clarke:

Good question. So we really wanted something like boom, bam, ta-da, "We could build recruitment websites in days." It's quick, and it's enterprise-grade, and we're like, "What do we call it?" And so there was a show called Shazam, and we realized we couldn't have that, because it was also the music app, and there was a character called that. So we came across... And do you know what? We were just bantering around names, and Shazamme came about, and off we went and we chose that, and it was about three to six months into the launch of Shazamme, and I'd been doing all the marketing, and we got a letter from Apple and DC Comics saying, "You need to stop using that name."

And I nearly had a heart attack, because I started building this cool brand and... Anyway, luckily we didn't have to pay anything for lawyers. Rick spoke to the lawyers of Apple and DC, and we came to an agreement that rather than highlighting the Shazam and the me part of the logo, we would highlight Shazamme. And they were happy to move forwards with that, so we were very lucky, but it was a horrible time.

Francis Larson:

Wow. What a creative solution to the problem. "Hey, let's just change the intonation."

Nicole Clarke:

Yeah, we floated a few ideas with them, because we really didn't want to change the name. Because it is so memorable, and there were a lot of people who didn't like the name initially. They're like, "Oh, no one's going to take that brand seriously." But now with 600 clients across the world and some of the world's largest using us, it's definitely a name that people remember and it stands out. And not many people noticed that we changed the highlighting of the different letters. But yes, we mentioned that to them.

Francis Larson:

Wow. Yeah, that's so funny. I remember I had a meeting with Rick for the first time. And I said, "Shazam." And he said, "No, no, no, it is definitely Shazamme."

Moving on. Do you think one of the reasons that Shazamme is such a powerful model is because you're a subscription, and that you're constantly improving? As opposed to the traditional method of spending 20 grand to make a website once?

Nicole Clarke:

Oh my gosh, yes. And I see it all the time, and we work with people that have just spent $20,000 to $150,000 building a website on another platform. And then they come to us saying, "Oh, we need to fix the jobs piece." And we're like, "There is so much more to it than..." The jobs are one of the most important parts of a recruitment website, and most definitely, that should never be an afterthought, which it normally is. When people get designers to build websites on WordPress or different platforms, they just plug in the jobs, and they believe that that's going to solve the problem. But by doing that, you're missing out on the most important piece. And a good example of what you mentioned, Francis, is yes, SaaS is so important. We are updating our platform day in and day out, not only with our roadmap of great features and functionality but also with clients that go, "Oh my gosh, we've always wanted to do this; could you do it?"

And we're like, "Yeah, we can. That's really quick to do." So we're building out pieces within our platform, and because it's a no-code model, we write the code once, and then all of our clients benefit from getting those updates across the world, and it makes a big difference. So one of the big ones, obviously, when Google for Jobs came out, we wanted to make sure all our clients' jobs were appearing on Google, because that's a really important thing to do. We also want to make sure that our clients' jobs appear on the job board aggregators that are free, and the free LinkedIn job board that a lot of people don't even know exists. But also when we talk about job ads, they're really the heart of any... Or they should be, the heart of any recruitment website or staffing website that's set up correctly.

Those jobs should be being pushed onto blog articles, they should be being pushed to the recruiter profile pages. They should be being pushed through to industry sector pages within a website. There's a real strategy to building a highly successful brand online, and one is SEO. So we made a change so that our clients can now customize... And this is an example of SaaS. They can customize the job URL to pull through the keywords they want to be found for, as well as the meta titles and the meta descriptions within the job ads themselves. A really powerful change for maximizing the value. And so many people are wasting so much money in this space on SEO, and they don't even have a foundation in place to make it work properly in the first place. So SaaS, we keep everyone ahead of the curve. You don't just build it, and leave it, and then it starts dying a slow death, it's constantly updated.

Francis Larson:

Yeah, that's such a good point about the SEO. Let's say somebody works with a traditional designer, they spend 20 grand, 30 grand, they build a website, like you said. Then they have to think about the job board, then they have to hire someone else to do SEO, and they're not going to have the right sort of mentality, it's not going to be appropriate for necessarily job boards and recruitment websites. So it makes sense that this is like a purpose-built thing. And candidates are interacting with the website, they're applying for jobs. It's not just a general purposes... It's not e-commerce for instance, it's so different, and it makes sense that people would really want to have a specialized service.

What stage of the journey are customers coming to you? Do they usually get a designer, and then it flops, and then they come to you? Or are you getting most of your customers before they've tried anything?

Nicole Clarke:

Good question. So there are lots of stages: we get startups coming to us, and we get large enterprise clients that have multiple brands across the world finding us. Normally, that comes from referrals, where other people who are using our technology or integration partners are saying, "Oh my gosh, have you seen Shazamme yet? It's a game changer." So there's a couple of different ways we work. Some people might use a designer, in which case we'd work with them to bring a brand to life from scratch. Other people might choose... We've got a range of 30 different beautiful design inspirations, and we're constantly adding to those, which have everything a recruitment agency needs to build an amazing brand. But because our technology is so easy to use drag and drop, you can put images in videos, you are really only now limited by your imagination.

They can start with a design inspiration or a theme, and then from there, they can create something totally different. And then the other clients that we've brought across, these are large ones and ones that are those competitive brands in the middle, we'll often bring brands over off WordPress or different providers, technology that's older and harder to use, and we'll build them onto our platform pretty much like for like, but usually with a lot of improvements from a tech standpoint. And we then hand them the keys, and they can go for their life, and they can customize, and update, and create, and they're always supported by our 24/7 chat support. So really there's no one sort of thing fits all, it can be very, very depending on the client.

Francis Larson:

Shazamme has really touched a lot of people in terms of the right product, I guess you could call it product market fit. What do you think the challenge has been for you and for your team growing that fast? What kind of things have been the hardest? I know you mentioned travel. I've seen you at a couple of international conferences…

Nicole Clarke:

I think it's why we're in the industry we're in, it's all about the people. It's getting the right people on the bus because if you can find the right people, they will drive innovation and thought leadership and really move a business forward. So I think it's when you first start out, we were lucky enough to have... It started with Rick and I, and then we brought on our operations manager Paula, and now we're a team of 26 across the globe. And we did experience some growing pains, where we hit a bit of a blip and we probably grew very quickly, and then things started to slow. We ideally push out a website within two to four weeks, and that was starting to slide because of so many clients coming on board. So we needed to readdress and restructure our company on, how do we set up for future scaling? How can we make this repeatable?

We've made some big updates in the past three months. That's a game changer as well because it means we can be more efficient. We want our clients, the recruitment agencies... And we also do career sites for employer brands as well. But we want to ensure that their experience is perfect, and we can take them through that process, and it's a good thing. So yeah, we'll be constantly refining. But I think it's really the people, it's continuing to streamline, never just believing that it's done and dusted and everything's perfect. You need to keep evolving. Nothing's ever perfect, and there are always opportunities to refine and make things more streamlined and cost-effective, especially with tech moving as it is in today's age.

Francis Larson:

You're a fully remote company, is that right?

Nicole Clarke:

Yes, we are. We do have outsourced teams, some of those are together in the dev. A lot of the developments done out of the USA, they're a team of six people there, and they're often together. Our projects team, there's a group of them, there's five of them at the moment, they're in a room together. Yeah, but everyone else is remote.

Francis Larson:

Has that been a challenge? As you passed 20 people being fully remote, have you found that being difficult or having to adapt from your previous experience, or was it pretty much similar from what you did before?

Nicole Clarke:

Look, I can say we've learned a lot from the prior business, where we had a team of 20 developers sitting in house. I mean, that was hell. That was a proprietary platform, and part of the reason we ended up going no-code for where we are today, because it's just modern technology that's just makes more sense. So look, I think remote, it can be difficult, but I think once again that's about having the right team in place that can work like that. We're moving at a rapid rate of knots, and if people can't keep up, it's not the right job for them. We're very entrepreneurial, and we need people to be on that journey with us. So I would say, look, once again, it's about refining and making sure that you've got the people that can deal with that. But I think we've got an amazingly solid team right now, and as we said, gone through those growing pains, and now we're in a really good place to spearhead forwards.

Francis Larson:

As a SaaS company as this platform that you've built, you must get a ton of requests for features. Are there any requests that you're constantly turning down? I know you mentioned you have built features as you get feedback, but is there any set of features that you're turning down all the time?

Nicole Clarke:

I think probably one of the biggest things that people always say to us is, "Can we use this as an applicant tracking system or an ATS?" Now, in our world, we believe let experts do what experts do, and there is no way, as we sit here today, that we would want to turn our platform into an ATS. It's just not our game, and we want to remain focused on that top of funnel website experience, the complex integrations made easy, keeping our customer service and support amazing. We've got to try, as I'm sure you do the same thing, it's very easy as an entrepreneur to get carried away and start thinking about, oh, we could do this, we could do that, but you need to rein yourself back in and focus on, what's the problem that I'm trying to solve? Otherwise, you can end up in a big mess with a lot of headaches. But yeah, ATS is probably one of the big ones that we'll just... It's just not where we play, there's too much competition in that space as well.

Francis Larson:

Yeah, no, I totally hear you there; there's so much competition. We're a back office company, as you know, and we get that request all the time. And it's just like, "It can't be done." The ATS market is so competitive, full-feature, that at least from our standpoint, it makes sense that you've decided to focus more on the website side.

Speaking of features, AI, big topic, ChatGPT, how are you all at Shazamme implementing that? Or are there plans to do more AI? Or how does that fit into what you're building?

Nicole Clarke:

Yeah, very topical question. Yeah, the buzzword is definitely all AI. We are really excited to have released some amazing things in AI in our platform, lots of things that save people a lot of time. Yet to do a video on it, actually, I need to do that. But one of the things that's always been a bugbear for anyone managing a website has been keeping up to date with what are your meta titles. What are your meta descriptions on different pages within your website? Normally, they would have to be done manually, one page at a time. One of the new AI functions that we've got is that you can literally click a button; it'll bring all of the page meta titles and meta descriptions onto one page so you can see every page very easily and see if there are any duplicates. The platform will also let people know if there are missing meta titles or missing meta descriptions, and it can write all of those page meta titles and descriptions for you if you want, or just the ones that are missing or duplicated.

So that's been one. We've also got AI now throughout the website editor, so you can drag and drop on a text widget, and you can literally ask it to write content for you. Or if you've already got a website with content on it, it can update content for you, make it longer, make it shorter, improve the writing, change the tone. Even now change the language, which is going to be a game changer for a lot of our international clients where they've got multiple language requirements, that's awesome.

Even the tagging of images, being able to put the tags on images so that the search engines know what the images are on a website, you can do that now from one page. Every image on your website will pull through to a page, and AI can write those titles for you. And then the big one that was released last week that I love, is you can literally create blocks or sections within your website and tell AI to write a paragraph with two columns and a button of why you are the best recruitment agency in Chicago. And it will literally write that content, put the images and the button on there for you, and then you can customize it all if you want to. But that's been a game changer. And then we've got chatbots that are driven by AI that can read your website content. And yeah, I think there's one of the areas we'll just keep evolving.

Francis Larson:

Do you think there'll be a day when somebody types into Shazamme, "Build me this website with such and such features," snf then the whole thing gets built automatically?

Nicole Clarke:

Oh, look, I believe that will be very close. Once again, I think... We can build websites so quickly, I've built one in a day, so it doesn't take us long. And we've got clients now that can build their own recruitment websites very quickly and easily, which is great. I think where we go back to that point, your question earlier, one of the pivotal differences with Shazamme is the complex integrations that we make easy. And the fact of the matter is, as you're aware, in this industry every client has a different integration set up with an ATS. No one has anything streamlined. And often that brings a lot of complexities that needs human power to come up with the best ways to fix what the... The integrations were broken in the first place, to fix that with the integrations with the website and the ATS, it needs brain power. Unfortunately. I think that AI is potentially going to be a little way off that.

Francis Larson:

Right. I guess it really comes back to the fact that this is a lot more than a landing page. There are so many integrations, it's all about the job board, it's super specific, and you're constantly building these connections that even with an AI-generated website, you wouldn't be able to have this amount of industry knowledge. Just the work that's required to do all these integrations itself is... I mean, that's one of the reasons they pay the monthly fee, is for you to constantly be building these things out I'm assuming,

Nicole Clarke:

Oh my gosh, seriously, the work that has gone into this platform and continues to go into this platform makes it an absolute game-changer in the industry. And yes, it is so much more than just a website editor, that's the pretty front face of it. But where the brains and where the power comes is in the backend, the integrations, and the complexity of them that we make easy. So you think you want to create a form and then map any field of that form into your ATS; that could be a client who wants a job and wants to get you to find a candidate for them. It could be that you want to create a form that asks complex questions to a candidate, and you want to be able to map all of those fields back into your ATS. It's that complexity of the integrations where we can map pretty much any field back and forwards.

And then not only... That's so powerful, the back end. But also the data, the analytics, truly being able to understand, where am I getting my quality conversions? So that you can spend more money there when you create landing pages and campaign pages. And if you do advertising on Facebook, often the sad thing is people advertise all over the place, but they don't truly understand the ROI. We can now do that and track people all the way through the journey through to the conversion, and then put that data back into the ATS. So there's a lot more power behind the scenes than just a beautiful, easy-to-use website editor where you can do anything you want to do.

Francis Larson:

That totally makes sense. There are so many product angles to this software. How has that ideation come about? Is that something that you and the team are meeting every week and coming up with new products? Is it driven by customer feedback?

Nicole Clarke:

Yeah, so we have been, as I mentioned, in this industry for so long. There were so many things that clients had told us that are still as relevant today as they were five years ago, that they wish they could do with their recruitment website technology. So a lot of that roadmap, our IP has all been built into what we're doing to solve all the problems we needed solving. And from that, there are always opportunities to keep growing and improving. A good example is medical.

Medical is one of the most powerful recruitment requirements at the moment, and they have very complex requirements around their job boards, and being able to find jobs on maps, and all different things. So we're creating unique things for the medical industry so that they can have what they need. And they've always been thrown in a bucket with every other recruiter, but they do have a specific requirement. We can make quick adjustments to our platform to be able to solve problems that come up in conversations with our clients. We just put it on a roadmap, and it's usually delivered very quickly. And also by looking at what's going on in the industry and other industries, what are we missing? What could help recruitment agencies be more successful? And we're just spearheading and leading the way with lots of different things based on client feedback in our own investigations.

Francis Larson:

It makes sense. So personally, I'm a software developer, and we write software as a company. And one of the things that... And you know this very well, it is the first time you write a product, the first version of the product; oftentimes, the next version when you re-write everything from scratch is so much better because you learn so much from all the mistakes you make the first time through. And then when you rewrite it, totally fresh, you often have a much better design. And it sounds like that's kind of what you, and Rick, and the team have done with Shazamme. You built up all this knowledge from sort of V1, and then fresh piece of paper, like you said, and you can make these design decisions.

Nicole Clarke:

Yeah, it's an absolute game-changer; you're totally right. Being able to see the missing pieces in a platform, and wishing you had something that was nimble, and flexible, and could continue to evolve at the rapid pace that things are in this industry. Where we sit today based on all of those learnings has made us be able to create something game changing and light years ahead of anything else in the recruitment industry for websites. And having chosen that tech stack we have, we can be flexible, we can duck and weave, we can change tact, we can even change providers if something better became available. So there are no restraints now, we can just move with speed and keep creating, which is just so exciting.

Francis Larson:

Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur? You've been an entrepreneur for several years now. Was that a lifelong goal, or was it more happenstance?

Nicole Clarke:

Yeah, that's a funny question. I grew up in a household where my grandfather was a motivational sales trainer until he died at nearly 90. My dad's been an entrepreneur ever since I was a child, and my mom's very entrepreneurial. So I've grown up in a family of serial entrepreneurs and salespeople, and I've loved it, I've lived it and breathed it. I tried to fight it, I wanted to go and do law, and I got talked out of it. And I've had lots of different businesses and done lots of different things, and technology is the passion. And knowing what a game changer, as you would know, when you create something truly special, how you can help people be more successful as well, is part of what I love doing, it's education. And stopping people from wasting money because the clients that we are dealing with aren't necessarily technologists. So being able to sort of help them maneuver and be more tech-savvy but in an entrepreneurial way is so much fun.

Francis Larson:

I can definitely hear some of the motivational sales speaking coming out through you, and it has definitely rubbed off on the success of Shazamme. Well, Nicole, this will wrap it up. It is obviously great to hear about the growth, how you got here, and where it's going, but thanks for being on.

Nicole Clarke:

No, thank you so much for having me, it was wonderful.

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