How to never make a bad hire again with Joe Woodward, Vizzy

0:00Joe Woodward:I remember being told by Robert Dodds that the greatest skill is just making something happen is gold dust. Don't do it for your ego to say, oh, we're a 10 person business. Do it because you really need to do it. I'd almost hold on the first hire, which is a bit ironic coming from a hiring platform. The ability to push a button and it say, oh, hire this person. That's not what we're here for. These are amazing tools, but it's still about the person connected to that tool that's going to really make it work or not.

0:28Juliet:Hi, Joe. Welcome to How to Start Up. It's wonderful to have you on. Before we get into all things talent, it would be great if you could introduce yourself a bit about the business that you have started.

0:38Joe Woodward:Morning, Juliet. Thank you so much for having me on. My name is Joe Woodward. I'm the co-founder and creative director at Bizzy. I co-founded it with my sister, Jess, and her husband, Chris. And really, it started with the idea of reimagining the CV for the next generation of talent so they can really show who they are and in turn businesses can hire for what really matters.

0:58Juliet:And this is incredible because I had a year in New York and part of our student visa to live in America was that we had evening classes and one of them was how to write a CV.

1:06Joe Woodward:And it was,

1:07Juliet:I swear to God, the reason my career went the way it went because the CV was so epic and it taught us all the hacks and tricks and stuff. But if someone hadn't taught me that, I wouldn't know. You just go, I did this, I did that. It was giving numbers and actuals and ratios and percentages and stuff. Where do you feel the world of the CV is failing?

1:25Joe Woodward:I think fundamentally it's just this incredibly limiting tool. When you just try to define a person and their potential and their talents by qualifications and work experience alone, it just becomes an incredibly narrow way to look at a person. And you lose all sense of how does this person think? What are their ambitions? Who are they? What do they care about? What's their kind of learning capacity? And really it's that sort of potential and particularly when you look at sort of young professionals in the early career space they may not have traditional qualifications they may not have any sort of experience yet so asking these young people to express themselves in this very limiting format is just a bit of a non-starter and they're not fun to create they're certainly not fun to read and I think again looking at this sort of next generation of talent the way that they express themselves as digital natives and how incredible they are at using these these modern tools but we're asking them to write this one-sided PDF.

2:23Joe Woodward:And it's kind of a fun fact I always throw out there is that it was Leonardo da Vinci that invented the CV. And so it hasn't been updated in an awful long time. And it's about time that we really tackled that. And I think then when you then apply it to kind of the modern systems and modern technology, it's then almost so easily hacked and automated. And now with AI, we have people writing CV applications with AI. They're then being screened by AI. and it's become this completely automated system. And it's a little bit like we just got to actually bring a bit more sort of humanity back into it and authenticity back into it and really think about, OK, what are we really looking for in the people that we're hiring?

3:02Joe Woodward:And it isn't just what's on a CV. It's so much richer than that. And so that's what we're looking to enable people to show and businesses to understand.

3:11Juliet:Well, for years, I've said to my team, if we could recruit on initiative and intuition, we'd be flying. and actually I scaled up the business year three and four and actually then brought it back down to a few people because people are the hardest part they're the most heartbreaking and the most expensive and the most time consuming and you can do anything if you put your mind to it you can teach yourself anything but hiring is so brutal and every single how to start up guest has said this is that be okay with the weight of responsibility be okay with a roller coaster and just get really good at recruitment because you're going to become an HR manager the second you scale your business.

3:46Juliet:So we're going to talk a lot about talent and things like that. But you lost your job during the pandemic. What was it that highlighted the need for a different way of recruiting people?

3:56Joe Woodward:Yeah, as the pandemic started, I was actually living in Mumbai in India, working in cricket. My career was in sports media and marketing. And it was kind of a dream job. It was awesome, very special to be living and working in India. But yeah, the pandemic kind of pulled the rug from underneath and I lost that job and had to come back to the UK. And yeah, after making banana bread for however many weeks, I decided to get back out there and dust off my CV and try and get my next job. And I guess I was just instantly incredibly frustrated with the process and the format. And I think with my kind of career across marketing and media and sport and entertainment really didn't fit as though the CV was doing it justice in terms of how I could show my work.

4:36Joe Woodward:But I think also a lot of my work up to that stage had been more focused on if you like Gen Z audiences and younger audiences. So I very quickly shift the perspective of, okay, if I'm frustrated with the CV, then next gen, the problem for them must be tenfold. And we remember at the time, there's obviously an awful lot of pressure on early career professionals losing their jobs and losing their opportunities. So it felt like a very kind of natural sort of fit at the time as to, okay, how can we really reimagine the CV for that audience and allow them to really show who they are. And also, I think from my time building teams and working in very entrepreneurial businesses, I just knew businesses are so eager to build really culturally rich, skilled, ambitious teams from the ground up.

5:21Joe Woodward:And so kind of meeting in the middle that sort of business need. And as you said, hiring is so important. It hits the bottom line. It's the people you spend every day with. They're the people that really drive the business forward. So if we could meet that need for businesses to really find exceptional next-gen talent with that most ambitious next-gen talent really being able to show their potential, we'd have something pretty special in the middle, which ultimately is busy.

5:45Juliet:Well, this is it. And I say this with absolute full weight. People make or break a job and people make or break a business. So it is so crucial to bring in the right people at the beginning. So if a CV isn't a reliable predictor of success, what would you say is?

6:00Joe Woodward:So what we've really sought to try and zero in on, and this is what we've also learned over the last few years and working with wonderful client partners that we have from sort of Burberry to EY to Virgin, the OVMH group and brands within there like Louis Vuitton and Tiffany, EY and the Pooj group. So we've got this amazing roster of clients who we've been able to build busy alongside and really learn with them. Okay, what are you looking for? What makes a great hire? And I think what we're really zeroing in on now is identifying how people think. And by that, I mean how people think, how they execute the quality of their work, their learning capacity.

6:35Joe Woodward:And as you said, that sort of self-initiated, self-starting capacity. And there's lots of kind of words that get thrown out cultural fit or the sort of attitudes and things like that. And so there's a lot there, which I think before were considered, oh, we'll just have to come and take a bit of a read on that interview stage with our digital profiles and really allowing people greater freedom to express themselves, we're able to uncover all of those really rich signals right at the beginning of the process. And to do it in a way that is very brand specific and role specific and within a candidate experience that's very engaging and fulfilling for the candidate themselves.

7:13Joe Woodward:So I think as well as still capturing the classic CV elements like work experience and education, we're able to go beyond that and really capture all those really rich, colourful areas as well.

7:23Juliet:This is incredible because also it puts a lot of ownership on the recruiter because a lot of companies recruit people, but they haven't really briefed properly or put a decent enough job description together. But what does a genuinely good hiring signal look like? What advice would you give to people?

7:39Joe Woodward:For me, the strongest signals and what we're seeing, certainly our clients really gravitate towards is that sort of self-initiated work and being a self-starter. And that doesn't mean that you have to have dozens of side hustles and all sorts of different things happening in your world. But I think even within a job, that ability to take the initiative and sort of drive the business forward or a project forward on your own terms, I think is gold dust, particularly in sort of the startup world. But I think it transcends into any business. And I think in my own career, they were the people around me that I could see were really flying, were the people that sort of went and did something that was obviously on script.

8:18Joe Woodward:They didn't just go completely haywire, but they were making it happen. And I've been lucky to work in some amazing businesses, one of which was Simon Fuller's XIX Entertainment. And I remember the sort of being told by Robert Dodds, the CEO, saying the greatest skill is just making something happen. Anyone can have an idea, anyone can have a sort of a project going, but actually making it happen, I think is the biggest skill. So I think any evidence that someone is showing that they can make something happen, I think is so rich. And then with that, I think comes the kind of the collaboration or what skill sets they have.

8:50Joe Woodward:But fundamentally, if they can kind of get up and make something happen, I think is gold dust.

8:54Juliet:Well, getting shit done, definitely in a startup, is completely crucial. And also everyone says it's like, oh, it's a startup. It's getting your hands dirty. I meet clients going, we're not hierarchical. It's like, we know what that means. We're all going to be in the warehouse packing boxes. But the flip side of this is mistakes that we've all made with hiring. Could you share some of the biggest hiring mistakes you see founders make with their first few hires or at all?

9:18Joe Woodward:I think there's probably some of the mistakes will be trying to be a bit too prescriptive on the person that you're bringing into the business. And as you say, particularly in startups, you wear lots of different hats. Everyone kind of will be mucking into different areas of the business. So I think if you're bringing someone into a startup environment and you're trying to be super specific on what the role entails and not at least up front making sure that they're aware that they are stepping into startup world. and that even if their role is quite a technical, so to say, finance-centric role, those skills and capabilities they have will still need to be applied into other areas, be it operations or kind of the wider elements, as it were.

9:56Joe Woodward:So I think being overly specific and not giving enough room to the kind of the many hats analogy that is inevitably going to happen at some stage, because that's when I think you could probably end up with just a bit of a clash of, oh, well, that's not in my job description type thing. And that's a kind of a horrible place to find yourself and the business may pivot away from the area that you initially hired them for. So I think you need that versatility in the person and to make sure that they are willing to be versatile as well as they come in. So I think that's probably one of the bigger watchouts, I'd probably say, for hiring as a startup.

10:28Juliet:I mean, again, this co-working office, you hear all of the same jargon. A lot of people said, hire slow, fire fast. And I was like, maybe hire fast, fire fast. But what are your thoughts on that?

10:38Joe Woodward:Yeah, I mean, ideally you don't want to fire at all. I think it's one of those where it's just you've got to hire well. And I think also there's probably a lot of businesses that maybe try and do it a bit too soon. I think there's a fair bit of pain you can probably carry as founders before making that commitment. Once you do start hiring people, the weight of responsibility is very big. You see the cost of the businesses increases and lots that comes with it. So I think there is almost something in the don't do it for your ego to sort of say, oh, we're a 10 person business or anything like that.

11:08Joe Woodward:I think there's you do it because you really need to do it. Just like when you're building, you're making product decisions and making, we all try to sort of test and make these decisions with as much confidence as we possibly can. So I think not doing it on a whim, I'd almost hold on the first hire, which is a bit ironic coming from a hiring platform. But I think you've got to make sure that you really do need those people before they join. Because also, I think as a founder, a big part is, I think, almost living their job a little bit and understanding the needs of these different areas. obviously then cuts to a point where the best thing you can do is bring in smarter people than you to do these things and then you will also be able to hire that person better because you understand that part of the business a little bit better and things like that so I think a big sort of way to avoid failure in hiring is to actually maybe hold on don't go flying into it just because you think you need to and that's not just with your first hire but

12:00Juliet:almost with any hire I couldn't agree more and I found it really interesting that people always say to me is like, oh, you run your own business. How many people do you employ? Not what do you do? Do you like it? Are you happy in your job? It is a kind of metric of success of how many people you have on payroll. It's very strange, but that's really good advice, especially coming from somebody that obviously would want people to hire more. What tells you someone is capable of growing into role, even if their CV suggests they're not ready yet? we're taking a quick 30 second break from this episode to ask are you thinking of starting your own podcast if so this is great news because we run a course that will train you how to produce your own podcast yourself this course is for people who do not want to outsource and pay someone else to do it you want to learn how to do it yourself we teach you everything that you need to get up and running with your own podcast show and so much more just dm us at hello at Fallowfield Mason to book your spot?

13:00Joe Woodward:That's an interesting question. I think, again, looking for evidence of the self-initiated, and I'll keep saying because it's just something that I just think is so true. And I think if you can see that person who almost can make it happen, they will figure things out and they will figure things out with you, for you. They'll get there ahead of you and all this kind of stuff. And they can almost make the role their own, if that makes sense. And so I think any kind of evidence that you can find for that. And again, this doesn't require people who are on their sort of second, third, fourth jobs.

13:29Joe Woodward:The talent on our platform, a lot of them still university students or recently starting their careers. The amount of sort of self-initiated work and self-initiated projects and things that they're doing today is extraordinary. Far more than I was doing or a lot of my friends were doing when we first started their careers. So I think that then taps into just their attitude and their kind of the ambition that comes with it to actually get a hold of a business and make a role their own. And I think if you have someone who's quickly asking you lots of questions or challenging the way things are done, that's all kind of great signs as well.

14:02Joe Woodward:Even if it can sometimes be a, not right now, I don't need to hear this today, but it's always a kind of a great, it's always a great sign. So I think the more kind of active that person is, I think is the greater evidence that they can grow into that role. and it's where with our busy profiles we've tried to give as much room for people to show their existing industry knowledge or their taste and their ideas and their opinions because i think that all kind of leans into how when they are given a place in the business how they will tackle it or what their perspective will be on a certain area so i think that's what we've really tried to elevate in our profiles so you can see okay this is a person that really has that kind of attitude and has this way of thinking that they're going to challenge and they're going to drive things forward, not just the tick box on credentials.

14:49Juliet:Well, that's it. The CV is very much a one dimensional piece of paper. I'd love it if you could tell us a little bit more about the Visi platform and how it may be interactive it might be for employers and employees. How does it stand apart from that PDF email?

15:03Joe Woodward:Anyone can make a Visi profile for free. And when you join Visi, you'd be presented with an empty template of a busy profile and you can introduce yourself with our bio cards and you can add an introduction video as well. We then have a psychometric assessment. So we partnered with a great group called Clarity 4D and you can take a kind of five, seven minute test and that will then tell you your personality type, your working style and your key strengths because it's not easy to write about yourself. So it's great to get that kind of almost like non-bias appraisal of who you are and what you can do.

15:35Joe Woodward:And then we have the sort of a classic CV element of work experience, education, but you can bring all that work to life with projects and using multimedia tools to really show your work. And then we have this area in the profile, which kind of makes busy. And we borrowed it a little bit, I guess, from the dating apps where we have prompts like three entrepreneurs you'd invite to dinner or a brand I love or work I wish I had done. So you can really demonstrate your industry knowledge that you've got a finger on the pulse of culture and your ideas and passions.

16:05Juliet:And maybe humour as well, because I've always wanted to have that softness around when you meet someone and you have a laugh together, when you're working so bloody hard, you just want someone to have light relief and that you get a flavour of that side of their personality, maybe.

16:19Joe Woodward:Exactly. Yeah, no, the personality, all of that comes through and whether it is a prompt of a cause I care about, which may be a bit more of a sort of serious theme if you like. But yes, absolutely. The kind of wit and humour and tone all comes through. And then we've also created a suite of questions that we've taken from world-leading businesses like, how would you improve the Netflix mobile experience? Or if you were to promote a film that had no major stars in it, how would you do it? So there's kind of these questions that cover marketing, technology and sort of operations as it were. So even if you don't have that classic work experience, you can still apply or demonstrate how you'd approach a question like that or what your ideas are.

16:54Joe Woodward:There's a great one about what products you think Apple should launch next. And it's amazing what people are then putting into these profiles, but they're all really interesting things as a business to then sort of digest.

17:03Juliet:Apple needs to pay you for that data as well.

17:06Joe Woodward:Well, yeah, that's certainly part of our kind of future business. And the insights you get are just fascinating when you then allow people this freedom to express themselves in this way. The stuff that comes out is incredible.