How This Creator Built an AI Hiring Platform Used by the World's Biggest YouTubers | Sherry Wong

0:00Sherry Wong:This creator is changing how the world's biggest creators hire. Introducing Sherry Wong, a content creator who has been posting since 2011, way before being a YouTuber was considered cool. But while scaling her platform to hundreds of thousands of followers, Sherry kept running into the same problem, hiring. Hiring the right video editor, thumbnail designer or producer was a real headache. So she decided to solve the problem herself and launch Roster, an AI hiring platform for the creator economy. Trusted by some of the world's biggest creators like the Stoke Twins, Eric and Preston. And through hiring challenges, Rasta helps them find the right people in days instead of months.

0:37Sherry Wong:And on today's episode of the Hot Start podcast, Sherry tells the full story. Sherry, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. Likewise, you have been creating content online ever since 2011. Before, it was actually cool to be a YouTuber. So what inspired you to start creating content in the first place? Oh gosh, the fact that you know I started in 2011 is a side that. That video is so embarrassing. I was like a kid at that point. But this was the time before being a YouTuber was really even recognized as a job. So I honestly, I wish I had a more eloquent answer, but I started for fun.

1:11I just liked making videos. Back then, Windows Movie Maker was still a thing. started filming videos. So my oldest video, which no one should go watch, is a back to school supplies haul. That's how young I was. But it's basically a documentation of my life. And so I just started doing it throughout the years. Content niche has changed and evolved a lot. And to this date, I still film content. But I think the demands in terms of what's expected, the frequency, the quality, everything has skyrocketed since 2011. So it's been quite a journey.

1:42Sherry Wong:And you mentioned that you kind of have been documenting your life. Like, How has that kind of evolved to what it is today? What is the type of content that you produce now? I would say now it's definitely a mix of lifestyle, kind of self-improvement, basically. It's a documentation of everything I do with work, how I balance it with just having fun in life as well. And so when I say lifestyle, it also includes things like sports. So it's really just me as a personality. If you want to follow along the journey, then you should follow my socials. And it's a little bit of everything. That's basically my personality.

2:14Sherry Wong:Yeah, I love that. And I read this story online that you kind of added being a YouTuber to your resume before it actually was common. It actually helped you to land a job in Singapore. So what was the story behind that? It's a very unexpected one. I guess, you know, the dots connect backwards. But I actually all my life thought I was going to be a doctor. I studied molecular biology, been to uni, my scholarship for sciences, I couldn't switch my majors. And then when I was graduating university many years ago, I realized it's not what I want. I don't think I'm even a really good student, to be honest.

2:45I don't like going to lectures. How on earth am I going to do another eight years of schooling to become a doctor? So I wanted to get a job. At that point, I was basically four years behind everyone else who's been doing summer internships. I was just applying for jobs online. I got connected to someone who at that point was the global director of creative partnerships at YouTube. And he was basically someone that I really looked up to. and I got introduced to him. I thought he was going to give me a referral so I can get a job at YouTube, but he just sent me back to the careers page on Google with no referral link.

3:15And I was like, what? What gives? What was the point of the intro? And then it turns out when I applied for the job, because I had no experience, the only thing I could put on my resume was that I film YouTube videos. And then I started a nonprofit organization unrelated to the creator economy, but that was something I was doing throughout my years in university. And I guess the fact that I was a YouTuber had stood out to him because a few months later, he actually reached back out to me. And at this point, I was graduating university. And he was like, hey, I actually remember that you film YouTube videos.

3:44I'm leaving my long tenure at YouTube to start a$50 million fund to invest in the creator economy. It's headquartered out of LA, but we're opening an office in Singapore. Why don't you come and see if you can come for an interview and let's see if there's a good fit? Because we need someone that can converse with creators, can understand their language and basically translate it back to, I guess, more of the corporate finance side. Like we need someone to be that bridge. So obviously I said yes. And then before you know, I was packing up my life into three suitcases and moved across the world.

4:11Sherry Wong:Hey, quick one before we get back to the episode. If you love conversations like this one, you would love The Fame Game, our weekly newsletter in which we break down how celebrities and creators build billion dollar brands. Sign up for free via the link in the description. And now back to the episode. Yeah, I think that's such a cool story. And like it's something that I resonate with as well, because we are an investment fund and we invest in brands founded by celebrities and creators. But when I initially started this a couple of years ago, I wasn't a creator, so I wasn't able to speak the same language.

4:40Sherry Wong:Right. So over the last four years, I have been actually starting to become a content creator initially on like LinkedIn. But nowadays also doing this podcast, for example, really helping me to understand being a content creator, too. So understand that any company nowadays is looking for that type of skill set in-house instead of relying on outside content creators. So I think that's really cool. The lines are so blurred these days, even if it's not video content. The fact that people are posting on LinkedIn, I think everyone, the barrier to entry is very low. If you have access to it, you can type it up.

5:13And obviously with so many AI tools at your disposal, you could get to the first draft a lot faster and have it as a thinking partner for sure. But I'm curious, actually, for you, what was the biggest thing you would consider as creator lingo? Or what was the biggest understanding that you've gotten talking to so many different creators?

5:29Sherry Wong:Yeah, like I think there's kind of like a gap in education, right? Like whenever you're talking about startups to creators, they have no idea what like a pre-seed round is or they have no idea what dilution is or they have no idea what like a cap table is or whatsoever. So you obviously need to educate them on that aspect if they're really wanting to launch their own companies. Also for investors, I was talking to like Haven, which is a content creator a couple of days ago. And he mentioned that, why would I want to onboard an investor who's going to tell me what I need to do? Well, I understand my audience.

6:03Sherry Wong:If he's going to tell me you need to post about this or you need to integrate the product in this way in your content, he has no idea what this audience actually likes. So there's also kind of a mismatch, especially because most of the investors are a little bit older. They are in their 50s. They have money, but they're not on social media. So are they actually able to understand if someone has a platform and what is the biggest advantage there? And also like what is the biggest advantage between someone that has 5 million subscribers, but none of those are actually in the target audience versus someone that has 100.

6:34Sherry Wong:And actually all of those 100 are 100k, sorry, are all in the target audience of the specific creator and the company that they're launching. So that are kind of the gaps that I'm seeing. It's true. I think also there's a lot of trust that goes both ways, right? When a creator is able to uphold what we would consider is more traditional professionalism, right? If they say they're going to post, they're going to post on time. They actually are making it brand safe. They think about all these parameters. And then there's the trust as well on the other side where you need to just let go of control and stop trying to spoon feed a posting schedule or direct because you're working with them because they are creative.

7:10But there's definitely a lot of trust that needs to go on both ways for sure.

7:14Sherry Wong:Yeah, no, it is also in the word, right? A creator being creative. So sometimes you need to rely on their creativity to kind of take over. So yeah, completely agree. One of the problems that you encountered as a creator was the hiring. So what was kind of the problem that you faced as a creator with the hiring process and also a problem that many other creators have? As you know, I've been filming videos for over a decade, right? So inevitably in that point, especially as I was navigating school, graduating, working full-time job, it's impossible to do everything yourself as a creator. I think everyone knows this.

7:44And if you try to keep doing it yourself, you're going to burn out. I unfortunately have definitely burnt out here and there. So there's periods in my creator journey where I've just fallen off the face of the earth. I'd come back because I gravitate towards it since I love it. But that was when I realized I needed to hire someone. And one of the most time consuming things as a long form creator is video editing. It's a process that a lot of us love to grasp and hold on to as long as possible because it's our baby. When we're filming, we have a vision of, you know, text effect here, audio. This is the vibe.

8:13but learning to find someone to help you out with some of the more time-consuming parts is definitely a huge aspect of scaling as a creator which I think more people need to do but also finding the right person is incredibly difficult for the longest time I think all you had was Upwork, Fiverr, maybe you can go on LinkedIn and or maybe you post on your Instagram story saying hey guys I'm looking for a video editor but those platforms it's trying to find someone that just gets it is It's just needle in a haystack, essentially. So it was definitely a huge pain point I faced and working with so many creators, I constantly hear about it as well.

8:50And it's obviously not just video editors, but also writers, thumbnail designers, producers. I need someone to help me with shooting, a camera operator. So it spans a full range and it's definitely a pain point, which is what led me to doing what I do full time now with Roster.

9:05Sherry Wong:Yeah, exactly. So the frustration with the problem led you to founding Roster. So what is Roster and what does it do? So Roster is an AI hiring platform for the creator economy. So any company, any brand or creator that's looking to make content, our algorithm will analyze the type of content that you make, what niche, what style, and will give you instant recommendations for candidates to hire. And especially a lot of the biggest pain point most companies have when they're hiring creatives is not the volume of applicants. If you post it on LinkedIn right now, you'd get 100 applications right away.

9:35Or you put on X, you'll get thousands of people. So can we build and leverage AI as a way to sift through the noise to find you the best creatives as fast as possible? That's basically what we do as a platform. So we've been really fortunate to be trusted by a lot of the world's biggest creators to hire. Your Stokes twins, ARAC, Preston and Brianna, TBNR. And doing this for the last few years has really opened my eyes in terms of the demands that a creator has as they scale through from a one person team all the way through to having some freelance. and then full timers. The pain point is still there.

10:12Doesn't matter which part of the journey you're at, but hopefully we make it a little bit easier for all of these.

10:17Sherry Wong:Very exciting. And how does the AI basically determine that a specific, let's say an editor, is the right fit for a specific creator? It's purely based on portfolio and what past work you've done. So we've got thousands and thousands of users on the platform from over 150 countries. And every single time someone makes a profile, think of it kind of like a LinkedIn profile. Anyone can go and set up their past work experience. If we can detect that you've worked a lot in the beauty and fashion space, for example, and you've done a lot of cosmetic related content, you've done a lot of editing for that.

10:47And L 'Oreal comes along and they're looking for someone to help them edit some of their social media campaigns or some of their ads. They probably would want to find someone who maybe their professional experience leans towards that same niche or maybe their personal experience. So can we find people who everyone uses the same software at the end of the day? Adobe Premiere is Final Cut Pro. It's how you use the software that matters in the industry. can we help distill and get you closer to the people who are in that niche as fast as possible so it's not just niche but there's also a bunch of other factors what software you use what your creative style is who you've worked with like the certain brands or certain creators and so a lot of different components go into that in addition to your usual kind of hygiene factors like where are they based if you need someone in the u.s you probably want to make sure that the recommendations are accurate to the geography as well or language as well.

11:37So we have a lot of, let's say, creators and brands hiring people who speak Arabic and English. Can you surface recommendations based on those language requirements as well?

11:45Sherry Wong:Yeah. And I really understand that obviously like the AI is recommending creators, editors, for example, that have the similar style. But our creators also exposed to editors who, for example, have a different style, but they are like very convinced that actually their editing style will uplift the creator's content Like maybe if they make small tweaks or whatsoever, it will actually do 3x in retention or whatsoever. Even though on paper, it's not the right fit. But that editor has like a strong belief that by making a small tweaks, it can actually enhance the content. 100 percent. This is actually such a great point because it's why we launched the feature called a hiring challenge last year.

12:24So we find that a lot of creative roles when you're looking to hire someone, you inevitably always end up doing a test project. You may do a test edit, like a one minute edit or a test script, test design for thumbnails. And so any role where you can hire using a test project, this hire and challenge feature lets you dump all your raw footage onto a roster. So if you have 20 minutes of footage you can put on there, you give everyone the same start and end date. And everyone has the same, let's say, one week to do a test edit. So it doesn't even matter what your portfolio is. It's basically a show me what you've got.

12:56And on the employer side, you can put up prize pools where first place gets a job offer and maybe a thousand bucks, for example. So this is kind of what Eric did. He gave a$100 ,000 job offer and a$2 ,000 prize to the first place. Doesn't matter where you're from, what background you have. One's just using the same standardized footage to do a test edit. And on the employer side, you get a TikTok style feed to watch all the submissions afterwards. So it also makes it a little bit more enjoyable because you're not just going through thousands of portfolios. It's literally everyone's edit in a feed for you to watch.

13:25and then you can just scroll through it. This has been an amazing feature for some of our users where they are coming from countries that maybe would be overlooked because they're on the other side of the world and their portfolio, maybe they just graduated from school and they have zero experience, but they're super passionate about the space and they love the creator's content. Sometimes they do the best edits because they've been watching them for five plus years. So this feature has really lowered the barriers to allow those hidden gems to be discovered.

13:54Sherry Wong:Yeah, okay, very exciting. And how does that 100k, for example, with the Eric challenge breaks down? Because like if the first place wins 2k, it's obviously far away from the 100k in total. So how does that break down? So in Eric's case, he did this last year. The winner got the$100 ,000 job offer. And regardless of if they take the job or not, they still get the$2 ,000 cash bonus, which they did. Yeah. And do you have like any kind of results of like what a challenge actually does? Like, for example, X more applications or whatsoever? It's crazy. The speed at which you can go from I need to find someone to finding someone great.

14:28It's just like that. So it completely depends on the creator, how fast, how short they want to set the timeline to. But yeah, I mean, we've had people who got over 3000 people signing up for the challenge, right? And so it's an incredible opportunity. I would say one of the biggest pushbacks that we've gotten, and it's the reason why we've set up the prize pool, is obviously some of the questions in the creative community is why would I do a test edit for a chance? at getting a job. So being able to have that prize pool that we let the creators set up themselves gives them an opportunity to also treat it like, hey, you would have spent this on a test edit anyway.

15:05Why don't you just make it an open call test edit? But also there are non-monetary value that you can provide to the people who take part. For example, some of the creators in the past, they've done top 10. So even if you don't get the job, get any of the prizes, top 10 will get personalized feedback from the creator and then they can now use the fact that they won eighth place in the Stokes Twins competition on their resume so they can start building up opportunities and achievements on their resume which is something that the creative community don't always have so it's like case competitions for people who work in business and want to become a management consultant.

15:40You have so many of those opportunities to build things up we want to be able to create those as well so we do encourage people to try to have other non-monetary incentives as well just to help cultivate a better sense of community.

15:53Sherry Wong:Yeah, and what I think is really interesting about it is that you make it something exciting, like hiring and posting a job offer on their Instagram stories. It's not something creators actually like to do, but now they can actually turn it into a video, which then they can upload on their socials, which also becomes a money-making video for them, right? So I think it's what's the exciting thing about this challenge. And not only that, it's also really exciting for you as a company because you're basically leveraging the creators to do the challenges that also brings more, in this case, for example, editors, obviously to roster.

16:28Yeah, for sure. I mean, from wearing my founder's hat for a sec, it's definitely a great growth hack for us. I mean, every single time we've had a large creator do a hiring challenge, the amount of buzz that gets spun up is it just like shoots up signups incredibly. But a lot of it is also at the end of the day. It just feels like in a way to be able to highlight some of the talented people on the platform. And to be able to connect some folks, like we've had people share on LinkedIn, hey, I won second place in this challenge. I spent my weekend working really hard on it. I can't believe that an international creator of that scale know who I am.

17:04Like they would have never gotten their resume looked at. But when you see case studies like that, that makes it so valuable that you're just like, wow, this is a huge impact for someone. And if you can get someone a job, that pretty much changes their career trajectory as well. Right. So it's an incredible seeing it. And we've got a couple hiring challenges coming up. We just wrapped up a few this month as well. But it's definitely a feature that has been our poster child feature on roster.

17:31Sherry Wong:No, I completely agree. Like my editor is based in Bangladesh and he is like amazing. and I would have never been able to find him without like the interference of a platform. So I completely agree that there's so much hidden talent around the globe. And those people are never exposed to like really exciting jobs like this. On the creator end, obviously for them, going through 3000 applications, even though it's on TikTok style, it's also not something that they're probably like excited about. How does the whole vetting process work on their end? So is it like cut down from 2000 to 100 based on like the AI, for example?

18:05So the AI will basically help you with sifting out the spam applications. Unfortunately, it's inevitable that some people will upload some random MP4 file that has nothing to do with it. So it will sift out all of the spam applications. But beyond that, we try not to interfere too much because we can't really decide what's good or not when it comes to the actual test edit itself. But one of the good things is that that link to be able to view all the submissions, most often the creators who end up getting thousands of people submitting it, they're usually, they've already got a team. So it's a link that can be shared within their assistant producers or their editors and everyone can go in and thumbs up, thumbs down.

18:42It's exactly like a feed. So they can all kind of take part in watching it. But the whole idea is, can you gamify it to make it at least a little bit more interesting than looking through thousands of URLs of portfolios? So we try to make it as interactive as possible.

18:56Sherry Wong:AI is slowly taking over jobs as well. So where people used to hire a person to do like script writing or thumbnail design, many are already using AI for that. Is that something that you worry about? No, I wouldn't say we worry about AI. More so maybe as a company, as a platform, right? Ultimately, what we do is we track jobs. What jobs are coming, what jobs are unfortunately going. I think with new technology, there's always going to be jobs that become obsolete as a result. But we get to be on the peripheral, which is, I guess, a very fortunate position. we get to map out what jobs are coming and going.